THE TRIP

We left Oriental early in the morning. From the looks of the sky, it was obvious what the wind was going to do on the way over. See?

It was pretty uneventful motoring the whole way over to Ocracoke.

I slowed some from my 6-7knot speed for about 2 hours to troll a fishing line and spoon, but to no avail.

We arrived without incident at about 1630. I was very suprised that there was not a single anchor down in Silver Lake! Not ONE! I have never seen this place so empty!

Part of the reason must have been the dual hurricanes that came through in the past couple of months. Everything looked fine, though. Businesses were open and I couldn't see signs of much damage at all.

The weather was not too thrilling. Kind of dull and dreary until Saturday when the sun came out.

One thing I thought was cool was that, since there are very few tourists on the island around this time, all of the restaurant owners get together and decide which one of them will hold Thanksgiving dinner. This year it was the Pelican restauant. The dinner was fabulous.

Everyone was pretty much shutting their businesses down following this weekend until Spring.

We left out on a blustery Sunday morning to go home. What a RIDE! We had 18-22knot winds out of the north the whole way back.

I'm thinking to myself, "great, I just set for a beam reach and fly all the way back, right?" -- NOT! Our speed was such that the apparent wind had me pinching close-hauled! It was all I could do just to maintain the WSW course I wanted to go! Still learning my lesson about cats and apparent wind!

We had the genoa rolled up to 100% and full main and were doing a consistent 7.5-8knots. I saw 8.7kn during one gusty stretch. We knocked 1-1/2 hours off the trip returning vs. coming out motoring.

The only problem we had was that there were 2.5-3ft rollers coming out of the west and hitting us on the beam. Not too much problem, but my 7 year old spent the first 2 hours reading down below and then thought he could watch some TV. Well.....

He was on his way to the head when he "sprayed" the entire port hull, nav station, sole, etc. with breakfast. We spent some rough time going down and cleaning it all up in 10-minute intervals (as much as we could stand being below).

An exhilarating ride back, anyway!