Everything in the Bahamas is expensive.  This box of crackers was $8.

Bill’s black eye was quite impressive although he said that it did not hurt.

When we woke up at Mile Hammock Bay, it was raining.  Rather than leaving in the rain, Bill made these cinnamon pecan pinwheels for our breakfast.

Greetings from our land home in Kingsport, Tennessee.  Bill and I arrived here Friday night, June 14.  Our land house seems to have fared okay without us, but I now have lots of projects here on my to-do list. 

Now, back to the description of our trip.

We left Brunswick, Georgia after breakfast on June 5.  The dredged channel from the harbor out to deep water in the Atlantic was long.  The shallow water along the Georgia coast extends miles out into the sea.  I felt like it took us hours and hours to finally reach the point where we could turn and head north.  Bill told me it was just two hours, but it was the sort of two long boring hours that seem like ten.  We motor sailed along the Georgia coast most of the day, but the wind picked up in the late afternoon, and we sailed on, flying both headsails and with one reef in the mainsail.

Just as it was getting dark, it began to drizzle rain.  The wind went behind us, and the sea was sloppy making the mainsail bang about.  Bill went forward to put a preventer on the boom, and somehow, he got hit in the face by a flapping genoa sheet.  His left eye was immediately bruised, swollen, and black.  Somehow, he did not lose his glasses overboard, but they were very bent.  I had been thinking we had been extremely lucky… with all the broken things on Irish Eyes, neither of us had been injured.  That thought came to a sudden end as Bill lay below on the settee with an ice pack on his injured eye.

We sailed or motored the rest of Wednesday.  Around Savannah, we had to dodge some ships, but nothing too exciting happened.  Wednesday turned to Thursday as we continued our trip staying 50 miles or so off the Carolina coast.  Bill was the chef on this part of our cruise.  The first night he made biscuits for country ham biscuits, and the second night he made individual meatball pastry pies.  I think he was bored and hungry on his watches and was dreaming up ways to use the remains of our food.

Finally, after almost forty-eight hours underway, we entered the Cape Fear River as the sun rose.  I was hoping we would stop at Carolina Beach, anchor there, and have a nice long nap.  No, that was not to be.  The captain went right past Carolina Beach and continued up the ICW heading to Mile Hammock Bay.  It is sixty miles from the Cape Fear River to Mile Hammock Bay.  That maded for an all-day trip.  A half mile before our destination, we crossed the New River as it flowed to the sea.  The crossing was an “ICW trouble spot”.  It was very shallow, and the printed charts were known to be wrong.  We arrived a little earlier than we expected, just after low tide, when the water was at its shallowest.  It had started raining hard, and it was foggy.  Thankfully, we made it across the trouble spot without touching the bottom, and we anchored in Mile Hammock Bay as guests of the United States Marine Corps at Camp Lejeune.  The rain continued to pour down.  It was an early to bed night followed by a late morning start for these two old and exhausted sailors.

We continued our trip north toward our slip in Northwest Creek Marina.  It rained on and off both Saturday and Sunday.  Because of the rainy weather, the weekend small boat traffic was not as bad as we had expected.  Sane people stayed home and dry.  We just motored on.

Our last night at anchor was spent in Cedar Creek.  It was a peaceful evening except for the buzzing of mosquitoes.  I was glad we had screens for our hatches and ports.  We were up and underway before 8am on Monday.  It rained a little on the three-hour trip up the Neuse River to Northwest Creek Marina, but we were tied in our slip and had our air conditioner installed and running by lunch time on Monday.  It was good to cool down and dry out the boat.  That afternoon as the air conditioner did its thing, we both had long showers at the marina and emerged as respectable humans (although humans with slightly pruney hands and feet) after months without a proper shower.

Over the next several days, we packed our car, cleaned the boat, fixed a few things, and were ready to drive to Kingsport on Friday.

This year’s trip was a challenge.  I was at times afraid we might not get the boat back to North Carolina until late summer.  The engine parts Bill ordered in Marsh Harbour on May 21 have not yet (as of today) arrived at the Marsh Harbour Boatyards.  If the epoxy glue had not stopped the engine's fuel leak, we would still be in the Bahamas waiting for repairs.  I would have been both hot and unhappy, and Bill would have been really bored.  Bill and I have not decided exactly how we are going to get all Irish Eyes’ parts mended, but it will all be done somehow.  Both of us are thankful we made it back home.

Now that we are here, we plan to spend the rest of our summer catching up with friends, hosting the grandchildren for a couple of weeks, and working on our land home.