We had a relaxing full day in Beaufort. We had actually planned on spending at least two days there, but that afternoon we met a fun  young French-Canadian couple from Quebec City on the docks. They had both left their jobs for a year, bought a boat, and took off cruising. They had come down from Quebec via Lake Champlain in Vermont the Hudson River to New York, then made their way via the various bays and ICW to Beaufort.  They didn’t have much ocean sailing experience, and we hatched a plan to buddy boat down to the next stop offshore with them, a 12-hour sail. The weather looked good for the next day, so we filled up our water and fuel tanks and got the boat ready for sailing again instead of motoring, and that evening we left Beaufort and went to the Cape Lookout Bight.

This is a lovely remote and safe anchorage, surrounded on all sides by dunes and is a wildlife sanctuary. They have a herd of wild horses that roam the area there, and some of them greeted their sister WildHorse on our arrival!

Cape Lookout, protected from wind and waves in all directions.

Wild Horses on the beach

Being a western boy all my life, I always assumed that wild horses were only something that existed in the west. However, I was surprised to find out that there are many places on the coast of the southern US, in wilder spots, that have resident herds of them. Learning new things and getting off the beaten path are some of the joys of the sailing life!

It was a 12-hour sail and we wanted to arrive in the daylight, so after a quiet but short night’s sleep, we pulled the anchor at 3AM and headed out, just behind our new friends on Phocea.  The winds were fairly light and unfortunately we had some confused crossed seas which made the boat roll quite a bit.  We were making fairly good speed, but with all the rolling, Lucie was feeling a little seasick and it was tedious sailing.

However, we discovered the best cure for seasickness – dolphins!  We had 6 or 7 of them swim with us for at least a half hour, and it was so fun watching them that Lucie’s seasickness disappeared. Who knows why dolphins swim in the bow wave of boats, but to all appearances, it seems like they are just having fun and checking us out.  From time to time, they roll on their sides and look us right in the eye.

IMG_0958.MOV

Hard to catch them in the act, but Lucie got a pretty good video.

We all made it safely to Wrightsville Beach where we anchored and relaxed.  Wrightsville Beach is a resort town on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We were definitely in the off season, so it was pretty deserted.  We spent the next day walking around there and that night hosted our first dinner party aboard WildHorse with the crew of Phocea.

We stopped to smell the roses in Wrightsville Beach. Hard to believe it was November!

We said goodbye the next morning and headed back into the ICW to Southport, NC.  If we had gone offshore, we would have needed to round Cape Fear and the Frying Pan Shoals. Whereas the weather looked ok for rounding the cape, the shoals stick out dozens of miles from the coast and would have necessitated a long detour, so we cut the corner inside and arrived in Southport, where we fueled, watered and got ready for the next step in the adventure.