We spent a full month in NC, working on a few boat projects and relaxing after our intense trip north! Let the marina shenanigans commence…

After being at anchor for so long it was incredibly strange to look out the window and see buildings and people RIGHT THERE. One day I caught something out of the corner of my eye in the cockpit – we’d been boarded!

One of the first things we did was get a hotel room and decompress. For once, I took a shower and didn’t immediately get sweaty again because of the oppressive humidity! (We had travel rewards that were about to expire, we aren’t usually this frivolous)

I mentioned the rust streaks that we observed after our last offshore passage, those drove me crazy so cleaned those up right away and waxed near the stanchions again.

The heat here cannot be underestimated, I looked for a shade to cover the salon to try to keep it cooler during the day but when I dug it out of a locker I found it covered in diesel!

We had a crazy storm pass through, within minutes the water in the marina rose over a foot, and just like that the storm passed and the water dropped again – it was incredible!

Kyle’s dad got his 1966 Century Resorter out. When this guy is “ankles deep” in projects, it’s worse than it sounds!

There were a few bugs to work out, but it’s a beautiful boat.

It’s not all fun and games, sometimes it’s literal shit. Kyle had cleaned both bilges til they shined, but we’d been down to one head for the last week or so of our trip (one toilet wasn’t functioning properly). Kyle took it apart and replaced the wear plate, seals and bearings…and then found out the real problem was a downstream blockage. Long story short, poo water flooded the bilge. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.

I took advantage of the dead calm marina to finally get some gelcoat repair done. The boat suffered some cosmetic damage in Hurricane Irma just prior to us buying it, I’d epoxy-filled the area a couple months ago but hadn’t laid on a layer of gelcoat yet. I also filled almost 40 screw holes that the previous owners had happily ignored.

At some point, my parents showed up and spent a couple nights aboard! We all packed onto Ken and Kelly’s boat one night for a sunset cruise, I think it was the first time I’ve gone for a boat ride on a trawler!

One day Kyle came aboard and told me we were going for a boat ride, I had three minutes to find my UPF hoodie. A boat ride? Whose boat? Where were we going? Do I need sunscreen? And where is my dang hoodie!?

We were helping field test a crab boat that had a brand new Caterpillar diesel engine! There are a few crab boats in the commercial basin here, harvesting crabs in the Albemarle Sound and selling them locally.

Our watermaker hasn’t been taking enough salt out of the seawater, so we need to replace the membrane. We were steeling ourselves for a $500 membrane bill, but were pleasantly surprised to find them for sale on Amazon for half that price! (that being said, we’re going to wait until the end of summer and buy our membrane from CruiseRO because membranes have a shelf-life and we want to know we’re getting a fresh one!)

Kelly bought a new Jeep, so we all took it for a test drive to a local vineyard!

We had one big task that had to be completed before we take off for a couple months – we need to get our wind indicator off the mast and get it sent in to the manufacturer. We’ve never known the wind speed, which means we’re just guessing at when to reef and when to pull a sail down. In order to get it down, someone had to go up….

We got Kyle about 10 feet off the boat and I was sure that was as far as he was going to go. But he’s a champ, he gritted his teeth and even managed to get some photos from the top!

He only dropped one thing (yeah, it was the windex) and it didn’t even go into the water!

We spent a month at the marina, working on projects and furiously trying to get the boat ready hang out in the hot summer sun without us. We borrowed an AC unit, but it barely kept the bedroom cold. It’s hard to get stuff done when the heat index is near triple digits, so we’ve headed further north over land to spend some time with friends and family in the midwest.