sailing trip 2011
at sea, originally uploaded by artnoose.
I just got back from about a week away sailing off the coast of North Carolina. It was a pretty epic trip. Here are some of the highlights, although I'm writing my next zine about it, so I don't want to blow too much here. Click on the picture and you'll be taken to my Flickr page where you can look at more pictures.
I had to take two Megabuses to get down to Durham, with a three hour layover in DC where I went out to dinner with a friend there. I arrived in Durham at 4 in the morning and got picked up by one of my shipmates. We drove out to the coast and met up with St. who was already at the boat. We spent the day cleaning up because the boat had been there for six months, including weathering one hurricane. I mostly cleaned out the food stores, which was pretty gross. The next day we spent doing more repairs and stocking up on food. My shipmate had found a three burner stove top, so they installed it in the cabin, thus depriving me of the character-building experience of cooking all meals on a tiny camp stove up on deck.
The next morning we tried to make a quick getaway but ran aground trying to get out of the marina and had to all tip the boat as far over as possible while a local fisherman pulled us until we got free of the shallow bit. Because everything had taken longer than we wanted, we had to do an overnight sail that night to keep on track so we'd be at our final spot by Thanksgiving.
I ended up getting seasick at the tail end of my first night shift and remained so until late the next afternoon.
We anchored at a few different places over the course of the next few nights and I got to see lots of jellyfish, dolphins, birds, and even ponies. Then we did one more all-night sail on the open ocean, trying to get to our final spot in Wilmington before a storm hit. I got sick in the night again but did get woken up once to watch the pod of dolphins racing our boat with bioluminescent trails behind them.
When we got to our final anchorage, I slept for ten hours while my shipmates went out with some friends in town. The next day--- which was my birthday--- we went to a big vegan pre-Thanksgiving potluck. By then we were all on "boat time" and it was hard to stay awake past 9 pm. The next night we had Thanksgiving dinner with St.'s parents and the next day I made my way back up to meet my next marathon of Megabuses home.