I'm starting to focus more and more on a long weekend trip in early May. I mentioned it a couple of posts ago here. I'll tack a couple of days on to a weekend and make it a four day trip. My first night out I would like to anchor in one of the little creeks of Mouse Harbor on the south side of Pamlico River entrance. That is about 15 miles from my launching point at Van Horn's Bayside Campground and Marina. Leaving my house at dawn I would get down there by 8:30 or 9. Rig the boat, pack the boat and I would be ready to cast off about 10:30 or so (I could get the boat ready quicker, but leaving on a cruise I tend to check and double check everything). So a nice 15 mile sail down Germantown Bay, across Spencer Bay and then the Pamlico River sounds just about right.
That would get me in the Mouse Harbor early afternoon, plenty of time to explore the area (it is a large, open bay with several creeks and beautiful marshes) and do a little fishing. The photo above is from Cedar Creek at the very southern end of Mouse Harbor, I anchored there on a solo cruise in the fall of '08.
And this little island below is well out of my cruising ground for this trip, but it is typical of the nice little islands, really remnants of eroded points, that sit just off the marshes all around the sound. You can see this one was only ten feed wide in places, just a strip of sand with driftwood and a little marsh grass. On a windy night I would not anchor behind a spot like this - but with a calm forecast it would be a great place for the evening. I have spotted a couple of these islets on google earth that I want to check out on this trip.
I hope to explore Caffee Bay just off of Swan Quarter Bay. During the fall '08 trip where I anchored there next to a nice little point where I had some good luck fishing. Below are the filets of a speckled trout, with chopped onions and peppers, that made for an excellent dinner.
The question leaving the dock on any cruise is wind. Windfinder shows typical May winds are ten mph out of the southwest. That would be ideal, but I won't count on it. I've done two spring trips down there and have had wind from the north, west, east and southwest. I guess the good news is there always seems to be wind from somewhere.
And I've got a couple of good books I'm looking forward to reading. I got a new pair of eye-glasses last fall, they have "progressive" lenses that give me a variety of prescriptions that allow me to focus on everything from distance to close-up. I really like the glasses, but they are not great for long term reading (at least for me). So I went by WalMart and ordered reading only glasses with their absolute cheapest frames, the civilian equivalent of what navy recruits call BCG's (birth control glasses -- wear those ugly standard issue glasses you'll never get a date). They aren't the fanciest glasses around, I'm more interested in reading than impressing anybody so they should work just fine.
I think this will be a nice little trip.
steve
No comments:
Post a Comment