day two - evening

What a great day. In seven hours of sailing we had a beautiful morning, a heavy rain storm, a great broad reach down Pamlico Sound and a run towards Swan Quarter as we slipped by a few more storms. In seven hours we sailed over 27 nautical miles with a top speed of 6.3 knots. Quite a ride. It felt good to finally drop the anchor in a little, well protected creek off the western shore of Spencer Bay.
Bruce's menu for the evening included boneless pork chops and mashed potatoes. This was our first experiment with dry ice in a collapsible cooler and it worked very well. The block of dry ice, about the size of a thick hardback book and weighing 10 pounds, came from the grocery store. We first froze our pork chops and sirloin steak (dinner for day three) in the freezer at my house, put them on the bottom of the cooler and set the block of dry ice on top of that and then put cooler and all back in the freezer until we left Saturday morning. We also added a couple of frozen bottles of drinking water and put newspapers over the top of all that. The morning of day two I pulled out the pork chops and put them on top of everything - the steak, dry ice, water bottles and newspaper - to thaw. Timing was perfect and the chops were thawed, yet still cold when we pulled them out at the anchorage that evening.

The meal was great! I wish I had some photographs of the finished product, but I was too hungry to let a camera get between me and dinner that night.

After dinner I did a little fishing, but didn't get a bite. (I'll ruin the suspense right now and let you know I did not catch any fish during the trip. I should have taken the cow-nosed ray on the first cast as an omen and left the fishing rod in the holder.)