Day 5 - Under the Bridge at Manteo?

We woke this morning to a change in wind direction. It was out of the north and the water levels were slowly subsiding. While we were killing time, we decided to rent a car and head over to Nags Head. The local Manteo Ford Dealer is THE source for car rentals on Manteo. "Doc" the owner, brought us a Ford Focus. We stopped back at the dealership to sign some papers and ended up talking about his journeys on the ICW...he also does business with Quigley Motors in York. They apparently add 4-wheel drive to vans. I never knew that but intend to check them out when I get back up to York.

After a nice breakfast at the Dunes in Nags Head, we headed up to the K-mart in Kill Devil Hills. I was running out of socks and underwear (how did that ever happen?). We got back to the marina at noon time and decided to motor over to Pirates Cove, which is about a 30 minute trip. We needed to top off our fuel tanks and could also check out the water levels at the bridge. 

When we got to the bridge, it was marked  from 5' to 0'. The water level was at about 1.5'. I guess this is based on reported tides by NOAA. Today's high tide was supposed to be 0.7' and low tide at 0.1'. I assume that this meant the water level was still up about a foot above normal. Since the winds are supposed to turn back out of the southwest tomorrow, we felt like it was now or never.

We headed back to the Manteo Waterfront Marina to dump our holding tanks and top off water. Then we decided to leave at 4PM so that we could take advantage of the approaching low tide at 6PM. 

Here is THE bridge at Manteo. We are going to know soon enough whether we are going to keep our windex.

The plan was to make this a short trip, as we would not find an anchorage until we crossed about 75 miles of water to Oriental NC, just above Beaufort. We decided to lay up in the commercial fishing village of Wanchese for the evening, about 5 miles south of the bridge.

We crept under the bridge. We never scraped the VHF antenna until the very last piece of steel. We had 66' all the way. BUT, if we had tried yesterday, we would definitely have taken the windex off the mast...so the wait was worth the time!

Once under the bridge, it was a 30 minute trip into Wanchese. We tied up at Broadcreek Marina for the evening, cooked a couple of steaks, and called it an evening.

Here are a few pics of our spot for this evening in beautiful Wanchese Harbor (NOT).

Tomorrow is going to be a long day. Our plan is to be underway at 7AM for the 75+ mile crossing of the Pamlico Sound over to River Dunes near Oriental NC. Let's hope that it is not as rough as our journey across Albemarle Sound!