Beaufort NC USA

BV anchored in Taylor’s Creek

We slept late on Monday 6 May and then moved round to Taylor’s Creek.  With the gale over, a fair number of yachts had moved onwards, so finding a suitable space was easy.  We’d come to Beaufort to see the OCC Port Officer, Diane Tetreault, who was looking after the camera Reg had lost when we were last in the town in November 2018.  We managed to get in touch with her, only to discover that she was on holiday in Peru for another couple of weeks!  Oh, well, some things are just not meant to be.  We’d just have to collect the camera on our way back south again.

We like Beaufort.  It’s a small quiet town with a great dinghy dock, a usefully positioned laundry and pretty good food shops only a mile’s walk away.  Best of all, it’s a pretty place so we spent the day wandering around enjoying the scenery and visiting the excellent maritime museum (of which we have no pictures).

The old part of Beaufort is most attractive, with old lapboard houses, complete with the air-conditioning of the time – verandas and balconies.

Some of the properties are very old.  We saw ‘Historic Beaufort’ plaques dating properties from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the oldest building we found being over 250 years old and dated at 1768 and 1728.

Views across Taylor’s Creek to Shackleford Island from the Town Dock

The Navtex Active antenna box which I initially
thought had failed

But we live on a boat so there’s always something not working quite as it should!  This time it was the Navtex, which we realised was not picking up messages from Norfolk or many from Charleston either.  So, we needed to spend some time working on it.  I initially suspected that the active antenna box wasn’t working properly, but that all seemed to be OK so ‘clearly’ it had to be a poor connection somewhere.  Unfortunately, there was nothing obvious wrong with any of the connections in the antenna chain or on the electrical side, so it looks like a problem that’s going to bug us for a while.

Scoot, one of the other yachts in the anchorage, with crew Sam and Jane (and Poco the dog)

The following day, 7 May, we heard from Dianne again.  Working well above and beyond the call of duty she was in the process of calling her friends, trying to find one who wasn’t also on holiday like her(!) who could go to her flat to retrieve our camera.  We couldn’t believe our ears and promised to sit tight in Beaufort until we heard back from her.  Shortly afterwards we got chatting with the crew of Scoot, Sam and Jane and dog, Poco, who were also in Taylor’s Creek.  It would have been nice to have spent a bit more time with them but they were planning on moving north with the southerly wind the next day and were moving across to Cape Lookout Bight for the night – perhaps we should go too?  But, of course, we couldn’t.  So we waved them off and hoped to see them sometime in the future.

To fill the rest of the day I made new straps for the dinghy seat and promised myself that before too long I would make a proper cover for the PVC seat as well.  I also made a new harness for the outboard motor, one that sits under the motor’s cover, rather than on top, so that it too is protected from the ravages of strong UV light.  It would be a bit of a bummer to have the engine fall into the drink as a result of the lifting harness being weakened by sunlight.  And, in a bid to do all the ‘really fun jobs’ in one day, started the 2-day process of descaling the pipework in the aft heads.  Mmmm – such fun!

Looking across Shackleford Bank Island

One of the hundreds, thousands of tiny crabs we
saw in the salt marshes on the island.  This one’s
a left-hander (left-clawer?).  Others are right-handed

To recover from the shock of work, we took the dinghy across to Shackleford Bank Island, hoping to see the wild horses which live on the island.  We’d inadvertently chosen to go over at low tide which was a boon in a couple of ways.  Firstly, it meant that we could take the outer loop path along the beaches (which are totally covered at high tide) and, secondly, we got to see the thousands of tiny crabs that live in the salt marshes that fringe the island.

Miles of pristine white Outer Banks beach – until the tide comes in

Quick!  Escape!  Dig-in!

Having spent longer than one would have thought possible watching the hundreds and thousands of tiny crabs scuttling around in the marshes, we had a lovely walk along the pristine beaches on the ocean side of the island.

The grassland in flower

And then we headed inland in search of the wild horses and enjoyed the maritime grassland covered in thousands of tiny, and not so tiny, brightly coloured flowers.

Big sky country

Big sky country with wild-horses

We eventually found a herd of wild-horses…….

Said to be from original Spanish stock brought here when America was first colonised, the wild horses currently on the island actually only date back to the middle of the twentieth century.  There are several herds.  This one appeared to number about a dozen

…..and were able to get surprisingly close to them without, noticeably, causing them alarm.

Beaufort (across Taylor’s Creek) from Shackleford Bank Island, with BV in the centre of the picture

The walk back to the dinghy took us past an excellent vantage point for taking a picture of BV in the anchorage.

And we had one last look at the thousands of crazy tiny crabs before dinghying back to Beaufort and trying out the ice-cream selection at the General Store (excellent!).

More homemade pizza; maybe I should made
less pizza dough next time!

We were settling down to enjoy an evening pizza and film night when Dianne got in touch again.  She’d found an available friend who could help, gave us his details and said that he should be able to get the camera for us the next day.  What great news!  And, indeed, the next day we met him outside the Maritime Museum (local focal point everyone can find) and he handed us our camera.  Dianne is absolutely a fabulous Port Officer and we OCC members are so lucky to have her in Beaufort.

Beaufort, North Carolina, USA