We arrived at Morehead City a bit before sunset on Saturday so had a quick meal then a nap before raising the anchor at 9 PM to set off for the Wrightsville Beach Inlet 60 miles to the west-south-west. This inlet is near Masonboro where we planned to meet up with another Michigan Sailing team alum. This time it was Meg Morrison who had crewed with Harry when he was a Junior. Meg now lives in Wilmington NC and keeps her sailboat in Masonboro where she had secured space on a dock for Juno. Only a day or two earlier our plans were to get together with Meg on Monday morning and continue to our next destination later Monday but as often happens the weather forecast changed and it looked like a Monday morning departure would be better. So instead we modified our plans a bit to get together with Meg on Sunday evening instead.
Heading toward Wrightsville Beach, we made good progress sailing offshore through Saturday night with just a jib all the way to the inlet. We had winds of 15-20 knots from the north at the outset making it easy to steer a course of WSW for the approximately 60 miles to the Inlet. Unfortunately, the good winds also came with some moderate waves on our aft quarter which made it very rolly and almost impossible to sleep. For the one on watch, it was a clear night with a bright moon that cast shadows in the cockpit and reflected light off the waves until around 4 am when the moon set. There was little other traffic so the radio was very quiet all night. All we saw were two other sailboats and some red warning lights marking the off-limits boundary for the Camp LeJeune training waters. Despite the rolly conditions, it felt great to be sailing again. Around midnight, the waves calmed down enough to make some sleep possible, but neither of us got more than 3 hours of sleep all night. We arrived at the Wrightsville Beach Inlet at 9:30 AM at about dead low tide. Meg's yacht club was only a couple of miles down the ICW but there is a shallow bar at the entrance and Meg had advised us to wait until an hour or so past low tide. So we anchored inside the inlet near the town of Wrightsville Beach to get a nap and wait for the tide to come up a bit.
After a nap, some lunch and a little bit of planning for our next couple of days, and with plenty of water under our keel, we made our way to Masonboro, traversing the shoal at the yacht club without any problem, and tied up. Sarah then tuned into a virtual baby shower, and we both took a much needed shower before Meg arrived at 5 pm. The last time Harry had seen Meg was nearly 40 years ago and Meg was a new acquaintance for Sarah so there was much to talk about. Before heading out for dinner at the Waterside Restaurant in Wrightsville Beach, Meg gave us a quick tour of her center cockpit sailboat, Détente, highlighting it’s sparkling new engine. We learned that Meg has a lot of experience around boats as she has a 100 ton captains license, has sailed across the Atlantic, and currently is very active with her local Sail and Power Squadron helping educate other boaters. We picked her brain for cruising tips relevant to our journey and she was most helpful producing navigational maps and even a street map for Charleston that later proved to be very helpful. After dinner, Meg obliged us with a quick stop at a grocery store and a gas station for some diesel before dropping us back to the yacht club. We were so glad to have stopped in Masonboro to visit with Meg and really appreciated her kind hospitality.
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