DUTCH NIRVANA -- From the Narrow Hudson to the Wide Neuse

We had seen the green Tanzer tied up now and then at the Town Dock recently but it wasn't until Sunday that we caught up with Dutch Nirvana's owner. Peter Cumminsky says he's been renting a slip on Browns Creek in Whortonsville and sails down to Oriental once a week to get supplies and provisions.

Peter recently retired early from Russell-Sage College in Albany, NY and lives on the Tanzer 7.5, (27'7"). He has scaled back, giving up most of his possessions. "What my ex-wife didn't get, I gave to my daughter." Living with a few things is something he's done on extensive hiking trips on the Appalachian and other trails.



Now that he's left Albany behind, his plans for Dutch Nirvana are open. Peter says he's been using this trip south to figure out where he wants to live aboard his boat for the next few years. One criteria: that he be able to keep it in the water all year, something he couldn't do on the Hudson when it ices in.

The Hudson seems to have presented other challenges in his years of sailing there. Even though Albany is far above NYC and the ocean, Peter says there's a "severe tide of 4 feet." something that led the Indians to call it the River that Runs Two Ways. The same may be said of the prevailing winds, which tend, Peter says, to blow either up or down the river; those out for a day sail may be able to sail in one direction. Usually though, they have to motor back, in part because tacking could be problematic; the Hudson Peter says, is about 300 yards across at its widest.

Which may explain why he's looking in this area. He was familiar with the statistic that the Neuse -- at 6 miles across where it meets Pamlico Sound -- is the widest river in the US. And ice -- and tides -- are very rarely an issue here. . So, he's scouting out this area as well as points further south as possible homes for Dutch Nirvana.

And what exactly is Dutch Nirvana?

The boat takes its part of her name from one of hercfirst owners, who was Dutch. Peter says the "nirvana" came from the way the 25-year-old boat sails.

One postscript that may be of interest to Harborcam fans: Peter says that on his voyage south from Albany friends have been trying to track his trip via cameras in several places along the way such as Cape May, and the Atlantic Islands of NJ, the Chesapeake, and yes, even on the tidal, icy, narrow Hudson River.

AYUTHIA

The parade of southbound boats didn't let up this week and more seemed to be stopping in than ever. One boat that turned a lot of heads -- and sent a lot of feet down to the Town Dock to get a closer look on her approach Saturday afternoon-- was probably the oldest of the bunch.



Ayuthia out of Vineyard Haven, MA is a gaff-rigged ketch dating to the 1930's. Jay Wilbur, who is also out of Vineyard Haven, where he is the harbormaster, was delivering Ayuthia to the Abacos.

Jay says she was built in what was called Siam (now Thailand) where her first owner had a teak plantation. As a result, says Jay, the boat is 'all teak, and the best teak'. Even the hull and keel. Though he thinks the masts are spruce.

Ayuthia draws about 4 feet -- and 8 with the centerboard down. She is about 50 feet overall and by today's beamy standards, narrow. Jay's father, Jack who is making the trip as the 'naviguesser' described her to some at the Tiki Bar as having 'no comfort'. For example, he cited the lack of a dodger. Jay laughs at hearing this and says that his father is 'used to a Grand Banks trawler'.



Boat and crew had left Martha's Vineyard five days earlier, sailing outside to Atlantic City, and then down the coast and in to the ICW. They were bound for Beaufort, then Southport before heading off shore to the Abacos. Jay WIlbur says the trip usually takes two weeks.

The boat takes her name from a city in Thailand, where she was built. These days she splits her time between two other places --- Hope Town in the Abacos where she is chartered in the winter, and Martha's Vineyard where her owner Tom Grew charters her in the summers.

MORDICUS

MORDICUS

The name made us curious. A trawler from Canada with the name Mordicus was at the Town Dock Wednesday morning and had us wracking our brains for some character we were supposed to have remembered from literature. A knock on the hull brought an answer. Gilles Lariviere came in to view and took a moment from doing engine maintenance to explain. "Mordicus," he said after confirming with his wife Marie-Andree, "is from Latin. It means tenacious"

Gilles and Marie-Andree live in Quebec near Montreal. They are not strangers to Oriental, having stopped in here on their way south in the fall and north in the spring the past five years. "Every year, except last year" he added. "After September 11th, we went back north."

SEA FEVER - What is that Orange Light?

Sea Fever, an Eclipse 43, found a spot at the Town Dock last week. The boat is named for the Maesfield poem -- which Hans Landolt began reciting.

I must go down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
and a star to steer her by,

The poem may have a particular resonance for Hans Landolt who hails from landlocked Switzerland and seems to have taken the words to heart. He and his wife Marjatta -- who is from Finland -- have lived aboard Sea Fever for 7 years, four of them in the Mediterranean and the past 2-3 yeas in Trinidad and the Caribbean. The couple, who were married in Nassau in May, came to the US for the first time this summer. When we spoke in Oriental, they were headed south as their cruiser's license was expiring.

One piece of equipment on their boat had TownDock.net and others wondering. Up near the spreaders and the Finnish courtesy flag, was an orange light. Was this some safety equipment required by the Swiss?



"It is a burglar alarm," says Hans explaining that it would be tripped off if intruders crossed a laser beam inside the boat. In all their time sailing Sea Fever, though, it had never gone off, he says. Not even in areas prone to piracy.

Hans says that when he was living in Switzerland, he would "read about crime in our lovely town of Zurich. " and that in his years sailing he found less crime in the Caribbean Or even in the US.

He says they'd liked their stay in Oriental. "We appreciate the courtesy bicycles," he said, pointing down Hodges toward the Provision Company. Then he paused, a polite visitor weighing his words. "But there is one thing you could improve on. Internet access."

He started to explain that boaters can use cell phones to get on the Web while on board their boats but that the cell phone he had -- his was a Motorola -- wouldn't work here. Hans seemed to be blaming the European configuration of his cell phone until a TownDock.net staffer gently interrupted him to say that even phones designed for use in the US can't get a signal in Oriental.



Before they left, Hans took part in on of the first flashcard judgings, having been swept in to the action by the Porch Pirates who came to the Town Dock to score a motor vessel's departure. Then he and Marjatta took off.

SLEIPNIR - Traveling with Twins

Sunday morning, "Sleipnir" a Hunter Legend 35 came to the Town Dock with 3-1/2 year old sisters Erika and Lisa McDowell and their parents Gudrun Briegel and Bob McDowell on board. The family from Reston, VA left Deal, MD two weeks ago -- and dealt with Kyle last week. They are headed south for about six months.

Firsts and Lasts
"It's the most time we've spent together as a family," says Bob, who after two weeks in to the trip, credited Cheerios and chicken nuggets for keeping things running.



While the trip is their first one cruising as a family, it will be their last ever on board "Sleipnir", as they plan to sell the boat before going overseas. "We wanted to get in this trip." he added, "before we move to Germany next year."

The girls and the boat go way back. "They were born six weeks premature," their father says, "and when they came out of the hospital, they had to wear heart monitors for a while. They were still wearing them when we put them on the boat for the first time."

Although they are twins, their approaches to sailing differ. "Erika is not much for the boat heeling over," Bob says. But her sister Lisa's favorite place on the boat, is "near the stern on the starboard side. She gets harnessed in there and really likes it when the boat is heeled 30 degrees to starboard," Though seemingly fearless at sea, Lisa was seen treading the Town Dock very carefully after arrival in Oriental. As she took deliberate steps, her mother Gudrun explained that the small gaps between the dock's planks seemed to concern her.

Yet Another Journey In Store
After this cruise ends in the spring, the family will be moving to the Munich area in southern Germany, where Gudrun grew up. "It's a small town," says Gudrun Briegel, initially comparing it to Oriental. On hearing that Oriental's population was 875, she added, "Maybe not that small." They plan to remain in Germany until the twins are out of elementary school.

Gudrun says their boat's name comes from Norse mythology. "Sleipnir was a horse with 8 legs that flew between Valhalla and the Real World" says Gudrun. Her family hopes that Sleipnir's namesake can take them to the Keys or the Bahamas. On Sunday afternoon, though, the younger members of the crew were happy to get to a playground in Oriental.

NEPENTHE -- Going South, Going Aground

"We've gone aground four times."

In Oriental recently, Dennis Robinett delivered this line as though it were something significant.

Of course, going aground anywhere can bruise a sailor's ego. And on this, their first trip south from Connecticut on the ICW, Dennis and his wife Suzi were learning that bay and sound waters don't always run deep.

They were also finding -- happily -- that going aground in the muddy bottom of Pamlico Sound wouldn't harm their Cape Dory 36, "Nepenthe" like a grounding in the rocky waters off Connecticut and New England would. There, running hard aground can mean very hard times.



Not far from their marina in Groton, CT, outcroppings of shale and other rock lurk just below the surface. There's one pile, says Dennis, "that actually has a sign that says "Rocks" on it". And still, sailors go up on them. Getting in to shallow waters in the Northeast "can get expensive". Suzi seconds that. At Shennecossett Y.C she says "There were 6 or 8 boats this summer alone, that needed yard work after going aground."

It's just a fact of life.... and in some cases, after life.

Suzi recalls one friend in Connecticut who scattered her husband's ashes near submerged rocks where he had gone aground a number of times. "'He liked it so much', she told us, 'that now he can get to see it" up close.

Given that background, it's not hard to understand why Dennis says, "We weren't comfortable going aground before this trip."

Softer groundings aren't the only thing the Robinettes have noticed as they head south toward Florida.

There was the bullet-riddled silhouette of a man that had been propped near a NO WAKE sign in the Dismal Swamp. "I saw that and said, 'I think we really ought to slow down here'" says Suzi. She had some concerns that the target practice might resume across the canal she was traveling down.

Waves in the South
Dennis Robinett meanwhile, notices that the further south they go, the more other boaters wave.



"I grew up in the midwest," he says, "in a small town like this in Illinois" where it was common to wave to neighbors, on land or water. When he moved to the northeast more than three decades ago, he found few people returning his wave. "It was like, "Who IS he?' In NY and NJ, they just stared at me." But Dennis says that as they've headed south on the water, he's found more of the waving he remembers from his childhood.

The Robinettes stopped in Oriental for the Columbus Day weekend and their son, daughter-in-law and grandson who live in Raleigh met up with them on "Nepenthe".

Now the Robinetts are heading toward Stuart, FL where they are resettling after moving from Connecticut. As for cruising plans, they think they'll be heading north for the summers. They have no plans for much offshore cruising. At least together. Suzi says she's more comfortable with the way a 747 goes to windward.

Their boat's name is pronounced "nih-PEN-thee", which Suzi says may sound like they're lisping when giving the name over VHF. The name comes from that of a famous racing boat. But way before that, "Nepenthe" appeared in "The Odyssey" as an "elixir that soothed the soul when times are rough".

One hesitates to bring it up, but Homer's Odyssey also had a whole section about sailors stuck between a rock and a hard place.... but then again, the further south the crew of Nepenthe travels, the less they worry about either.

This Space Reserved for Firefighters

Charles Rawson hadn't sailed on the East Coast before. He grew up sailing in Southern California and has been living aboard his Cheoy Lee, "Sunset" for the past twenty years, cruising to Mexico a number of times. But the East Coast sailing didn't happen until he had the 36 foot clipper ketch trucked from San Diego to the Chesapeake this spring. Charles is making his way down the ICW now, and brought Sunset to the TownDock this weekend.



"The East Coast is a completely different breed of cat. I may never go back. " he says. "Out West there just a few groups of islands that aren't very large. And the mountains go right to the sea." While that may make for dramatic-looking coastlines, Charles notes a drawback for sailors seeking shelter. "There are no 'hidey holes' "

Fending off Ill WInds on Land and at Sea

From the late 60's to the early 80's, Charles had worked as a fireman in Santa Barbara where the Santa Ana winds can quickly spread fire up and down the dry canyons. After falling through a roof -- a second time -- he retired from firefighting 20 years ago.

But a vestige of those days remains.

On the aft-most portlights on his boat the word "TRAGAHUMO" is posted, along with a decal of a yellow fireman's helmet



"Tragahumo is slang for firefighter in Mexico", he says "And in Mexico, firefighters are respected." Unlike police in Mexico, who have a bad reputation for corruption and bribery, says Charles, the firefighters -- or bomberos -- are seen as being above all of that and are probably the most trusted government figures.

So before he ventured in to Mexican waters, Charles made sure to identify his boat with his firefighting past. He thinks it helped, especially the night that thieves hit an anchorage he was staying in. "The next morning we found that they had taken the motors off of every other boat's dinghy . Except mine."

---
The story makes sense to Stuart Smith. "They're seen as gods" he says.

Stuart retired last year after twenty years of firefigthing in Flagstaff, Arizona, Now he and his wife Mary Ann -- a retired school teacher -- live on their catamaran, "Firecat" which they tied up to the same side of the Town Dock where the other firefighter had been just a day or two earlier.

They pointed out that their catamaran, "Firecat" also has a symbol of his firefighting past on it: Near the bow is a Maltese cross ... with a University of Arizona Wildcat superimposed on it.

Asked if their public service work had come in useful in the past year of cruising, Stuart says he was called upon in Marathon, FL last winter when a woman on another boat "was having heart trouble." He says he went to the woman, checked her out "and told her she wasn't going to die in the next ten minutes and didn't need to call an ambulance. I told her to call a taxi."



Stuart and Mary Ann and their dog Oscar have been to Oriental three times in the past four months. "So far, of all the places we've been to, this is the friendliest town." They say that if they were looking to settle somewhere they'd consider Oriental. For the moment though, more cruising is in the gameplan, perhaps with a different boat. Firecat is for sale and the Smiths are looking to buy a trawler.

MOLLY BLOSSOM -- First Known Use of Harborcam for Navigation

We heard about them before we met the boat and crew.

Sometime Wednesday afternoon, a local ham radio enthusiast in Oriental overheard a conversation. A boat approaching Oriental was asking another ham operator on shore to go on the Internet and check TownDock.net's Harborcam shot. The approaching boat wanted to know if there were space at the free Town Dock.

Now, this particular use of Harborcam was something TownDock.net management couldn't have anticipated when the camera was installed two months ago. To our knowledge, this was a first for Harborcam.

It was also a first for the resourceful sailors, Martin and Betsy Basch, who hadn't employed that particular ship-to-shore-to-web-to-Harborcam technology before. A day later, with their Krogen 42 trawler, "Molly Blossom" at the coveted Town Dock, they were laughing as they admitted they were the ones.

Naively, TownDock.net asked why they contacted their Oriental friend -- and Harborcam recon man -- John Knauth via ham radio. Because, they explained, if they'd asked for and received the information on VHF, which most boats monitor, the information would not be theirs alone.

As it turned out, the other Oriental resident listening in had a live view of the harbor at the time and joined the conversation to give information more updated than Harborcam's every-ten-minute photos.

(It is for this reason that TownDock.net management cannot guarantee space at the free dock.)

In the end, the Basch's anchored out Wednesday night, letting friends on another Krogen, "Freelance", take the Town Dock space. "We've been to Oriental many times before," said Betsy, and their friends had not. When "Freelance" left Thursday, the Basch's moved in-- the third Krogen at the Town Dock in 24 hours.

As for the boat's name, , Betsy Basch says "Molly Blossom" is a family name dating back a few generations. It also represents a nod to her father who, she says, loved to play with words. "Even just the sound of them. When we were growing up he begged us that if any of us ever got a boat, we name her Molly Blossom."

Betsy grew up in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on New Bedford Harbor. It had two sides, she says -- there's New Bedford where the Quakers developed a whaling industry-- and then there's Fairhaven which was home to privateers, the legalized pirates of the 18th century. One of those privateers, says Betsy Basch, married in to her family generations ago. Martin Basch says that one of them may have been part of a rare privateer attack on land --on the town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Perhaps Harborcam may have come in handy for Betsy's ancestor. (At the very least, the bright glossy colors of Lunenburg's waterfront would show up well on camera.)

The Basch's who are from Harvard, Massachusetts plan to spend the winter in the Keys, and head back through Oriental next spring on their way to Gloucester.

Krogens --

If you passed the Town Dock a few days after Columbus Day, you might have done a double take at the similar profiles of the two Krogen trawlers tied up.

On the left was Jean Marie, Van and Jeanne Vander Most's Krogen 42 out of New Hampshire. Like everyone coming through Oriental these days, they were headed south and planned to be in Vero Beach, FL for a cruiser's Thanksgiving feast. That event began 6 years ago as a potluck, growing to 130 cruisers and their families in community hall there last year. As the event has grown, it's required some coordination -- someone has to get the turkeys -- and this year Jeanne Vander Most is organizing it, though she says it is 'completely loose..



On the other side of the Town Dock was Freelance, a Krogen 39 that Darrell and Jennifer Brand call home. The Brands were headed for Marathon, FL where they spend the winters. Freelance is named for the work they do .. and that allows them to live as they do.

Darrell works behind the camera, as a director of photography while Jennifer does hair and make-up in film and TV, largely in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Darrell also teaches charter captaining and does some charter work. "A lot of people cruising are retired," says Jennifer, "but we still need to go out and make the big jingle." They've been working freelance and living on boats for more than a dozen years. "We work some grueling hours but then we're able to take off these chunks of time."

They'd left the boat on the Chesapeake this summer and worked in Minnesota and were now making the southward "migration with the herd" leaving the early snows of Minnesota behind.

Jennifer says they lived on a 38 foot Calibre sailboat until a year of so ago. "We wanted a pilothouse so we could keep going in the rain," she says. She thought the transition to a trawler would be harder -- "you know, no more romantic sailing under a full moon" -- than it has been But the important thing has been to be afloat. "I'm addicted," says Jennifer, "I can't think of another life."

In a carryover from the sailing days, they anchor out as often as they can. Darrell says the Krogens were designed to rely less on plugging in to shore power than other non-sail boats. They were staying at the TownDock they said because friends on another Krogen -- Molly Blossom -- had told them about it and the people that would come by and visit.

--

ONTUIT

Four years ago, Matt Devan, just out of the Coast Guard, sailed his newly bought boat from Connecticut to North Carolina. It had no motor and somewhere off the Outer Banks he needed a tow. He ended up in Ocracoke where he met Michelle Russell.

Fast forward to Wednesday morning, when Matt, Michelle and that 24 foot sloop "Ontuit" stopped by the Town Dock for a little while. After four years of living on Ocracoke -- the past year living on their boat there-- they have sold everything else and just this week started cruising on "Ontuit". Oriental was their first landing on a voyage that Michelle says, "officially began on the 13th."



"We have no time limit, no schedule. We'd like to go through the ICW and around to the Gulf Coast -- Matt has family in Fairhope, Alabama -- and maybe shoot to the Bahamas, Abacos," says Michelle, who grew up in South Jersey. "Right now though, we're hoping to get to Titusville, FL, go to Disneyworld and doink around there for a while ."

Along the way, Matt's hoping to find some waves. Not for the 2-1/2 ton boat, but for him and the surfboard that was strapped to the lifelines Wednesday, some sand still clinging to its bottom.

There were waves out on the Pamlico Sound when they came through earlier this week. Tuesday night they rode out the Nor'easter in a more protected nook up Green Creek, behind Oriental's Highway 55 bridge. Wednesday morning they pulled up to the Town Dock, shook the wet from the sail, folded it up and invited TownDock.net to take a look below.



Ontuit, Michelle says, is a Tradition, "one of the first fiberglass boats," made in 1958. Matt who is 27, has actually owned it twice. After first getting to Ocracoke, and living on board for a while, he sold it. But the man he sold it to developed health problems, Michelle says, "so Matt bought it again, and got it back in better condition. Matt was happy."

Despite having ridden out the nor'easter the night before, they both seemed happy during their brief stop -- for coffee, a boat part, and sail folding . Oriental had one familiar ring for Michelle, who is 28 and had worked in a coffee shop in Ocracoke. "We also had our 'breakfast club' out there on the front porch," she said, looking across Hodges Street toward The Bean. As for the stretches of time with their new open ended schedule. "We have been playing a lot of cribbage." she said. "He's ahead by one game."

Matt says the boat takes its name, "Ontuit" from an Indian tribe that moved from place to place. Though not a direct translation, that does seem in keeping with Michelle's description "We are just going to kinda putz around."

By mid-morning Wednesday, Matt and Michelle and "Ontuit" had headed out towards Adams Creek. TownDock.net looks forward to the surf reports.

T'morn

The weather turned cold and the skies went gray early this week in Oriental, almost as if to provide a more fitting backdrop for the motor-sailer "T'morn". The 41-foot Ushant was made in Scotland, and built for the cold, wet sailing there. But more than Scotland, it was Massachusetts that the Horan brothers of New Bedford brought when they arrived Sunday afternoon.



They weren't tied up to the Town Dock for very long before Peter Horan was calling out, "Nice hair," to a man standing nearby who had hair almost as white as his own. It turns out he was passing on to the stranger a compliment he'd received years earlier.

"I was in a restaurant, Mitchell's it was, in Hyannis and my wife and I noticed this other couple where the wife was doing all the talking and the husband was, every now and then, saying, 'uh-huh, uh-huh. uh-huh' And we realized the man at the table was Tip O'Neill" the now-late Congressman with the shock of white hair who was also Speaker of the House (in Washington) . "I told my wife, 'Let them eat in peace, don't pay any attention.' But later on, as they were leaving, they stopped by our table and I felt his big paw of a hand on my head, and he says to me, "What a beautiful head of white hair."

There are two of them on "T'morn". Peter Horan owns the boat and is sailing with his brother Bill who is the navigator for their trip to Titusville, FL. Bill's navigating began a week or so earlier, taking them from Buzzard's Bay to Block Island and then a 2-1/2 day passage offshore to Norfolk. To avoid the Cape Hatteras shoals, the brothers tucked inside and were traveling along the ICW, which is how they found Oriental late Sunday afternoon. They'd not been here before.

"Is there a reason all the boats are heading out now?" Bill asks late Sunday afternoon. North Carolina's nets-out-of-the-water rule from Friday evening to Sunday evening is explained and talk turns to his hometown, New Bedford, home to Herman Melville and a long-running maritime tradition. It is a subject of some pride. " It was the Whaling Capital, " he says and when we mention that a sailor now in the Oriental harbor had been headed there this summer to research whaling boats engraved on Cocos Island , he warms even more to the topic, "Did you know that for a long time, New Bedford was America's most well-known city? Go down to the Fiji Islands, people there hadn't heard of NY. But because of all the whaling ships, they knew New Bedford."



Bill and his younger (by 2 years) brother Pete are a contrast. Pete, who will be 65 in May, is a general practice MD, who from the railing of his boat offers a TownDock.net staffer medical advice. "Since Adam and Eve," he says, "People have failed in four ways. Now don't just nod your head cos the doctor's talking here." Towndock.net staffer stops nodding. " Four ways. One. They eat too much. Two, they drink too muck. Three. They smoke. and Four, they don't adhere to a personal fitness program!" He practices what he preaches; he says he keeps -- and uses --- a Nordic Track on the bow of his boat when it's in Florida. "And not as a clothes hanger." Bill, on the other hand, tactfully waits for his brother to be out of earshot at the Town and Country grocery before asking for a carton of Dorals.

"T'morn" is the first sail boat Peter Horan has owned. Growing up on the water in Massachusetts, he says he sailed a lot as a kid, and "raced til I was 14". That was 50 years ago. After that, "other things became more important." He got married, had six kids, and had a houseboat named "Madhouse".

Then three years ago, he looked for a boat that could sail in addition to being a motor boat. "I had trained as a pilot," he says, and in the air "you're always looking for alternatives. 'What do I do if this happens? What do I do if that happens?' " He wanted alternatives on the water.

Which led to "T'morn", a 22-ton boat with a beefy pilothouse whose previous owners "took her across the ocean a few times, through all the canals in France -- there's a tabernacle -- up the Mississippi and on the Great Lakes." However, Pete Horan himself doesn't plan any such long-distance, offshore travel.

The name "T'morn" he says, comes from a Scotltish abbreviation for "see you tomorrow morning" In Oriental Sunday evening, a number of people didn't wait that long to stop by; "T'morn" had attracted onlookers almost from the start, many of them Oriental residents who grew up not far from the boat's hailing port, Boston.

The next day Peter Horan told TownDock.net he was surprised to find so many people with Massachusetts roots had settled in Oriental. "This is significant." he said, "This is significant because Massachusetts people don't leave home easily."

A case in point might be his own travel plans. Though he was on his way toTitusville, FL for the winter, he isn't leaving Massachusetts entirely behind. He plans to live three weeks out of the month in Florida and then fly back to New Bedford to work for a week in the medical practice where he is a general practitioner. "We'll try that for three months, see how it works." The Bahamas may be another destination before he and "T'morn" head north in April.

On his return trip to Massachusetts, Pete Horan says, he'll stop in Oriental again. His brother Bill, the navigator, echoes him. A day after arriving, Bill was speaking about the locals in Oriental in the almost the same admiring tone he used Sunday talking about New Bedford's past. Perhaps it's the maritime link; he mentions a meal he'd eaten at M&M's "Real scallops. None of that skate." he says knowingly But really, he says, "I want you to be sure to write that people here have been so friendly, and made us feel so welcome."

T'morn then, y'all.

On The Way To The Annapolis Boat Show

Oriental has been getting a little preview of the Annapolis Boat Show for the past week, with several boats stopping for the night on their way north. An XplorerCat 46 stopped at the TownDock for an hour or two Sunday morning, and caught our interest. The "Endeavour" is named for the Endeavour Catamaran Corporation in North Clearwater, FL which builds mostly motor cats. The crew of three were delivering the boat to Annapolis (there are actually two Annapolis Boat Shows - the Sail Show starts this Thursday, Power a week later).



Motor cats have become increasingly popular, so TownDock.net asked the crew of Endeavour to give their best sales pitch. "It doesn't burn any fuel" according to Woody, the delivery captain. Compared to other motor vessels of its size, they say it is more fuel efficient. Crew member Buck Thomas says the motor cat has a range of 1000 miles on a 600 gallon tank. He adds that there are 'no bumps' on the ride.



Cap'n Woody and the others left Clearwater last Monday and said Oriental was their first stop since Jacksonville. They were hoping to reach Coinjock by lunchtime and Annapolis in 2 days.