Two more days…as the strong northeast wind hangs on and then clocks east on Saturday before going southwest on Sunday (huzzah!). I miss sailing our boat! It’s 50nm to Manteo from here, with one, at best dubious, stop in-between. Recall that it took us from 6:30am to 4pm to sail the 48nm between Elizabeth City and Edenton on a favorable breeze. If we leave here and have to beat, it could easily add 10-20 miles (2-4 hours) to the trip. We’ll instead wait, relax, and enjoy the town.
We took another stroll on the boardwalk – the meditative “turtle trail” – and spied a new-to-us snake.
Even with the entirety of the internet at hand, I still can’t tell copperhead from cottonmouth from water snake. How close do I really want to get, to be able to make out the subtle differences? Not close enough, apparently.
We walked around town a bit and then back to Grace for lunch; caught up on business, worked on a little boat project, and created blog posts. Later, we sat in the cockpit, eating popcorn and watching the world go by. A teenage couple in formal attire came to the waterfront to have their pictures taken. A young man and two girls came to fish, which seems to be a regular late-afternoon thing for them. It’s entertaining to see what they haul in – mainly small bluegill, but tonight the guy had a large catfish on for a while. It fought furiously, splashing and bowing the pole to extremes before circling a piling, where barnacles cut the line. The look on his face – that fish was so close he could taste it, in his mind already in the frying pan – I’ve been there.
I made spaghetti for dinner, with the last jar of my homemade sauce. Mercifully, tomato season is just two months away.
Sailing Gracefully 
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