Cape Lookout Bight

Cape Lookout Bight   …   Friday 2nd November 2012

We awoke this morning to the great smell of …. the aft holding tank overflowing again! This was a real surprise because we really hadn't been using it that much and clearly our monitor is not yet functioning correctly. We did a quick clean up and put the problem aside until later in the day. 

Our plans for today mostly revolved around getting us in a position to make a really early start on a big day-passage tomorrow. In order to get out of the Beaufort Inlet to the Atlantic from the marina we either need to backtrack a couple of miles up a narrow channel (which we didn't fancy in the dark) or go through a bascule bridge (which doesn't open until 6am). So we decided to make the trip out into the ocean today and head slightly eastwards to spend the night in Cape Lookout Bight, a deep and well protected cove formed by sand bars right at the edge of the Cape. Our exit from the slip at the marina went fine (hooray!) and we had a smooth trip through the Beaufort Bascule bridge and out of the Inlet. "Out of the inlet" sounds weird but believe me no talks about the Beaufort outlet. The winds were from the south west and there were more significant swells than either of us had expected. We made good time to the cove and were anchored around 1pm. It's worth noting that the winds are blowing hard, 15-20 mph gusting to >25 mph. They are supposed to diminish and turn to the NW, which will be good for our journey tomorrow. 

During our brief passage offshore today we pumped out the aft holding tank, and after we arrived we set to work in trying to resolve this issue once and for all. Taking out the sensor we were able to confirm the tank was now empty and using bucket of water to dip the sensor in, we also confirmed that it wasn't working as required. We re-calibrated the "empty" and "full" using the bucket dipping method and were able to get it work as it should. Once re-installed it showed the tank as empty and we confirmed that it did change as pumped in some water. Hopefully now this is working properly and we won't have this problem again!

I should say that Cape Lookout Bight is beautiful, as a number of people had told us. However, our dingy is partly deflated and tied down on the fore-deck, and the howling wind didn't encourage us to pump it up, so we haven't explored around. There are two other yachts anchored here and during the afternoon a couple of shrimp boats have also pulled in.

We probably won't be blogging again now until Sunday.

34 37 24.9 N, 76 32 59.6 W

Cape Lookout Light

Shrimp Boat at Anchor