Gulf Stream adventure
Earlier this year we sold our home near Orlando, Florida, and moved north to the New Bern, Pamlico Sound area of North Carolina. Pamlico Sound is a very large inland sea, protected from the Atlantic rollers by a row of outer banks that stretch from Kittyhawk (of Wright Brothers fame), south beyond the quaint seaside villages of Ocracoke and Cape Hatteras, to Lookout Point.
The actual Sound is about 60 miles long east to west and 20 or so miles wide north to south, with many tributary rivers and old colonial towns like Bath, which was the first capital of North Carolina. The Sound is also steeped in pirate history, and where the Englishman known as Blackbeard roamed and finally met his end.
We had bought a house in Fairfield Harbour, halfway up the Neuse River towards New Bern, which was itself once the capital of North Carolina in 1710, as immigrants migrated westward. At Fairfield Harbour the Neuse is a mile wide and feeds the western end of Pamlico Sound. Fairfield’s man-made harbour has a large central lagoon with finger canals, and many houses have their own docks, some with very expensive-looking boats at the bottom of the garden.
Time to go
The removals van had finally been stowed to the gunwales and sent on its 730-mile journey north to our new home. This left only one more item to be moved, which simply wouldn’t fit in the van – my 45ft schooner , moored at Cape Canaveral on the eastern Space Coast of Florida. She needed to be sailed up the eastern seaboard to the Beaufort/Morehead City inlet, a distance of about 450 miles, then up a river to the Pamlico Sound, and a marina berth I’d leased within the lagoon. It was not a long passage compared to some of the
