St James Plantation

The wind dies down overnight and we wake up to a cloudy day, but comfortable temperatures. As we pull up the anchor another sailboat,”Jacquelin” (Susan and David), first timers on the ICW, tell us they are heading to St. James Plantation also, and follows our track out of Wrightsville Beach. Again the Autopilot is not working. Two hours later we pass through Snows Cut on to the Cape Fear River. Our timing is good today, we hit the upper Cape Fear River at near maximum ebb tide and get to ride the current all the way down for 13 miles or so, before we re-enter the ICW going west. 

We hit a maximum Speed Over Ground of 11.3 mph and re-enter the ICW at Southport and an hour later we pull into St. James Plantation Marina. We have stayed here before. On our first trip we pulled in here because of the cold weather forecast and had snow on the dodger in the morning. Today we have nice warm temperatures in the high 70’s. 

 

"Red Head" at Southport owned by the creator of Active Captain.
Previous owner Billy Joel

Reaching St. James Plantation Marina early afternoon we find “Obsession” on the same dock and we finally get to meet Janice with her husband, David. Next to them is another Catalina 36 “Shadow”, so all us Catalina owners have a long conversation on the dock. 

St. James Plantation

Later Linda and I have dinner with Susan and David who followed us down from Wrightsville Beach. They wanted to pick our brains on the trip further south, as we did with others on our first trip south. David is ex-military, retired young as did Susan and they are now living full time on their sailboat. They plan to spend the winter on the west coast of Florida.