New Bern. The tangle of bridges and marks here is pretty crazy. We have many bars of AT&T connectivity, so we think we can synch our various photo albums, Kindles, and cloud storage.

We'll be waiting here, we think, for almost a week. The weather outlook is great for Monday ad Tuesday, but we don't want to get to Charleston that early. It deteriorates Thursday and Friday. After that, maybe we can scoot south.

Here's Red Ranger at 35°6.1884′N 77°1.9218′W near Union Point. Tomorrow we're going to go ashore and see what the coffee shop situation is.

Today, we're feeling too lazy to rig and launch the dinghy. The floor section has a leak, so it doesn't hold air. We have to inflate the floor every time we go anywhere. That's an ugh.

Concerns Were Voiced

Got a text from my sister. She'd told folks about our journey south. The folks she was talking with were worried for us. They asked my sister to pass on two things:

• The Wolf-Trap Lighthouse. See https://www.gazettejournal.net/illinois-man-dies-in-boating-accident-at-wolf-trap-light/ for a short summary of the accident. Apparently, they knew the folks that ran into the unlit obstruction that is the mortal remains of the lighthouse.

• The Sargasso Sea.

This was interesting. We're grateful to my sister for passing on her friend's concerns for our safety. We told her we had up-to-date charts and three separate, working, chart plotters.

• A B&G Zeus2 with current charts.

• An older (but still working) Standard Horizon, also with current charts.

• A iPad with AquaMap software and a separate, accurate GPS.

We've passed Wolf Trap at night, and we can see how someone could bang into it. See "Running Down to Norfolk." We make sure we're about a mile away to make sure we're nowhere near it.

The Sargasso weed rafts in the North Atlantic are far enough off-shore that we doubt we'll every get anywhere near them. It's not obvious from looking at the wikipedia page on the Sargasso Sea just how close to shore we travel.

It's hard to explain in a text, but we design our route to avoid getting off the continental shelf. There's a stretch south of Cape Fear, in Long Bay, were we'll be 40 miles off shore. We try to avoid getting into water that's 20 fathoms (120 feet) or more. For the most part, we rarely cross the 10 fathom (60′) line.

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