Great Loop: Beaufort, North Carolina

- May 07, 2022

Beaufort, North Carolina

April 29th, 2022

We enjoyed our too brief Beaufort visit. One of the tough aspects of Looping is that you have to budget your time. We are retired, but the seasons are the clock to which we must pay homage and attention. Spring was telling us we needed to be moving north so we could enjoy summer in Canada. We still had to traverse much of the east coast, climb up the Hudson River to Albany to head west on the Erie Canal and gain access to Lake Ontario, gateway to our watery route through Canada.

As a consequence, we hustled to take advantage of our evening and next morning in Beaufort. Beth did an initial walking reconnaissance of Beaufort while I tackled some boat projects. Beth also laid out our route to River Dunes, out next destination. She has developed good skills as a navigator and has taken over the bulk of this workload. Once she had a draft of the pending route, we review it together, made any needed edits, then load it into our chart plotter to guide our upcoming voyage.

Saturday morning we walked into town. Beaufort is a compact city, so it was a short walk. We soon found ourselves at the Saturday morning farmers market. We made a quick lap to see what was offered. We zeroed in on produce to provision for the next week of travels and a coffee and pastry to prepare us for that day's voyage. I also chatted up the fellow in the produce line immediately behind us. We found we had only a single degree of separation. We both worked on a common project. He was on the customer side and we sold them test instruments for integration into their system. We have shared acquaintances, but had never met each other. We both had a good laugh about the coincidence and purchased our vegetables.

Following our successful shopping stop, we walked through downtown. Here we found a board walk with shops on one side and docks on the other. Many locals and tourists were also out enjoying a morning walk. We saw Looper Flags on many of the boats. This is a popular stop and proof that others were migrating north with the coming of spring. While Loopers don't convoy, they do migrate with the seasons and thus form a moving gaggle of boats that will crowd local marinas prior to moving on to the next season appropriate destination. It is an easy and natural rhythm. Perhaps that is why it appeals.

By noon, it was time to cast off lines and continue our migration.