70 nautical miles

When I woke up we were a few hours into the ICW, getting ready to stop in Oriental NC. The town dock lets you stay for free for 2 nights, but we were only pulling in for a hour. First we went to the coffee shop. We met lots of people who were admiring Running Tide. Mom and I went to the little provisioning store to look around. Then we went back to eat breakfast with the boys. The bagel sandwiches were amazing, as were the smoothies. After eating we went back to the boat and left the dock.

We did schoolwork and swatted bugs off. Suddenly the boat smashed into something and we looked over to see a marker running past! It had broken in half and the top was lying in the water. We checked the boat and everything seemed fine. The hull had a few scrapes, a stanchion had been ripped out of the deck, and we had metal everywhere, but the we had actually done more damage to the marker than it had done to us. The shrouds had taken the force and had broken the marker, but they, too, were fine. Then we called the Coast Guard to tell them that the marker had been destroyed.

The rest of the sail went fine and we were at the Wilkerson Bridge by 4:00 pm. Now, dad and Clarke had been rigging all different things over the past few hours to see if any of them heeled the boat enough to make a difference on our mast height. The Wilkerson Bridge is an infamous for being short. Lots of boat have had to rig systems to heel the boat so their mast could get under. We first tried to get under without heeling the boat, but our mast just barley touched so we swung back around and rigged the heeling systems. We got our now-packed-up dinghy out and filled it fully with water, attached a halyard run through the boom the the strap contraption we made, swung the boom out, and raised the halyard. We also put out the spinnaker pole with our life raft on the end (the raft is really heavy). Then we slowly went up to the bridge. We made it under!!!!!! Thank goodness, cause we would've had to sail an extra 100ish miles to keep going north. As darkness fell we derigged all the contraptions. Then we ate dinner. The kids went to bed while mom and dad anchored.