Alligator River Marina Columbia SC mm84

5 days at anchor is a record for us. We still have fresh water left in our water tanks but it is time to pull up to a dock. So our next stop is Alligator River Marina. A lot of our travel takes us through a straight as an arrow canal. As is usually the case the wind picks up in the afternoon as we are traversing the Alligator River. The wind is on our stern in the wide (at least a mile wide) Alligator River but the Marina is in a protected little Harbor so docking is easy. The Marina is nice and new but the owners also have a gas station, gift shop and restaurant on site. Located on a busy road that goes to the Outer Banks. With our Royal Marsh Harbor Yacht club discount, dockage is a reasonable $37 per night. No other loopers here. Judy and I eat at restaurant--$9.99 for a hamburger steak dinner including salad and a side.

We are not too far from Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks so yet another call to Enterprise gets us a rental car delivered today. It was the first time we have paid extra for the pick up and delivery but they had to come 35 minutes to pick us up. By 10 am we are at the Wright Brother memorial National Park at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks where the famous brothers made the first airplane flight. Very interesting displays and historical explanation. It is just amazing their perserverance and their mechanical and aeronautical intuition without any formal training. Later we drove along the Banks and saw mile after mile of stilted vacation homes-some overlooking the ocean-some just staring at each other. This area of the outer Banks is very commercialized and is very different than Ocracoke. Every so often there is a public access to the miles and miles of beaches, so Judy and I made our way to the beach. No snow fences here just sand fences. After returning to the Marina from our day of land exploration, we found Libations (Mike & Pat) and Joy @Sea. We had cocktails with Mike & Pat on our boat. We had not seen them since they left the Bahamas a few days ahead of us.