Cape Lookout National Seashore

We woke up this morning to calm winds and seas.  Surprisingly, I slept through the night, because I had slept most of the afternoon on Thursday.  The skies were still overcast through mid-morning, and then the sunshine took over.  A rainbow arced low on the northern horizon over the sand and dunes of Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Rainbow over the north shore of Cape Lookout Bight

Peter worked on the radio and planned the next part of our journey south while I studied Spanish and cleaned the pilot house.  It became warm enough to sit on the aft deck and read a book.  Peter had suggested getting the dinghy down and going ashore early in the morning before the sun broke through the cloud cover and I declined.  But everything looked more appealing in the light, so after lunch (on deck!), we put on our swimsuits and t-shirts (Yeah!) and went to the northern shore of the bight.

Peter collecting shells on the beach and the Cape Lookout Lighthouse in the distance

Cape Lookout Lighthouse and patterns in the sand and water at low tide

It was great to be on land.  The beach was strewn with shells, most of them broken but still colorful.  We collected some intact ones, mostly scallops in shades of red and ochre.  Here and there, we discovered the remains of horseshoe crabs and large jellies, still glistening, left ashore as the tide receded.  Their internal organs are discernible through their translucent bodies.

Seashells on the beach

Jelly bigger than my foot

From Mantra, I had spotted wild horses on the beach, but none were around when we went ashore.  The beach is long.  First we walked east and around a point, then we retraced our steps (which we could literally due in the wet sand), passed the dinghy and went in the other direction.  I was trying to sneak up, fairly unsuccessfully, on pelicans, oystercatchers and gulls resting on the flats where the tide had ebbed, when I spotted a horse.  We slowly approached it from a distance, but it seemed indifferent to us.  After getting some good photos of that horse, I saw another one farther down the shore, on the top of a grass covered dune.  Of course, I had to get as close as possible to that one also.    Both of them were quite shaggy and dark reddish-brown and had white blazes on their heads.  They were too busy eating to pay us any mind.

Wild horse busy eating

As we strolled along the beach, Peter gathered trash, as he always does when we take a walk or a hike.  Actually, there was not much on the northern shore of Cape Lookout Bight.  When we took a walk across the dunes on the opposite shore to the open water, the amount of flotsam and jetsam was overwhelming, so we ignored it as best we could.  It was interesting to feel and see the difference between the sand on the inside of the bight, where it ranged from silty to coarse, and the much finer, wind-tamped sand on the dunes and down to the beach on the outside.

We had hoped to take hot showers on the swim deck, but the sun disappeared behind the western clouds and a cold wind blew in.  The unblemished azure sky took on a bruised look as the clouds quickly thickened.  The weather was changing.  After pulling up the dinghy, we weighed anchor and moved to another spot in the south of the bight for protection from the wind and fetch.

It was a glorious afternoon, the type that (almost?) makes the suffering in bad weather and on night sails worth it.  It was great to be barefoot again, but the rain returns in the night, the temperature is dropping tomorrow, and the wind will be on the high side of "breeze."