Wednesday, May 13
After I researched on the Internet the noise made by the shrimp, Peter insisted that it was also a means of communicating for mates. I scoffed at the idea. Surely they are not eating and having sex at the same time! Reluctantly, I must admit that I was wrong and Peter was right. (This has only happened about half of dozen times in our marriage as best as I can remember!) I did additional research this morning, and, indeed, the pop-gun sound is also used for mating. We were also interested to learn these one to two-inch shrimp mate for life (which is only a few years long)!
When I went up on deck this morning after awaking, the very first thing I saw in the lustrous flat calm blue water, quite close to our boat, was the huge head of a loggerhead turtle. What a way to start the day! We spotted them several more times over the hours, but their surfacing was always too brief to allow time for taking photographs.
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| Morning at Cape Lookout Bight |
It was another lazy day in this lovely, unspoiled paradise. Peter paddled around to visit a couple other boats before lunch. After our meal, we went to shore and walked over the dunes, where the sand was hot on our feet, to reach the Onslow Bay side of the north-south spit that protects Lookout Bight from the west. The beach was quite wide, and we crossed various types of sand to reach the water where small waves gently lapped the edge of the land. It was interesting to feel the different textures against our soles.
There were lots of shells in places, although maybe not as many as we found on the beaches inside the bight. Most of them were old or broken, but in addition to the ones we noticed yesterday, we found pieces of shark’s eye (the shell, not the anatomical part of a fish) and Scotch bonnets. We kept hoping to find them intact but were unsuccessful in our search.
On the water, many people were in small boats fishing or just enjoying being on the water, but we were the only people on the west-facing beach. This made the birds happy. We saw brown pelicans; laughing gulls and other gulls; common terns, royal terns and Caspian terns; Wilson’s plovers, piping plovers and black-bellied plovers; loons, sandpipers; ruddy turnstones, and other birds. I would love to take a National Park ranger-led walk to learn more about the birds and the turtles and the shells.
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| Gulls and terns |
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| Plovers, gulls and terns |
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| Plover |
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| Royal terns |
As we sit at the saloon table this evening playing Scrabble, the snapping shrimp are busy eating and mating all around us.
Thursday, May 14
This is it! Around noon, we will begin our last leg of our journey to the Chesapeake. We hope to be able to sail in comfortable conditions most of the way to Deltaville, Virginia, but we will see.
I woke up as the sky was lightening this morning and went up on deck to watch the sunrise, something I do not often see. Actually, I never saw the sun rise because it is extremely overcast, but the pink streaks of light on the eastern horizon were spectacular. Also, loggerhead turtles were popping up here and there throughout the large bight, but they are just too quick to allow me to photograph them.
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| Peak of the sunrise color show |
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| The sun lost behind the clouds |
Peter was still in bed, so I went back to the warmth under the covers, although it is not as chilly today as it has been. He got up and I fell back to sleep, arising again at 9 a.m. Now, the boat is tidied, the sandwiches are made with peanut butter and jelly and with egg salad, the snacks are in the pilot house, and we appear to be ready to haul up the anchor after a small lunch of soup.
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| A quick glimpse of the loggerhead turtle |
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