Video Transcript

[Tom] Welcome aboard Swamp Puppy! I’m Captain Tom and this is day 20 on the Great Loop Waterway.

[Elyse] We’re cruising the Great Loop Waterway from Florida to the Great Lakes and back again. Join me and Captain Tom on our yacht Swamp Puppy as we figure out full-time boat life and navigate through rivers, lakes, canals and more.

[Tom] Yesterday we cruised over 60 miles and today we’re cruising over 60 miles and probably tomorrow we’ll be doing something similar. Hopefully less, we’re trying to make a weather window for the Albemarle Sound.

Today we’re going from Goose Creek up to Alligator River, just over the Alligator Bridge, basically just staging on the south side of the Albemarle Sound.

Just think, I moved away from them and turned into the wave.

[Elyse, to the gulls] Don’t worry, I’ll get your picture, wait your turn! Oh , you’re giving me the butt, okay.

[Tom] If you watch the video of our 30 day stats, you’ll know that our mileage per day average was a little over 30 miles. That’s a really nice easy day. We started out doing easier, shorter days because we’re new to all this but I would say now doing 60 mile days it’s a little too much. It took us nine and a half hours yesterday, it’s going to take us similar time today – around nine to nine and a half hours.

I think that 50 miles for us and our boat speed, which we tend to go right around six and a half knots, I think 50 miles is a good nice sweet spot. Now, of course, you can’t always do 50 miles depending on where towns are, and sounds you have to cross etc. But when you can cruise 50 miles I think that is a good slower pace to make it.

It’s a whole day of travel, but the difference between 50 miles and 63 miles is about almost two hours of cruising. That makes it a seven hour day instead of a nine and a half hour day.

So far this has been my favorite section of North Carolina. When we first came in, it was very busy. But this area has been very rural and beautiful and the nice still Alligator River was was really pretty.

We just got out into the more open section of the Alligator River and our plan is to make it just north of the Alligator Bridge and anchor right there, because that’s right on the edge of the Albemarle Sound. We’re out in the wide open spanse of the Alligator River, right here it was really narrow for a long ways with trees on both sides so it was nice and calm. But it started to get a little hot, we came out here and it’s nice and cool again.

Today’s been a beautiful day weather-wise. It started out looking like it was going to rain on us a few times, but we got lucky and were able to dodge the showers so it never rained on us! It’s pretty calm, I mean to be fair this area is pretty expansive, so plenty of fetch in here. We have following seas.

It’s been a really nice cruise today. I’m a little tired. We did nine and a half hours of cruising yesterday, it was over 60 miles. Then today we’re doing 60 something miles, and we’re already 50 miles. We’ve got 13 miles to go, so I’m a little tired.

[Elyse, to a bug] Who’s captain today, huh?

Well how do you feel about crossing the Albemarle Sound tomorrow?

[Tom] I’m glad we’re going to do it on a more calm day. I was texting with Kevin from Mathers on the Map because they crossed the Albemarle Sound today. I asked “how was it?” His response was “sporty!”

I’ve been watching the the weather for the window to cross it and it looks like tomorrow between like 5 and 8 a.m or 8 a.m and 11 a.m. Basically early in the morning, the wind is pretty much non-existent. I told Kevin I’m trying to catch that dead spot tomorrow…

Sorry, I’m having to watch those crab pots.

…I said “I’m trying to catch that dead spot tomorrow morning,” and I guess he checked the Windy.app because he said, “oh my gosh! That looks heavenly.” That’s what I’m trying to go for because he said there’s swell off the ocean east to west, and then they had winds out the south. If you’ve got winds coming one way and swell coming the other way, I’m sure that was sporty! They have a bigger, heavier boat though so they could probably handle it a little bit better. For a big boat, we are a lighter boat – we’re only 20,000 pounds.

[Elyse] You could bench that! So… no pancakes tomorrow?

[Tom] No pancakes tomorrow. We’re trying to get out of here.

As we dodge crab pots, we are looking for our anchorage – because, after all, there’s a marked anchorage amongst all these crab pots. Plus I don’t think we go too much further in there if that make much of a difference really. If I go forward it gets shallow, so I can’t go over there. I gotta go around the starboard side of this boat. This is wild, isn’t it?

[Elyse] Yes! We should pull one of these up and have dinner.

[Tom] Yeah, right? There’s so many!

I’m also having to go through the channel of deep water.

[Elyse] I don’t think the crab pot density is going to be any less.

[Tom] Well then we’d have to try the other side, I guess. Does it look pretty thick still? I feel like there’s not any more up there, once we get past these.

[Elyse] I keep thinking that, but then they come into view.

[Tom] Do you see more in front of us? Only that one over there? Okay.

We’re going down this narrow little channel right now, near the second anchorage back in here. What do you see, do you see any? I thought I saw one. Just that one right there? Okay, so we’re getting out of them. All right, we’re just gonna come up a little bit farther and then we’ll drop right here. I think this looks good in here. There’s one way over there that’s pretty far, and we’re in the widest point of this little channel. Ready to drop it after a long day of cruising!

Who doesn’t want to do a surprise boat project? That’s right we had a problem with the windlass.

[Elyse] You think we can cut the engines off now?

[Tom] Yeah, that’s fine.

[Elyse] What’s going on here?

[Tom] We have to fix the windlass as we’re using the windlass. I was just thinking to myself earlier I need to get to this before it stops working on us, and lo and behold it was ready to be fixed now.

Whatever this little guide piece is here, which there’s a little button that comes around and hits it and puts outside of it. I’m not sure I think it’s just a cover basically, but it got loose and so it was it was putting the button on the other side and it was getting jammed. I had to tighten an allen bolt. I came up here and looked at it yesterday, and I went inside the chain locker and tightened the bolts on the inside. I thought maybe something there was loose and I could see it but I couldn’t figure out how to tighten it.

Well, I should have basically laid down and looked in there because I looked from both sides and was trying to figure it out. I should have laid down over here and seen the one allen head that I needed to see that’s obvious. I’m doing a little tweaking, it got a little bent.

All right, I got a marine tech out here. He came out in his dinghy, he fixed it, whipped it right up, not bad only $3,000 and now it’s good to go. Another night on anchor for zero dollars.

Okay, I fixed it myself. I just used an allen and a hammer and a pair of pliers. Saved myself whatever that would cost to have someone else come fix it.

[Elyse] Is this a permanent fix or temporary fix?

[Tom] The way that I look at it is – I learned from John from Farm Craft 101, excellent YouTube Channel, by the way – when you fix something, if it’s good enough it could be temporary but might just be permanent, you never know.

We ended up cruising for 9 hours and 20 minutes, and we covered 63 nautical miles. After another long day, I was already exhausted, so fixing the windlass just made it even more of a long day. But sometimes that’s just how it goes. I was rewarded with an absolutely stunning sunset we enjoyed together on the water, plus we were in the perfect spot to tackle the Albemarle Sound first thing in the morning with good weather. The Albemarle Sound is notorious for being nasty.

If you enjoyed this video don’t forget to hype it, and do us a favor and share it with somebody who you think will enjoy. It in the next video I hit 1,000 nautical miles as a captain – pretty cool. We’ll see you next week, thanks for watching!