One of the reasons we had come to Belhaven was that we needed a pump out, which they offer at the town dock we were at. However the machine wasn't working the office staff said, and someone way suppose to come take a look at it. Well that person showed up in the morning and I heard them talking on the dock when I woke up.

I went out and chatted with him, and he was there to test the pump which was indeed working in terms of sucking up water from a bucket. I suggested they test it on us, as we were there and needed a pump out anyways, and so we did just that. Pump out worked great, and might have just been operator error in why it wasn't working. Either way, we got a pump out, and so that was nice to have checked off the list.

That did mean we had to move from our spot though now that the pump out was working. Moving up the dock to the shallower spots was a sketchy option, and the winds were quite favorable for going north, so we decided to just strike out and continue on. I would have liked to stay in Belhaven a few more days, but it was making sense to just be on our way.

With all hands on deck we sprung off the dock without any issue, and we crept out of the town docks with our depth sounder reading 5.2 feet in a few places (it's about a foot under the water, and we draw 6 foot, so that is ~2 inches below the keel). Skinny but just enough to stay floating. We exited the harbour and just put the genoa and floated downwind. It was blowing pretty srong so that was enough to get us up over 5 knots. We continued on at I attempted to sail into the narrow channel, but we quickly got confused winds and it was not really possible to keep the sail full, or make any kind of useful speed.

So we started the engine and did the long motor down the canal. This is probably some of the most dangerous sailing we've done, it's just motoring in a straight line for 4 hours, but you can only diviate 20 feet or so before you risk running into the ground. A couple of times I got looking at the nav phone and not noticing my direction and looked up to almost running out of the channel. Have I mentioned how much I don't enjoy the ICW?

That being said, it is also beautiful. It's all nature through this section. I even saw a fawn frolicking at the bank of the channel as we passed by. It felt like a scene from disney movie. And thankfully the traffic was light. I remember when we came south through here it was a lot of boats, and so a lot of radio traffic to request a pass, etc. I think only 4 boats passed us the entire way through this time...

After the channel it was pretty late and we just dropped hook at a little anchorage with a bit of south wind protection, nice easy stop just off the channel.

Tomorrow we'll continue on and make some more way north.