Jack Hammer

0800, Friday, May 15, 2014

Woke to moderate N winds, cool temp. Pleasant morning in Swansboro.

Changed engine oil. This time no screw ups. New oil went where it was supposed to. On the way to discard old oil, had the good fortune to run into Dave Owen, the chef at the Saltwater Grill. He had heard that some country boy who played a hot blues harmonica was raving about the she crab soup. That would be me. He wrote down the recipe and gave it to me. Very gracious.

Our Piggly Wiggly ride, the other Dave, was a no show, so we left at 1200 at dead low tide. Touched bottom in the slip and had to drive out. Passed into and through Bogue Sound, a broad but shallow water body, with a gentle N breeze, partly cloudy skies. Bogue Sound is separated by a sparsely developed narrow strip of dune lands from the Atlantic Ocean.

Continued past Hoop Pole Woods to the east, and finally Morehead City to the west and into a deep harbor with the state port terminal to our port, with a very large vessel parked there. The harbor was filled with tug boats, barges coming and going, and lots of powers boats buzzing about.

 

 

 

 

Barge Bearing Down

 

To the east is Beaufort, NC (not to be confused with Beaufort, SC) and the class A Beaufort Inlet. We turned north away from the Inlet and reentered the ICW, passing into and crossing the Newport River and then entered the Adams Creek Canal and finally Adams Creek where we anchored at ICW mile 187 after a forty-one mile run.

Shrimp boat just to the east.

Near sundown. Grilling chicken. Watching turns and laughing gulls flying by. A frog chorus strikes up just at sundown and a woodpecker begins some intense drumming nearby. My good friend Mike Iwanik would know which woodpecker it is.

Coincidentally I just read a true story about a Mr. Jack Hammer, a mechanical engineer who grew up in rural Missouri listening to woodpeckers drum and actually got the idea for and eventually designed and produced the “jack hammer” that we all hear occasionally around construction sites. Mr. Hammer recorded woodpeckers drumming and determined the drumming frequency for various woodpecker species and decided to set his jack hammer at a similar frequency because he figured if it was good enough for woody woodpecker it was good enough for Jack Hammer. The decided that he had discovered a universal constant of some sort.

Emily thinks that actually the woodpeckers got the drumming idea from Jack Hammer. So much for the theory of evolution.

Tomorrow, onward to Oriental and then Belhaven, NC.

Sweet Dreams.