Magnolia had a relaxed trip along the coast and up Adams Creek to New Bern NC.

Along Adams Creek I saw what I thought was unusual…a personal helicopter next to a “normal” house….kind cool!

We have been to New Bern once before but this trip we were on a mission..more later.

I am not sure how, but the bear is the mascot of New Bern. There are decorated ones all over town.

We able to arrive in time to make Easter Sunday services…..an no the church did fall down with my presence.

Annette and I are both licensed HAM radio operators and check into various radio nets most days when we are underway. This is particularly true when we are making offshore hops where we are often out of VHF radio and cellular range. A number of retired cruisers operate shore based radio and maintain a database of boats locations. Out friend and net controller Dick Giddings needed help installing a new directional beam antenna so that is why we are in New Bern!

The first step in is to tune the transmitting elements portion of the antenna. This is done by physically adjusting the length of the transmitting arrays. In this case we needed to shorten the elements until we obtained the appropriate frequency .

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Once the array was tuned it was time to attach to the tower. Now this is certainly not an OSHA safe environment…

But the job got done and no radio operator were lost during this operation. The tower was eventually erected and Dick is live and on the air with directional beam for better communications.

Next stop was Oriental NC.

Our friends from Pentagon Sailing Club Roger and Leslie Hammer have made their home there.  We try never to miss the stop. When we arrived we found a number of our cruising friends in port as well. It was a great meet up and evidenced by the full table.

PSC Mid-Atlantic

The local Piggly Wiggly grocery store now runs a shuttle to and from the docks that makes grocery shopping a breeze!!!

A few miles up Goose Creek brings us to Campbell Creek where two friends call home.

We were welcomed at Mike and Kathy’s dock for a wonderful visit. We always have a ball catching up and swapping sea stories.

Beautiful morning departure with our hosts seeing us off.  Thank you for the kind hospitality and wonderful memories.

Departing Goose Creek we made the two day trip up to Great Bridge Lock where docked for a relaxing couple of days.

We did spot our friends aboard Lali pass by!

My artistic contribution to this post.

After our short visit at Great Bridge it was a short passage to Portsmouth, VA.

Within the hour of us dropping the hook, the French version of the Blue Angels did several fly overs right overhead. Very fun!

Portsmouth always gives a beautiful skyline view of Norfolk. Out favorite part of this port though is our visits with my niece and her husband. As often, more catching up than pictures…I really need to work on pictures!!!

Next up was a short passage from Portsmouth to Hampton.

Along the way I got to “check-in” with the Aegis Cruisers.

Right behind us Ted & Sally aboard Amici arrived. Always a good time to hang with these two!

Drinks and deserts….our favorites…

Now Ted is a real foodie and somewhere along the line he picked up that Popeyes Spicy Chicken was the best…as a service to Sally, I took on getting Ted his chicken!!

From Hampton it is a short hop up the Chesapeake Bay to home. On the way though we are going to meet up with the Pentagon Sailing Club (http://www.pentagonsailing.org/) for the Memorial Day Raft Up.