Waiting for Weather in Beaufort, North Carolina

While waiting for a good weather forecast to continue, we spent nearly a week in Beaufort. What a great place to wait! Since the Taylor Creek anchorage is so close to town, we dinghyed back and forth between the boat and town with wild abandon (OK, perhaps not with wild abandon, but we did it often). Beaufort has enough to do for a month here, so we only sampled a bit. The downtown area is just a few blocks, with big old houses, and lots of restaurants and interesting shops such as Scuttlebutt, which has more nautical, cruising, and boating books than I’ve ever seen in one place. Great place to browse, and we bought a cruising guide for the mid-Atlantic waterway (more on that in the next blog). We also visited the Old Burying Grounds (Anne is particularly partial to old cemeteries), the laundromat for a couple of hours (woo hoo, clean clothes!), and the North Carolina Maritime Museum. The museum has terrific displays on all things water-related in North Carolina, such as the fishing and crabbing industries, boat building, life boat stations, and the ecology of the area, and an exhibit-in-progress with artifacts presumed to be from the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship. They also have a beautiful little library where we sat for a bit and caught up on the latest boating and cruising magazines. I imagine if you’re a local you can check out the myriad books that line the walls.