Cape Lookout!

Cape Lookout is a short day trip from Oriental. It took about 2 hours total to get there and this includes 2 ferry rides.  The first ferry was from Minnesott Beach to Cherry Point.  This is a car ferry across the Neuse river.  The second ferry is a passenger ferry from Harkers Island right up to the Cape Lookout lighthouse.
You pack in what you want for the outing and pack it back out.  There are no trash facilities or food on the island.  This is great because it makes it more of an adventure.  There are some nice paths through the dunes and sea oats on the island.  It is about 1/2 a mile wide where we landed.  After a couple of hours on the Atlantic side, we got some of the last tickets to climb the lighthouse for the season.
The current lighthouse was built in 1859 and is quite impressive. It is solid masonry construction with a 10 foot thick wall at its base that tapers on the exterior down to 2 feet at the top.  It is 163 feet tall and very windy at the top!

Here is a link to the Google Map of the area...

Town and Country...

Oriental, NC. is a great mix of things, beautiful waterways, friendly people, great seafood, small town charm and wildlife.  People will stop you on the street to talk.
The wildlife sometimes comes right on in to visit or maybe hack into your computer.
Check this fellow out.  He crawled down the chimney at 3:30 on Monday morning.
The dogs started barking.  It was a bit of a shocker.

Meet Mr. Raccoon: the original hacker.

Somebody needs a hug.

Hydro: Glassing

After an initial sanding of the hull, we glassed the flat part.  We used some heavy bi-axiel glass from our scrap bin.  A little more fairing was needed on the pontoons.  This was done last night.  Today we sanded the fairing material out then started adding a layer of mid-weight twill glass to the pontoons.

We have 10oz twill cloth that overlaps the bi-axiel on the bottom.  Once we glass the other pontoon the center of the flat will have one layer of 17 oz bi-axe and 2 layers of 10 oz twill so 37oz of glass.  additional reinforcement will be needed on the interior of the pontoon/hull joint.  There will be great stresses here at speed. We added red pigment to the epoxy for fun.  The finished boat will be red.