Days 17 & 18- Wacca Wache Marina to Southport , NC

Monday April 14th & Tuesday April 15th, 2025

We left Wacca Wache Marina Monday morning. It was a beautiful ride through so may cypress trees, beautiful (VERY LARGE) homes, a swing bridge that we needed to open for us until we came to our lunch stop at Barefoot Landing. What a cute place! At this point we are so close to North Myrtle Beach, I could not believe it. The only experience I have had with Myrtle Beach was: it was too touristy, too many shops that all sold the same stuff and chain restaurants. I guess that is only a section of the area. Barefoot Landing has over 50 unique shops and just as many restaurants, which many are not chains.

We ate lunch at Lulu’s, a scratch restaurant that is owned by Jimmy Buffet’s sister. Who knew. Yes, it is a chain but it was great! We parked our boat at the dock, sat outside, then after walked around Barefoot landing to see all they had there. Super cute and i can imagine it can get quite busy!

Then we moved on to an anchorage spot in Calabash Creek. It was awful windy, there were 3 other boats in there with us. We didn’t sleep too well until after midnight when it seemed to calm down some. Even though we were a bit anxious about our anchor not holding (yes we do use the anchor alarm), we made it all night with our anchor doing just fine.

In the morning we then motored on to Southport, NC. Along the way seeing more big houses and still very windy.

We end in Southport Basin on a dock outside a restaurant called Provision Company. We are at the convergence of Cape Fear River and Elizabeth River. We can stay at their dock for the night if we have a meal there. We are going their for dinner. A sever there came and grabbed my line because, YES IT WAS STILL SO WINDY! Prior to getting to the dock we received a call on the radio from someone called Porch Time. Evidently he and his wife did the loop in 2006, live right on the basin in Southport and keep track of loopers coming through in April & May to invite them to their porch at 5pm for happy hour. Yep, we will be going! There are a few more loopers in the marina next door that we hope to meet as well. More to come!

There were quite a few more loopers than we expected! It was fun to meet everyone! We had dinner with two other couples that we met tonight. It was great.

I think we shall stay until noon tomorrow so we can get to the maritime Museum before heading up to Willington. We are taking a little detour to go see the USS North Carolina.

Fun fact: this small quaint little town has been made famous by several films shot here:

Safe Haven

Nights in Rodanthe

A Walk to Remember

Domestic Disturbance; Summer Catch

I Know What You Did Last Summer

Weekend At Bernie’s

Crimes of the Heart

PLUS several TV shows; most notably is Dawson’s Creek