Well, let me tell you NOT to take the NC DOT ferry to Ocracoke anytime soon. If you are interested in a visit to that cute little island at the tip of the Outer Banks, don't be in a hurry to get home quickly.
This weekend, my fam made a quick visit to Hatteras Island to meet up with some friends and relatives. We stayed at a beautiful beach house on Saturday and on Sunday decided to take the ferry over to Ocracoke. We left at about 11 am to catch it. We missed the first ferry, but managed to catch the noon one. We headed out on this beautiful Sunday blissfully unaware that in a few minutes we would get stuck in a shoal. Any idea what a shoal is? I sure didn't know until our ship ran into one and got stuck. The shoals have snagged ships for hundreds of years on the Outer Banks. I just happened to be on one of these many ships that have had the misfortune to run aground.
But I digress. It took me a few minutes to realize our ferry had stopped moving. The engine began revving and smoke billowed out on our side of the ship. My initial thoughts were, well shouldn't he stop running the engine like that? Aren't we going to run out of fuel or something? Finally, the captain managed to get us ashore about an hour and a half after we had departed. This was supposed to have been a "short" ferry ride to Ocracoke.
We quickly grab lunch at a cute little restaurant and head on back to the ferry since we knew it would take some time to get one and we were trying to head home. Well, needless to say our story gets worse. We waited for 3 hours until one of the staff people let us know they were cancelling all of the ferries for the night due to high winds. The wind was what had made us run into the shoal earlier so this was to be expected I guess....
Fortunately, we found somewhere to stay overnight and bought some formula for J. We did finally make it off the island after another 3 hour wait for the ferry Monday morning.
This little adventure will not make me want to run back to Ocracoke anytime soon. Hatteras, however, was lovely.
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