Wednesday evening

We headed northwest out of the thunderstorm. As previously stated, we were pretty tired from the day's travel and getting up early. In checking the charts, it seemed that Broad Creek offered a couple of marinas and several good anchorages. At this point, a nice hot shower and a restaurant meal had great appeal, but alas, was not meant to be. I didn't cross check my lat/lon position against the chart because we assumed we were farther east than we were. Heading for the Broad Creek marker, we soon spotted a nun buoy in the distance. But when we got to it, we found that we had already passed the Broad Creek entrance. The buoy was hidden from us in the poor visibility of the thunderstorm as we passed it by. We were actually a couple of miles west of the entrance. We discussed turning around, but elected instead to turn straight south and head for South River. The North Carolina Coastal Cruising Guide listed South River as a good anchorage protected from southerly winds, which we were experiencing. And the everpresent thunderheads were building again out of the southwest. We were also running out of daylight, as it was about 6:30 pm by then. Running on Honda power we headed south on a 180 degree true heading and hit the South River markers right on the money. We traveled on up South River about a mile by which time it was very dark. Using the depth finder/GPS Humminbird 160, we dropped anchor right on the edge of the 7 foot contour, let out about 100 feet of rode, and dropped a 10 pound anchor kellet to hold the rode horizontal to the bottom. By this time, lightning was flashing almost continuously due south and the wind was building to 20 knots plus. We shared the anchorage with a large motor yacht and two other sailboats. We had gotten pretty close to land and this helped break the wind somewhat. We still had adequate swinging room should the wind shift as long as the anchor reset! We had a quick meal, set the boat up for sleeping and turned in. I woke up numerous times during the night to check for anchor dragging and to just look around. It seemed the Beaufort area was getting slammed with a big thunderstorm. Even though the wind probably was up to 30 knots at times and lightning was frequent, we did not get enough rain to get the boat wet. Most of the weather seemed to skate by us to the south, for which we were grateful.