Arthur Aftermath

Even the town's dragon mascot got into the "pirate" act. (check out his hat!) My pix of the event are pretty skimpy, but friends Mike and Lori have more on their blog post of the festival.  

Local ghost walks tourguide Dale Mongomery (a.k.a. "Murderous Monty") told pirate stories for the kids -- tales of Blackbeard and Calico Jack, both of whom were active in this area -- and generously invited us to share the stage with him for an impromptu swordfighting demonstration.

Despite our frustration at having run from a statistical probability of hurricanes in Florida, and directly into the path of the first actual hurricane of the season, we pretty much skated on Arthur.  He came ashore near Beaufort (only about 20 miles from here, yikes!) as a Category 2, but was fast-moving, so that there wasn't a lot of damage or surge.  There were some tree branches down, and nuisance flooding; we found leaves in our cockpit a good 50 yards from the nearest tree, but all-in-all not too bad.  And the next day, the weather cleared out spectacularly for the town's fourth of July festival.

They call it "CroakerFest."  A "croaker," I learned, is a rather unprepossessing local fish, always drawn with fat lips, and not even in season yet.  But hey, they had to call their festival something, and several other likely candidate names from local agriculture, like strawberry festival and potato festival, were already claimed by other nearby towns.  I love that the town didn't take itself too seriously in designating their festival!

And this is one of the benefits of traveling slowly by boat.  We probably wouldn't have detoured to a small town festival when the glittering temptation of a bigger city display was available ... and we would have missed this sweet nostalgic family fourth.  There were all the traditional pieces -- a parade, beauty pageants, live music and dancing in the (closed) streets, horrible festival food, kids' play area, and of course fireworks.  Because Oriental is a sailing town there were also a few dinghy-sailing races, fun to watch from the shore.  The evening music was big-band swing of the 30s and 40s, and honestly, it looked like some of the players, and some of the dancers, were old enough to have enjoyed this music the first time it came around!  Fun for us was that the theme was "pirates" so we dressed up and told the kids that we were shipwrecked in Hurricane "Arrrgh-thur" and we were here to assemble a new crew and commandeer a new ship.

Then after the party, we went back to the ship we do have, or "treehouse" on the hard, high and dry and safe from the storm, but with no air conditioning or refrigeration since both need to be in the water in order to work.   The lack of refrigeration motivated us to a long-overdue fridge cleaning.  The weather was hot but not horrible, so the lack of a/c motivated us to sit outside and, unobstructed by the mechanical sounds of the canned air, enjoy a delightful concert of songbirds.