Today I said goodbye to N5516, Large Flightless Birds. When this story began 12 years ago I knew it would eventually come to an end. And when we acquired N5516 in August of 2015 I knew that someday I would hand her off to someone new but I did not foresee it would be this [...]
Saturday, December 31, 6am local time. Sun not up, its cold but no breeze. The crew does another check of all the engines and starts firing up the systems. Everything checks out, we disconnect shore power, take in the lines and the captain maneuvers us off the dock and heads us downstream on the [...]
Our insurance company prefers (strongly) that we stay out of Florida during Hurricane Season. So this summer we set up shop at the Port City Marina in Wilmington NC and got hit by Hurricane Matthew. You can read the various blog entries we posted during the storm; while conditions never got really bad at the [...]
Sunday morning. Matthew has left us. Conditions in the marina never got really bad. Lots and lots of rain, but the wind never got really bad,saw some gusts in the 40s. I walked the docks this morning and it appears everybody here came through in good shape. The construction areas around the marina [...]
Local media is reporting the river in Wilmington is already up six or 7 feet. The rain slacked off for a few minutes so I headed out to take a few pictures This is what things look like on the dock just a few hours ago. Now the dock has floated up several feet At [...]
It has been relatively quiet and calm for most of the morning. Occasional bands of gusty winds and some rain that does not last very long. Current forecast is that inland areas are going to get much more rain than those of us closer to the coast. But about an hour and a half [...]
Hurricane Matthew is heading our way. During the hurricane season our insurance company wants us north of the Florida Georgia line. After our Bahama trips we settled in to our slip at the new port city marina in Wilmington North Carolina on the Cape fear River. With news that Matthew was heading [...]
Large Flightless Birds is based for the hurricane season in Wilmington NC. The sunsets have been gorgeous. The marina team has been wonderful, although there is a great deal of construction going on, leaving dust and grit on all the surfaces from the unpaved lots around the area. Construction is due to start soon on [...]
They say that if you have a boat and don't have a list of stuff to work on you're not paying attention. When we are not on the boat we leave the AC in the pilot house on and turn the rest of the zones off; run a couple of dehumidifiers to keep the inside [...]
LFB had a few weeks between scheduled trips so I decided to take advantage of its presence in the Bahamas. I flew over to Marsh Harbour to meet the boat and the captain and spend a week cruising around the islands and doing some scuba diving. As the plane came into the airport at Marsh Harbour [...]