Saturday May 5, 2018 - Wrightsville Beach to Bogue Inlet (Swansboro NC).

I got off to a bad start today but I recovered.  The bad start was a grounding within 10 minutes of leaving my anchorage.  I needed to make a right turn to go through a channel that returned to the ICW.  I have several poor excuses for my mistake:

1.       I was used to being in the ICW where you keep red on your left (when traveling north)

2.      I didn't see any green day marker - the bright green squares were in line with my line of sight so that they were basically invisible from my viewing position.

3.      The green day mark on the chart plotter was in a shoally area and not easy to see (well, I didn't notice it until after I had hit bottom).

4.      And, most significant was that it appeared from my Garmin chart that I was right in the middle of the channel.  The point where I reversed my direction is where I hit bottom.  I then spun around and went back to go around red "14" (the PROPER way).

So, once I was got off and went back, I realized that the red 14 was NOT an ICW marker.  That means Red Right Returning.  And, I noticed the Green 15 - both in the channel and on the chart plotter.  Well, fortunatly, it was an easy fix and I, as far as I know, I had no audience.  So my pride wasn't hurt too bad. I was glad I corrected things fairly quickly since I was in somewhat of a hurry to make the 8am bridge opening about a mile away. 

The rest of the day went pretty well.  It was a 50 mile day which is pretty good.  There were 3 timed bridges and one delayed me by about 45 minutes.   As I arrived in the Bouge Inlet area, it was low tide which, in the past 2 weeks has been a no no for traveling.  But I'm now north of most of the big problem areas.  That means less effort to time my travels and hopefully no more groundings (due to tides).