Ghost Ship

It was chilly and windy when I went out onto the walkway for my morning Tai Chi, the sky still streaked with the remains of the sunrise.  This big freighter was coming into the Morehead City Channel.

 
Yesterday, I tackled a repair I had been meaning to make since we have been here in the condo.  It was a patch of broken popcorn ceiling in the corner of the master bedroom.

The local Ace hardware store is a good one, and I had researched several products for making the repair, finally settling on the most expensive one, a can of spray repair material that (according to the instructions in both English and Spanish) appeared to be foolproof to use.  After carefully taping newspaper around the area and on the floor, screwing on the applicator tip, and pulling the double "trigger" on the can, it immediately exploded into a spray of popcorn-ceiling material that spattered more on my head than on the ceiling.  I rushed to wash my clothes, hair, and face, so fortunately Martha did not have time to take a photo of me in my popcorn-festooned state.  So much for "foolproof!"  But that's how it goes with repair work.

I returned to the hardware store and next purchased the least expensive material, which came in a tube the size of toothpaste, and (I should have known) it worked perfectly.  An application of paint completed the project.

This afternoon, we returned to Beaufort for an interesting bag lunch program at the N. C. Maritime Museum.  This is a great little museum which we have supported through their clam chowder cook-offs for the past two years, and we are now members as well.

While we ate home-made tuna sandwiches, we listened with 20 other visitors to a presentation on "The Vanishing Crew of the Carroll A. Deering."  This so-called "ghost ship" was a five-master schooner that washed up on the Diamond Shoals off the coast of Cape Hatteras in 1920 on a return trip from South America to Norfolk, VA.  The ship was completely deserted - no crew, no lifeboats, no ships logs - and there has been much speculation about what happened to it.  Many ships have gone missing in these treacherous waters, but few crews have gone missing leaving the ship behind.

One of the best displays at the Maritime Museum is the skeleton of a sperm whale, affectionately named "Echo," which is impressively suspended from the ceiling.  The whale was a 33.5-foot-long adolescent male sperm whale that stranded and died at Cape Lookout in January 2004; its skeleton was meticulously preserved and re-assembled.

Also on display is the whale's heart, which was sent to the University of Tennessee for plastination.  A helpful volunteer showed us the heart, about the size of a large duffel bag and displayed in a glass case.  "Would you like to touch it?" she asked.  We did, and she carefully lifted one side of the case.  "Most people say it feels like rubber bands," she said, and indeed it did.

"The heart of a blue whale," she confided in us, "Is the size of a Volkswagen beetle."  Very impressive.  And the first whale heart I have ever touched.
 
There is always something new to learn about this area, and we have enjoyed visiting the museum in Beaufort just as much as Fort Macon and learning about the rich local history in this area of the Outer Banks.

Beaufort is a pretty little Town, and after the presentation we enjoyed poking around in its antique shops before returning.  Crossing the bridge back to Morehead City we saw a huge bright-orange freighter in the channel, the same one I had seen on the horizon first thing this morning, I think, and not a ghost ship at all, but a very real one, unloading its cargo here 100 years after the Carroll A. Deering had arrived nearby with no hands on deck.