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December 26 - 7:30 AM, thank goodness that while we slept the tide came fully in, so when we woke up, we were not only afloat, but with ample clearance below us!  We hauled up our anchor, and headed back out the channel and into the ICW.  Our trip down to Southport was great.  We had beautiful weather, finally some sun, and the depths were good so all in all it was an easy trip.  In Skipper Bob’s they list that in Southport there is a free town dock, so we decided that we would check it out and see if it was available.  We pulled into Old Southport Harbor, and following the directions in the guide, called the local police for permission to dock.  Granted!  We began to nose up to the dock when all of a sudden, we were sitting in mud.  Hmmmmm.  we backed off and re-approached, this time successfully getting the nose of the boat up to the dock, where I threw a line around the piling.  Brian tossed me the stern line, which I wrapped around the back piling… but the stern of the boat was about 5 feet off the dock!  The connecting “dock” in between these two points is about a foot maybe 14″ wide (think trapeze platform!!!) and it was about 4″ up from the water… how to pull the boat over???  our primary winches of course.  Laughing, Brian wrapped a couple of wraps around the primary, and began scooting us through the mud by winching the boat alongside the dock.  Hilarious!  We were JUST touching bottom but it was a pretty funny way to come into a dock!  We got the boat secured, and after popping online to see what was around, we took the garbage up to the garbage cans and set off to walk into town to find some pizza.  After walking about a mile, past a couple of pizza places closed for the holidays, we popped into a small convenience store, which turned out to be a Mexican convenience store… how cool!!  The yahd all kinds of great stuff, canned mango juice, mango gatorade, a wild selection of hot sauces, chips, tortillas, and eggs (ah, yes I was in search of eggs since I’d used up the last of them on Christmas breakfast). We bought a bunch of stuff, and walked back a couple of blocks to a small restaurant/bar we’d passed along the way, Loco Jo’s.
Turns out that Loco Jo’s opened on Christmas Day!  We were among their first out of town customers, which was really cool!  They had a great selection of microbrew beers, and FABULOUS food.  We shared some beer battered onion rings and some pork wontons as starters - both were excellent.  I had fish and chips and Brian had their burger all the way.  Best fish and chips I have EVER had!  Bri’s burger was excellent as well.  We ended up sitting next to a really nice couple who had moved to Southport from western Massachusetts and had a nice chat with them between courses.  I’d absolutely recommend this restaurant as a great stop along the way for anyone coming this route.  It’s not too far of a walk, and the food was worth walking a little further than some of the closer places.  We stopped on our way back at the wine store across the street to see if they happened to have any Root1 (our new fav) which they did, and they were having a wine tasting of four wines.  We tried the tempranillo, the chardonnay and the moscato, and bought a bottle of the chard to have on board when we finally start catching some fish! We ambled the rest of the way back to the boat and settled in for the night with the plan to get up in the morning early, and set out.