This is the New River Inlet in North Carolina. We took a trip down this weekend to do some sailing with our smaller boat and check out this Marina, Swan Point Marina in Sneads Ferry N.C. As you can see in this aerial photo she is right on the ICW and just a short hop out to sea. The Marina is under new management and they are lovely. The facility has most everything you need. Check out more here :http://www.swanpointmarina.com. The newest fix to this inlet was a channel realignment project. Photo below. The project will widen and deepen the New River Inlet Channel, and the sand from the channel will be placed on the northern 1.7 miles of the beach. The shoreline will be extended an average initial width of 180 feet across the project area. The intent of the project design is to supply wave and current protection for the north end of Topsail Island. So this is great news much easier to maneuver out of the channel. As we found this weekend, not much room to play with in these shallow depths, even the channel is 10′ most of the time with some 17′ areas. and the channel is narrow. We grounded our boat twice this weekend. Not in a bad way, we have a swing keel on our small boat and it is a flat bottom so it will kick up when you hit ground. The sand bars are ever moving and one minute you will be in 7′ and the next 1′. The 9.9 hp engine was able to kick us off when we did not have time to raise the keel. So our sailing was more of a headache than fun. We started out with 10kts of wind a quickly grew to 20kts. With the curved narrow channels and depths motoring is the only option in this section. So we gave it up and headed home for some 12kt winds on the lake and depths of 92′. That was a better sailing day, but all was not lost by going we always say there is something you learn every time you take an adventure to the unknown. Gained a new set of friends and a new home for Erised. Mission accomplished.