I am up at dawn, quick breakfast, and push off, motoring to the middle of the channel heading for downtown Wilmington, I make it past the first try, that’s an improvement. 
Now I’m passing the Port of Wilmington (a bit further downriver) and I hear a louder-than-normal exhaust noise. Seriously? I go below and the aluminum flashing has torn at the joint of the two pipes and I have water and exhaust spraying forth. I head toward the shallows, drop anchor, and shut the engine down at 9:00 am. Now you might think that I’d just give up at this point and just say screw it. Ah, no, that’s not my way… When I formulated plan B, I also made a contingency plan in my head in case this failed in this exact way. So, Plan C is started. I disassemble everything again, and the new nipple in the elbow is holding nicely, the failure was the exhaust repair tape, it turned liquid and had run down the pipes and hardened at the water injection spot partially blocking the pipe. Blocking the exhaust would be a bad thing.
Plan C is essentially an all-mechanical fix. The two pipes are wrapped three times with aluminum flashing with high-temperature exhaust gasket sealer in between each wrap, the 1” electrical conduit coupling (with 1 1/2” id), goes over the flashing wraps, and the conduit coupling has two screws at each end that mechanically clamp the two pipes and make one mechanical unit. It takes me about an hour and thirty minutes to undo and redo the fix to Plan C, and by 11:00 am I’m on my way again, heading for Snow’s Cut and rejoining the ICW north.
I make the turn from the Cape Fear into Snow’s Cut at 1:30 pm. Everything is working fine, it’s all holding together, and it will get me home over the next three days. As I wait for the Wrightsville Beach bridge to open, a Boston Whaler passes me in this narrow and very busy stretch of the intercoastal, there is a woman and an older gentleman onboard, as they pass me I can see them talking and turning around looking. I’m not sure what they are looking at, but with all the boats here I just shrug it off. They turn around and head back toward me, the woman (probably in her 40s) says to me, ‘is that your boat?’, I say ‘yes’, she asks ‘where did you buy it’, ‘Wilmington’, she says ‘that was our boat! I got hitched on that boat’, I say ‘if it was owned by a man named George, then yes this was yours’, she points to the older gentlemen ‘That’s George’, George says to me ‘She looks great’, I reply ‘Thank you, I’m just being her back from a 3-month trip to the Bahamas’. What are the damn odds? Think about the chances of this happening!
At dusk, I drop anchor just off the ICW at Topsail Island, the craziness of the past few days seems to be over. I sit down to a well-earned glass of Southern Comfort, a hardy dinner, and a restful night’s sleep, knowing that in 2 days I’ll be back in New Bern… home.