October 25 Portsmouth VA to Elizabeth City NC 43 8 Nautical Miles

Today we traversed the Great Dismal Swamp, one of three inland routes between Norfolk and North Carolina. This is the westernmost route and most of it is a very straight and narrow (about 50 feetwide) canal

that is not very deep (about eight to ten feet).A new route to a new port.
One thing about it is easier. Normally I piece together many legs of a days journey, measure the length of each lag and add them together. But in the ditch, the charts show the mileposts from mile zero in Norfolk to over a thousand miles later in Florida. But these are in statute (land) miles and so one must take only 85 percent of them to get the nautical miles. Today we started half mile north of mile zero and Elizabeth City is at mile 51, leading to 43.8 nautical miles. And describing "legs" would have been difficult after we exited the canal proper into the Pasquatank River, which is nothing if not sinuous. Oops, upside down. Eliz. City is the black boxes (streets) toward the upper right, the old down town.

But this path is more challenging because there is no sailing allowed, and the road is so narrow, requiring constant attention as when driving a car. Also there are hazards above and below. Below are "deadheads" -- water soaked tree stumps that lay on the bottom and give us a thump when we hit them. We know they are there and that we will take a few hits (four today) but unlike coral heads in the Bahamas, they do not sink your boat. The peril above is tree branches that overhang the canal and get whacked by our mast (about three times today).

Here is some of the flora we harvested with our mast and shrouds, showing also the straightness of the canal, the diagonal to the lower left corner.

It was a long day, but warm at last and sunny, and windless. Normally we dont like windless days but no sailing is possible in the canals so no big loss. We got underway at seven in morning mist, and headed up the Elizabeth River to make it to the first lock, at the northern end of the swamp, at its 8:30 scheduled opening.


Here we are, all five boats, locked up together.

The lock business and the associated bridge took an hour and we timed the next 22 miles at five knots to arrive at the second and last lock for its 1:30 opening, and arrived in Elizabeth City at about 5 pm. A long, slow, ten hour day.
Yesterday we crossed paths with a mammoth container ship; today a more modest craft.

Eliz. City calls itself "The Harbor of Hospitality" and this billboard

is 50 feet from our slip. It proves this true by providing seventeen free guest docks, and we took one. In the morning, a man and his daughter offered us a ride, three miles, to the supermarket and Judy and Rich, who work for the Coast Guard, gave us a lift back. Yep, a friendly town. We are bow in. On the way in we looped our starboard stern line over a piling and  then ran forward to hand a bow line to one of the friendly volunteers who secured it to a piling near land on the port side. Easy, in the absence of wind. The other two lines loop around pilings off the other two corners and I added a spring line to keep us from crashing into the street ahead of us if there was a surge (but no surge tonight) and we were totally secure. Black line is starboard aft line and white is spring line.

The last step was loosening the starboard forward tether and tightening the port one to bring our bow above the short stubby dock so that we could climb down from the bowsprit onto it.

On arrival we took free shoreside showers

and had dinner ashore before returning for the evening. There was a very easy camraderie among the crews of the boats here, all enthusiastic about their similar but individual adventures. Next to us, separated only by our biggest fender, is a beautiful Shannon, "Whisper", whose three very young, very blond children came aboard to play with our crew. Witty was not really a happy camper in this, but he played along well enough. I missed the photo op.

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October 6 Oriental to Morehead City 19 5 Nautical Miles

We had to get our sea legs back. But while it was calm in Whittaker Creek, it was blowing hard, though probably not as hard as our new wind measuring instrument shows -- calibration needed -- once we left its shelter.  We could have beat the first five miles crossing the Neuse River, but after that is was mostly canal-like waterways with the wind strong in our faces from the southwest and we motored all the way and did not set a sail.  Approaching Morehead City/Beaufort a pod of perhaps 20 dolphins passed us, going upstream, in groups of two or three at a time, their black fins, and later their backs revealing them. Sorry I could not catch a picture; I was at the helm. This military assault landing vessel was going out Beaufort Inlet to the sea while we were approaching it from the north.

Our first stop was a fuel dock, which was tricky getting into, and back off from with all that wind, but we took on 45.8 gallons, our first refueling since Annapolis. I figure that since Yorktown, we have been burning .66 gallons per hour.
We had several choice anchorages picked out but with all this wind we took a spot on the dock of Sanitary Fish Market and Restaurant for $25 if you eat here.
We were joined for dinner there by Deb and Terry of "Island Time," a 42 foot Brewer cutter-rigged cruiser, the boat that is tied up behind us and enjoyed good conversation but sadly, very mediocre food.

They are from Midland Michigan and plan a five winter campaign to cover the Caribbean, all the way to Panama and the Central American coastal nations, leaving the boat for the summers. He was an engineer for a chemical company and she retired as a professor of biology.
           For tomorrow I planned two options. The first is to go out of Beaufort Inlet and back in at the Masonboro inlet near Wrightsville Beach. This is about 75 miles, but 69 of them a straight shot in the ocean, where we can go straight and fast. They predict 20 to 25 miles of wind from the NW, so it would be a speedy beam reach and close to shore so that the big seas will not have had a chance to build up and winds diminishing by five knots in the afternoon.  The alternative is a two day passage to Wrightsville Beach via the Intercoastal. The problem with this second alternative is the midpoint anchorage -- Mile Hammock Bay located in Camp Lejeune. Specifically, the Coast Guard is advising that the ICW will be closed tomorrow for military exercises involving firing live ammunition in the direction of Mile Hammock Bay. So the inside route may require us to spend another day here. A variation on plan B, mentioned by our new friends during dinner, would be to anchor at Swansboro, about ten miles short of Camp Lejeune with a rather longish run in the ICW the next day.  After dinner, while we walked four blocks to the postoffice and back Lene prevailed upon me to forego plan A for fear that even if we left at first light, we would have only 11.5 hours before it got dark, meaning that we would have to make 6.5 knots to get there before dark. Plan for the worst is her mantra. And Lene did not relish rising before daybreak and a rough passage and I like a happy crew. Lets check the weather again in the morning.

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