Back into civilization at Oriental NC, sort of.

It’s Friday morning and we are underway, having stopped last night in a lovely little harbor about 25 miles north of Oriental NC where we are headed.   In Elizabeth city we went to a fish market and bought a peck of oysters.  You can’t buy a dozen oysters there, it seems.  The options are a bushel, half bushel and a peck.  I have heard of a peck of pickled peppers but never one of oysters.  So how much is a peck of oysters.   Let me tell you, it’s a lot, between 15-20 lbs.  That’s a lot of oysters.  Luckily, I am getting pretty good at opening them.  We have had about 1.5 dozen oysters on the half shell two nights in a row and there are plenty left.   So, how about raw oysters with Hendricks gin and tonics?  It’s as good as it sounds.  Totally… Having seen so many fabulous sunsets and sunrises here it’s hard to say if this was taken last night or the one before or if was a sunset or sunrise.  However it’s certain that it was in the last few days so you will just have to trust me on that.

The sunset, no wait, it was a sunrise, got even better a bit later. It’s been several days since I have last posted because cell coverage has been very spotty and we have been doing long days, usually dropping the hook around sunset when it’s time for a drink and not time to begin typing.   When it’s calm on the water, and there is no wind (much of the time, it would seem) we work on our blogs here in the cockpit.  Here’s Brenda pecking away about an hour outside of Oriental. Yesterday we were underway for nearly 11 hours having done much of the Alligator river and Pungo River in a single day.  Unfortunately, we didn’t see any alligators as there haven’t been any there since the 1930,s I am told.  However, there are loads of bald eagles which we saw frequently.   I tried to get a good photo of one but never could get quite close enough.  Yesterday I was pretty close and  saw three at one time.  Alas, again, no photo worth showing.  When we get to Oriental around noon today we will be at ICW mile marker 180 and will have put nearly 800 miles under our keel since leaving Essex.   I wish that I could say that we have been sailing for the last few days but frankly we have only had the jib out for a few hours since leaving Hampton VA.

As we have headed south over the last few days we found ourselves going through a number of canals and back out into broader bodies of water.   This shot of the plotter is a good example of what we saw on the charts.   The ICW is a series of canals that connect more open bodies of water.   Unlike the Dismal Swamp Canal, which was about 50′ wide, the Alligator Canal and others are closer to 100′ wide, plenty wide for two boats to pass comfortably.  Actually, there are very few boats headed north but some powerboats do pass me from time to time.  

Here’s a particularly nice one that has passed me twice, yesterday and today.  It seems that he stopped for the night and didn’t get going till after us today.   The yacht Bernadette, a Trumpy, is also from Newport RI like Pandora.  These canals are really straight as the plotter shows.  When we are going along the ICW the boat is often on the exact heading for hours.  You can see her wake here which shows just how straight a path she is cutting through the water.   I guess this is just another photo in a series of “Bob loves to watch the wake thing”.  It’s good that the Army Corps has kept the channels straight because if you stray outside of the dredged portion you can quickly go from 15′ to 3′ and grind to a stop really, really fast.  Good thing that I took the Boat US towing service, unlimited.   No use for it yet but I expect that I will use it soon enough. The character of the trees continues to change nearly every day.  This morning I was struck with how nice a view we had of the pines on shore.  Not sure what the name of these kinds are but I’ll bet that they use them for telephone poles.  Perhaps “Pole Pines?”.  Hmm…Two nights ago we were anchored in a small creek off of the Alligator River, a really desolate place if there ever was one.  We were the only boat in the harbor, actually more like bay, a really shallow one.   After the sun went down it was incredibly dark.  Actually, with the exception of a loan green channel marker in the distance and a cell tower blinking red, it was totally dark.  After twilight we were treated to a star show complete with a very dramatic milky way overhead.  It was beautiful.  Having said that, it was also a bit creepy to be in such a desolate place. A fishing boat wreck pokeing above the water near by didn’t help the mood.  There weren’t any homes on the bay which was several miles across with the exception of some hunting shacks and duck blinds that were not occupied.  Oddly, we had pretty good cell coverage due to a highway in the distance.  Glad that we have a cell phone booster on the top of the mast.

Speaking of that, I was concerned about going through a bridge on the Alligator River Canal that is only 64′ tall yesterday verses the 65′ ICW standard height.  My mast is 63′ tall plus gear which makes it really, really close to the 64′ height of the bridge we had to pass under.  Happily, the water level was low by about 1′ so we passed without incident.   Only a few dozen more bridges to go so we will see if the cell antenna survives the trip south.

I almost forgot to put this photo of a blimp hanger in.  We passed a very large Coast Guard station on our way our of Elizabeth City a few days ago.  This is a REALLY BIG building.   BIG doesn’t begin to describe it, actually.  I expect that it was built for dirigibles and those were really huge.   Hanging in the sky several thousand feet above the base was a blimp, or more of a balloon on a long wire connected to a big spool on the ground.  You can see one, the white dot to the left of the hanger, on the ground in this photo.  I don’t know what it was for, perhaps some sort of a “coast guard thing”.  Guarding the coast is what they do, right?

Bald eagles aren’t the only “birds” flying over the most remote swamp as we witnessed a number of Navy flyovers by F15s yesterday.  One came so close to Pandora that the sound was earsplitting as the pilot kicked in the afterburners and headed straight up like a rocket taking off.  We could see into the back of the engines which glowed yellow/orange from all the fuel that was being burned.  The sound made the boat shake as it was just so close.  I wanted to get a photo but by the time you heard them coming they were already past and too far to get a shot.  I expect that they were just a bit under the speed of sound.  We would watch the jets scream by so low it seemed that they were only a few hundred feet above the water, then head up and up until they were only a small dot in the sky.   I expect that they would draw all sorts of complaints from the locals if they did those sorts of stunts over residential areas.  Brenda, she put her hands on her head as the screamed by.  Me, I loved it.

Also interesting is that we have been in water that was mostly fresh from the beginning of the Dismal Swamp Canal until yesterday when we entered the Pungo River.  Now that we are in Oriental it’s plenty salty again.  (Yes, we are now in Oriental and it’s high time for me to finish this post.  That’s all for now.