You Could Call it a Crabby Day

Saturday, July 11

We left Oriental, North Carolina at 6:20.  We headed East in the Neuese River to pick up the ICW again. The Neuese is so broad it could be called a sound or a lake. The channel markers are very far apart and were hard to pick out in the rising sun. We did our usual head scratching for a few minutes until we figured out where we were and where we needed to be.

We found the opening for the Bay River and then moved north into Goose Creek. Our original goal for this leg of the trip was supposed to be Coinjock which would be 118 miles from Oriental. We lost so much time with the repair that we are now in jeopardy with our vacation time. We need to be back to work on Monday, July 20th.  So our new goal for the day was to get as far north as we possibly could in daylight hours.  We hoped to be pretty close to Norfolk by day's end. 

As we passed through the Pungo River the water took on the color of strong tea. The River was lined with trees; it must have been a pretty good percentage of cedar. Cedar stains the water brown. By the time our day on the water was done our swim platform was tea stained as well. It needs a good coat of wax to protect it from footprints and brown water!

From the Pungo River we headed Northeast into the Pungo/Alligator River Canal. The canal was twenty miles of pretty much no wake travel. We were able to get up on plane for a very short distance. Once we left the West to East canal we headed due north in the Alligator River. We were finally back on plane and making time. At the entrance of the Alligator River is a swing bridge that allows highway US64 to cross the river. We waited barely five minutes for the bridge to open and we were on our way. 

 Crossing Albemarle Sound was quite the treat. Read some sarcasm in here. The sound is a lot like Lake Erie. It is East West and really stirs up a chop when the wind is blowing. We had a Southeast wind; so the crossing was pretty bumpy. We're both pretty used to that; but what made us crazy was crab pots! All over North Carolina fisherman set crab pots. Some are commercial and some are the personal kind. 

The pots are set with small buoys; they are about the size of a small loaf of bread. All the floats are different colors. You would think the white ones would be pretty easy to see; but picking them out from the white caps wasn’t all that easy.  The black floats were even worse. We dodged them off and on across the sound. Usually they ran right along the edge of the channel; but sometimes they move. We stopped and reversed several times to avoid getting them caught up on our props. 

We saw other boats our size off and on throughout the day. I think we passed them all. With courtesy of course. We also passed a huge shrimp boat and two barges. 

Our original stop from Beaufort was supposed to be Coinjock, NC. When we made our unscheduled loooong stop in Oriental we tried to figure out how we could make up some travel time. We charted a longer day; but didn't know if it was going to be feasible. We decided to see what time we would get to Coinjock and make a decision at that point. At two o'clock we passed Coinjock and decided to press on. 

About forty five minutes later it started to rain. Just heavy enough to reduce visibility somewhat and be a thorn in our sides. We could see lightning off in the distance but it was moving East of us so we felt okay going on. It continued to rain the rest of the day. 

Our East to West trip across the Albemarle Chesapeake canal was delayed because we didn’t realize we needed to hail bridge tenders on channel thirteen.  He must have been deaf because he didn’t hear our horn. We had to wait a whole extra half hour to get it opened. Our Marina for the night was about five minutes past the bridge. Ugh. 

We finally arrived at the Atlantic Yacht Harbor at 5:45. We'd been on the water for eleven and a half hours and accomplished 148 miles. It was a long day. Our day was long because more than half of it was no wake and required a lot of navigation through all of the intracoastal markers. It was especially long for Dan who had to do most of the driving and crab pot dodging.

We are both extremely grateful that the boat performed very well and we didn’t have any new issues. We have another long day on the water tomorrow.