Thursday night we anchored off Buck Island north of Albermarle sound a little ways. We dragged anchor and had to put out the big anchor eventually and then settled down to a nice evening, including a nice look over by a V22 Osprey.
Friday we started up and headed on into Coinjock, which is supposed to be an Indian name for the mulberry bush it turns out. Stopped at the marina there and fueled up and had a nice lunch, then got under way again headed north up the Virginia cut.
There were some interesting zigs and zags around various places and under some bridges and some of the area was very pretty. But some of those zigs and zags had Tom working pretty hard to stay in the channel. I took all the straight parts. :-) As the afternoon wore on, we were working to make several different bridge openings and did what we wanted to which was to get as far as Great Bridge. We passed through the bridge at it's last opening of the day and tied up at a free dock between the bridge and the lock.
At the swing bridge before that, we were passing by a naval air station off to one side of the canal, and were treated to the sight of a jet coming in and then coming to a hover, and descending behind the trees. It was apparently shooting landings or doing some sort of test because it kept coming back every 10 minutes or so, sometimes hovering again and going out of sight, and sometimes speeding back up and zooming away like some sort of missed approach. I think it might have been the new F35, but it looked to me a lot like an F18. I did see on some of the pictures a panel behind the cockpit opened up for the air intake.
After tying up at Great Bridge, we hiked a little south to a nice Italian restaurant and had a good dinner and a glass of wine. Deb woke the place up when she rang my phone to ask about the APRS tracking . I had set my phone with the loudest ring I could so I could hear it on the boat over the engine, or when I had it on the charger and not in my pocket. Every head in the place turned when it went off! I turned it to vibrate only after that (and missed a call from Connie today when it was on the charger because I didn't hear it. I can't win).
As we tied up at Great Bridge, everything finally snapped into focus.
I had thought this was the route Lee and Kevin and I had trekked going south, but it didn't look all that familiar. But the bridge was unique and I immediately recognized it, and then the town around it. This was the same place we stopped for lunch one day going down, except we tied up at the yacht basin below and got fuel and walked out a block below where we were tied up last night.
It got pretty cool overnight, and we slept in a bit to charge our batteries since Saturday was going to be a slow day with an early morning. Today all we really did was walk further into town to get a decent breakfast, buy some supplies at the local stores and then head north for Norfolk about 10 miles away. We had to pass another couple of timed bridges, but did those in good order and made our way to Tidewater Marina where we're tied up till midnight.
Tom got some maps and more local knowledge and checked the weather and tide tables. They gave him a heavy roll of paper maps some other boater abandoned at the shop (100 foot boat, gone electronic charts).
We haven't opened them up to see what goodies are contained, but Tom gave me the overview of our path for the next day or so in more detail so I have a clue.
The weather is supposed to clear and the tides will be going out starting around midnight. We need to leave then to have a favorable current with them. It will take us about 4 hours to get out on the Atlantic and turn north for Cape May. Then we will have about 30 hours of travel to our next planned anchorage. The winds are supposed to swing around to the south and southwest and push us along with 10-20kt winds and waves up to 3 feet or so. We'll see. It's pretty chilly now, and will be worse at midnight. Coveralls again.
We went out for a walk to a recommended pizza joint and got good pizza and bad mexican music rather too loud. We did see the lightship Portsmouth as we walked back and also a paddle wheeler that does tours around the harbor. It was obviously a fake paddle wheel though, just spinning for show.
Tom's had on some good music to clear his musical palate after the restaurant music, and I'm web surfing while we have the net and getting ready to go shower and shave. Then we're going to nap for 4 hours and get up and leave on the tide as they say.
If we're not too far off shore, I hope to have some sort of internet for the next 30 hours, but it may be spotty. If that doesn't work out, the next report will be from Cape May sometime mid day Monday if all goes as planned. Haven't downloaded any pics yet from the days so I won't send them till later.
If you are interested in tracking our progress, I'm running an Automatic Position Reporting System program on my droidx. It's based on my radio callsign, wb2ems-8. If you just google that or google map that it should take you to this page http://aprs.fi/?call=a%2FWB2EMS-8 which should show our recent progress and current location. I'm asking it to drop a breadcrumb on the map every 10 minutes, but depending on cell coverage at that moment, it may or may not make it into the system. I've done this with ham radio gear in the past, this time I'm trying it with the cell system. We'll see how it compares.
Till later
Kevin
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