Day 1 and 2 were pretty uneventful. After arriving at New Bern on Sunday, I took a taxi out to Oriental and met Tom at the Marina where he'd taken a slip for a couple of days. We weren't at the town docks (towndock.net), so we couldn't be seen on the webcam, but just a bit to the left of them (east side of the inlet) at the Marina. Tom had a nice table at the Toucan grill waiting for me when I arrived and I got a great burger there, which was needed after a half a day of air travel and no airline food.
Tom had lost his head stay the previous week and had to make repairs by replacing the furler. Unfortunately the new furler didn't fit his main head sail, the big Genoa. He called ahead and made arrangements to drop it off Sunday in Oriental and it was done mid day Monday. We got it mounted, but then had to wait out Tuesday because of a big front coming through and the storms associated with it. By Monday night it was blowing over 25 mph, and that continued well into Tuesday with rain and some thunderstorm activity.
Monday was spent with a walk up to the Marine consignment store, where you can buy all kinds of cool used boating goodies, and then over to West Marine, for new marine goodies. At the consignment shop, we found a very lightweight (12 lb) outboard motor for Tom's dinghy that was purported to have some issues that are likely easily solved. Tom also found a nice orange mustang survival suit - a well thought out pair of warm coveralls with flotation gear built in. He had been wanting some warmer clothes all trip, and these were a screaming deal and in good shape. I found a safety harness with lanyard to wear under a life vest.
We went up to West Marine and I checked out inflatable life vests with harnesses, but decided to go with the passive vest and harness till I see a better deal. We did stop by the grocery store between the two and load up two backpacks of food to take back to the boat. I think I got all the cans in my backpack. :-)
In the morning, we had started the day at The Bean, the gathering spot for townspeople and boaters. It's directly across the street from the town dock and marina and a natural spot for everyone with any nautical interest to gather. Tom was in and out making phone calls about the sail and others stuff, and at one point most of the seats were taken and a nice gentleman named Bert who turned out to be a really interesting character. He was a veteran, and involved with the honor flight group and doing some political organizing around getting a message to Washington that folks have had about enough.
His idea is that folks should take an empty plastic milk or water jug and write a message on it and mail it to themselves via general delivery in Washington DC, with a return address of back home. That way it's your property and they can't just toss it easy. He's talked to the post office about it, and even did a test mailing of 3000 jugs, on his nickle! He was very interesting to talk to and we spent about
3 hours with him. I think he said he was 81 years old, and was clearly known by everyone in town and everyone was coming up and saying hi. A few other folks came and sat with us because of him and we got to meet several more folks that way and have a nice chat. It was *very* welcoming and pleasant.
I awoke Tuesday to Tom racing onto the boat in the storm, grabbing his foulies, and saying there's a woman in trouble at the next marina.
Took me a minute to find some clothes and get running so I got there a bit after the most of the excitement but Victoria on Malia was in a berth and with the water having done down in the storm (the wind blows the water out the mouth of the sound and it drops nearly a foot) he boat had settled and slid under the dock and was being beaten against the underside of it by the wave action in the storm. Tom had already horsed the boat clear before I found them, but I got to help a bit with getting the ropes rearranged so that the boat was more securely held in place and couldn't get in trouble again. Victoria invited us in out of the rain for coffee and turned out to be a fascinating person. Professor, sailor, writer, etc who has sailed to and lived in Hawaii, sailed to New Zealand, and up and down the east coast and Caribbean, We enjoyed talking to her for about an hour. Her boat was a Cape Dory 36 and very nice inside and fixed up very practically. She had a nice little black and white cat who was very friendly and took to Tom right away sitting in his lap while we both petted her.
After leaving Victoria, we headed back to the boat to do mundane things to get ready for the next days leaving, like laundry. I spent some more time at The Bean, drinking coffee, resisting the ice cream, web surfing, and people watching .
That evening, we decided to wander around and find a different restaurant to eat dinner at, but ended up at M&M's where we'd had lunch. We did invite Victoria to eat with us and had a nice time talking to her about sailing and the pacific, writing and how to market it (she's got several books written but not published yet) and then she and Tom finished up with a discussion on refrigeration with Tom recommending a water cooled system as being more reliable than the two air cooled systems she's been through in the last 6 years. We had a great meal and talked till the place closed.
Wednesday we got up and set sail out of Oriental east into Palmlico sound. We had to go pretty far east, then bend around north and west to stay in deep enough water. It's amazing how large many of the bodies of water are, but without enough depth to let a 4 foot draft boat pass. We probably added 3-4 miles to our route to stay in 10 foot water. Weather was good, fairly sunny but a little chill at 40 and windy. Later on in the day it got somewhat better, but then chilled down again as we approached sunset.
I brought along my Icom 703 (Ham Radio) and some antenna bits and a battery and set them up on the stern rail and tuned around. All the bands including ten meters were open and ten was hot! I worked a station in Oklahoma that was jealous of our boating, then a station in Munich, and one in Costa Rica. Later in the day I worked another in Texas, and he asked me to reduce power to 5 watts (from 10). I did and he still had us at s6, so I reduced it to 1 watt and were were still s3. In the evening I used the whole coil on the buddistick and 75 meters tuned in fine and I heard K1KBW, and W2DTC 40 over and fell asleep listening to them.
As sunset approached, we had left the sound and were north bound in the alligator river. It's a pretty desolate area, sort of like parts of the erie canal, but with less population around. Most of it looks like no one has been there in a long time, because the area on either side of the canal is mostly swamp land. Every once in a while you see a nice big dock and a house or compound with lots of lawn and open space, but I bet we saw only a half dozen the whole length of the place.
In the sound, the red and green buoys were red on right, green on left. Someplace up the river, they apparently switched, but with no notice and we couldn't figure out why. All we saw was after no buoys for several miles, the next green one we saw was waaaay over on the right. There was just enough room on the right for a couple of boats to pass, but it looked really funky. It didn't show on the chartplotter which has all our navigation information. It wasn't clear if the markers had flipped sides, or if we were supposed to squeeze through on the right side near the bank. The Erie canal has a couple of places where you do squeeze through like that, so we could go either way. I was driving and slowed way down and pointed right at the buoy so we could go either way, and Tom went forward to read the water. He decided at the last moment to point me to the right, so that's the way I went. We immediately ran aground! Fortunately it was fairly soft mud, and we were going slow, so we were able to back off and go around on the left side of the buoy without incident. Not even a whole day and I'd already run us aground once, albeit at Tom's direction.
We tried to anchor just as the sun went down at a spot the guidebook recommended by a bridge, but it turned into a minor disaster. First we nosed into the canal they recommended, but it was too tight and too shallow. As we backed out and drifted a bit downstream, the prop started hitting something and thumping terribly. I tried to put it in neutral right away, but for whatever reason, that didn't seem to work. I ended up shutting off the engine after a moment, leaving us dead in the water and drifting near the shore. Tom took over and got us free, but now it was rapidly starting to get darker and we still needed to anchor. We tried several more places, both sides of the river. We got a tree stuck on the anchor on one trial that took both of us to get up and free, and kept running into soft bottom on other attempts. We finally gave up and decided to continue motoring down the river in the dark, following the chart plotter, until something better presented itself. We ended up motoring on for two more hours all down the length of the river until we came to the opening into the Albermarle sound and found anchoring there in a recommended location.
Tom was steering the boat, glued to the chart plotter display following the purple line, while I sat in the bow with a powerful flashlight, looking for snags and trying to keep my night vision well enough to see where we were in the canal. Fortunately it was a beautiful night, a setting crescent moon, and lots of stars and once my night vision got adjusted and we turned some lights off ,I was able to keep track of our position in case the chart plotter didn't run us exactly where needed. It was tiring, but we made it. We anchored behind a channel marker as suggested, and saw a white LED light that looked to be an obstruction marker of some kind. In the morning, we couldn't see anything around that would be holding up a light like that. We now think it was another boat anchored in the same area and was it's anchor light. We went to bed around 11 pm and were both asleep shortly.
Today we got up at a bit before 8 and got underway. We had some fun in the early part of the day when we were under the flight path of a variety of jet fighters going east to play tag with each other. They kept circling around and making passes over and near us as we transited the area. I'm sure they have fun doing that. One made an afterburner pass almost directly overhead and then pulled up and did a loop as he got out over the edge of the sound, and his buddy followed suit minus the AB on the next pass. Fun! Made me wistful though, wishing I could be up there. But being down here was good too.
We went up one part of the sound to the alligator river bridge, a turning bridge and passed through there just a bit after noon.
Unfortunately, north of that, the chart plotter led us astray and aground. The preferred channel shown on the plot that Tom was following didn't correspond very well with our current reality and we drove into a sandbar at 6 kts and got well and truly hung up. You know you are in trouble when you can feel the boat going up and down over a couple of humps. before it slides to a stop. We tried rocking and moving weight and putting up sails but to no avail. Fortunately there was cell service on Tom's phone and he called Tow Boat. They were two hours away and had just gotten back to the barn after pulling another sailboat boat out of the same area an hour before. Several other boats called on the radio to check on us and comiiserated about their groundings nearby recently as well. Apparently this area is subject to a lot of shifting shoals, and in fact a jet drive USGS survey boat was mapping the shoal and channel to the west of us, talking to us on the radio and making mutliple passes back and forth and turning around as they hit the mud (said they could 4 wheel drive with the best of them with the tunnel drive). It was interesting to watch while waiting for tow boat. Also much activity in the air with various helicopters flying about.
They came out and gave us a slow and careful tow. Instead of having two big outboards on the back as the one on our lake does, they had a small boat that I think had a jet drive. They spoke of washing away the sand and mud and as they took us under tow, it was clear that there was a lot of stuff being blown up in the water as the gently blasted a path for us and led us to deeper water. It only took about a half hour for them to free us. All in all we lost about 2.5 hours to the grounding, but don't seem to have suffered any damage, except to our pride.
We continued on across the open part of the Albermarle sound towards
the Virginia cut Tom came down the dismal swamp route southbound and
wanted to see the other route and it's a bit shorter and the tow boat folks said it was less hazardous for shallows and such as well and recommended it as the better way to Norfolk. So instead of heading to Elizabeth city, we headed more northerly. As we got to the far side, we encountered a tug and barge and did circles while he passed by so we wouldn't hold him up in the narrow channel to Coinjock. He was very appreciative and gave us a number of good pointers about nearby anchorages, and we took his advice instead of heading into Coinjock and are now anchored off buck island just outside the channel. It's pretty quiet and pleasant but we can hear the fighter jets zooming by and a little earlier we had a visit from a V22 Osprey that came out in the dark, circled around us, and then went back the way it came. It was interesting trying to figure out what it was. It was wide and had lights, but was coming very slowly and didn't have the usual helicopter whop whop whop sound. As it got closer I got a better look at it, and guessed what it was. Then took a look with the binoculars as it passed by and was able to get a better view of it from behind.
Very cool!
It's 9 pm and we're both beat. It's April 7 and I have a sunburn! I suspect I'll be asleep in a half hour. We have cell service and can uplink this tonight but sometime after noon tomorrow will be heading into the trackless swampland and will probably be out of touch for two days.
Well, now it's 9:42 and we've had 3 anchor alarms and drug anchor to within a 100 feet of the island as the wind swung about and piped up.
Just went through the exercise of pulling in the smaller 'lunch hook'
anchor, and "dropping the big one". :-) Hopefully that will be the end of the days excitement.
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