Four Days on the Boat, James River, Cape Charles and York River

The weather has changed for us. It’s raining on our trip now just like it has rained on everyone else’s trip. It’s not bad, however, and we’re enjoying a quiet ride up the York River to see what we can see. It’s not a very long river, so later we’re just planning to turn around and return to the historic Yorktown park to tie up at their dock. 

Pearl on the York River

It’s been only four days since we both returned to the boat and got underway again, but it seems longer. On Friday we did a dozen errands while we still had the rental car, then we returned it and headed out around noon. We went up the James River to Kingsmill, a marina at a resort near Williamsburg. On the way we passed the “ghost fleet” of old WWII ships that are kept in mothballs until they might be needed again. The dockhand at Kingsmill told us that when he was a boy, there were 150 ships, and just after WWI, there were more than a thousand, but now there are only about 10, maybe a dozen. Also on the James River is the Newport News ship building center, where a mega-long aircraft carrier is under construction, and under cover from prying eyes and satellites. 

Ghost Fleet on the James River

Another view of the ghost fleet

Saturday we got an early start to get to the Chesapeake Bay near Virginia Beach. We pulled in to Chesapeake Beach (which is not the same as Chesapeake where we exited the ICW) to pick up Lauren and her friend Parker at a marina. This was the first time anyone in the family had met Parker, and so far, so good. From there we traveled out to the Bay, going over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel again as we headed north to Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. It was a scorching hot and sunny day, like baking in an oven, but it was a beautiful ride. We saw dolphins and pelicans and rescued a mylar balloon from the Bay. It was obviously meant for my sister Mary, whose birthday was yesterday, so we sent her a photo.

Happy Birthday Mary

Cape Charles is a charming colorful little town, but very isolated. We had a wonderful dinner at the marina restaurant with cream-of-crab soup with a dab of sherry, crab cakes, scallops, fish tacos, and fried oysters. Afterwards we walked into the little town, which is about 6 blocks by 7 blocks total, but is well-maintained, not at all run-down like so many other small towns we’ve seen. It has a beautiful white sandy beach and we saw a gorgeous sunset over the Bay. We had ice cream. The marina was shooting off fireworks as we walked back to the boat.

Sunset over Cape Charles

Sunday was another very early start so that Parker could get back to Chesapeake Beach by 10 to go to work. He is a SEAL in the Navy, stationed in Hawaii, but working in Virginia Beach for several weeks. Brian and I dropped them off, turned around and headed back to the Bay, crossing over the Bridge-Tunnel for the 4th and final time. Black clouds followed us from the southeast as we headed northwest to the York River. It was tropical storm “Bonnie” making her way along the coast, but only giving us some drizzle. It was a nice quiet cruise, a very quiet marina, and a quiet night - except when Charlie escaped out the door and Brian chased after him. Brian didn’t catch him, but he came back anyway after an hour or so of exploration, meowing at the screen door to get in. What a relief that he found his way back, and that he came back at all. We have heard stories of other family-cats that were lost along the way.

Brian’s jet-lag from Europe finally caught up with him this morning, so he slept late and we started out around noon. Now we’re having a gentle ride up the York, just looking.

Brian with George Washington  at Yorktown.

This monument marks the surrender of the British at Yorktown,
paving the way for American independence. 

National Anthem at PAX River

Tuesday, May 24, 9 a.m.

After a very nice weekend with Brandon and family, I’m back in St. Mary’s at Lauren’s house. Nelson is here, too, having just driven from Albuquerque to Lexington Park in three days. He has completed all his paperwork to join the Air Force OCS and could start his training in either mid-August or January. The date is very uncertain at this point. 

Here in Lauren’s townhouse in Lexington Park, we are in the flight pattern. From time to time, the jets overhead are so loud that Nelson and I just stop in the middle of a sentence and stare at each other until they go past and we can hear again. The interesting thing is that the birds here are also the loudest I have ever heard. Perhaps they have all gone deaf, or perhaps they are trying to compete with those huge gray birds that streak overhead.

Every morning at 8:00 they play the National Anthem at the navy base. We can hear it perfectly here at Lauren’s house. I like to go out on her back deck where the sun is shining to listen. Then they play Reveille. Afterwards, I sing/hum the National Anthem for the rest of the morning, my own version that has been adjusted for humming in an alto voice, but is really a medley of several tunes. In the evening they play Taps.

In New England, our small harbor-towns shoot off cannons at sunset. In some harbors, we toot the boats’ horns, and in the Florida Keys, they blow into their conch (say “konk”) shells. It’s fascinating to hear all those off-key notes honking into the sunset. 

Lauren, Nelson and I are going out for chocolate milk shakes at lunch today to celebrate her completing another class toward her masters degree. We have planted flowers in her flower pots. I’ve been catching up on the Blah-g. Brandon and Hermione are anticipating the end of the school year in about three weeks, Jena is planning her wedding in California, and Brianna is wrapping up her work in preparation for graduate school at Harvard beginning in August.

Brian is due back in Norfolk at midnight Thursday. He's been in Abu Dhabi and Berlin for work. I’m leaving here Thursday morning for the four-hour drive with the two cats (and they were awful – they meowed almost the whole time!). On Friday morning we have a few errands to do before we return the rental car, then we’re on our way again.

St. Mary's County, Maryland - Old Home

I’m visiting our daughter, Lauren, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, while Brian travels to Abu Dhabi and Berlin for business. This is where we lived for 13 years and where three of our five children were born. It really does feel like home. I am sitting at Lauren’s kitchen table, listening to jets, jets and more jets, but it is so cloudy and the clouds are so low that I can’t see them even though they are low and right above me. This goes on every day. Lauren calls it their airspace, like jet-class or jet-practice. 

Apparently it has rained here in Maryland for at least a month. Our friends on the Melinda B are way ahead of us and were in the rainy weather for weeks. We, on the other hand, have had fabulous weather almost the whole time. Perhaps Maryland’s weather will suddenly clear up when we arrive on our boat in a few weeks. Even Norfolk, where it has also rained and rained, was nice while we were there. Brian is in Abu Dhabi where it is 100° today and so clear that he can see 50 miles!

Here comes another one! How can jets be so loud and so low but still I can’t SEE them? Even the birds fly up out of the trees when the noise begins.

I feel like I have been lifted right out of my boat life and inserted into another. Yesterday I got the bank statement done and checks written. I did about 8 loads of laundry, including things that need to hang up to dry instead of being baked and shrunk in a laundromat’s dryer.

We want to spend about a month in Virginia, going up and down the big rivers, plus going up the Potomac to D.C. and visiting Virginia’s eastern shore. Even though we lived in Maryland for 20 or 30 years, we never explored the Virginia waters, so we are really looking forward to it. The rivers are the James, the York, the Piankatank, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac, plus Mobjack Bay. Aren’t those great names?

Now it is quiet again - and the clouds have thinned. Everyone is hoping for sunshine.

Haiku Snapshots

At the beginning of the trip, I read “Dreaming Spies” by Laurie King. In it, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes travel to Japan on a ship, and another character introduces them to Haiku. Using only 17 syllables in a 5-7-5 style, it uses words to create vivid verbal pictures. When I missed out on taking photos of some birds in the water, I decided to try to write a Haiku about them instead. If it’s done well, it can be an excellent substitute for a snapshot and would have been especially valuable in the days before the invention photography.

         Shallow, narrow bay,

         Black birds sway on flimsy stakes,

         Waving in our wake

Here are a few more:

         The anchor is set

         Work is done, safe in harbor

         Let the night come on

         Sipping scalding tea

         Boat rocks gently, Monday wakes,

         Sitting with my cats.

         Big unknown country

         We were warned to be afraid

         But folks are friendly

What's in a name?

If you want to keep people away, choose names like “dismal” or “alligator” or “mosquito”. They will not come. 

So far, the Dismal Swamp entrance is just beautiful. The Pasquotank River is as still as it can be, with just a light breeze. The trees grow right out of the water - remember, a marsh has grass and a swamp has trees. They are lovely at this time of year.

We’re just moving along. I’ve got a chicken breast in the crock pot with hopes of making green chicken enchiladas for supper tonight. We have several leftovers plus pimento cheese in the fridge for lunch. And we still have some excellent chocolate cake from the Spoon River Restaurant in Belhaven for afternoon snack. 

It’s always Spring on this trip. It’s been Spring since we left Florida and started heading north, following the mild weather, the flowers and the new leaves. 

That’s about it; couldn’t be better.

Alligator River and Albemarle Sound, NC

We got an early start at 7:30 to travel 84 miles today between Belhaven NC and Elizabeth City NC. In between we will travel on a 21 mile man-made canal between the Pungo River and the Alligator River, then 22 miles on the Alligator River, then a 14 mile crossing of Albemarle Sound, taking us into Elizabeth City at mile marker 51 in the late afternoon. Long day, but what great names! Tomorrow, if all goes well, we will begin the Dismal Swamp and enter Virginia. 

Our days have been spent mostly just moving on. We’ve seen the small towns in North Carolina that we wanted to see, but we rented an Enterprise car in Morehead City to do that. In about 45 minutes we could cover a stretch of road that would take us all day by river. We saw Morehead City, Beaufort NC (pronounced Bo-fort in NC, Bew-fert in SC), New Bern, River Dunes, Oriental, Washington, Belhaven, and a few other itty-bitty towns along the way. Our Mother’s Day lunch was at the Country Kitchen in Bath, with fantastic fried chicken and Brian had those creepy-looking fried soft-shell crabs. The next day we continued Mother’s Day with dinner at the Spoon River restaurant in Belhaven, probably the friendliest restaurant in the world. In North Carolina, restaurants close on Tuesday instead of Monday, so this worked out for us.

We have discovered we get completely different impressions of towns when we enter them by water instead of by land. On Sunday, we saw Belhaven by car. It was just a tiny town off the highway with one deserted main street and hardly any houses. But from the river, Belhaven presented itself as a charming small town with a cute main street and some interesting old houses within walking distance along the waterfront. It was exactly the same town, but from two different views.

There’s something very soothing about traveling on a canal. You can set the GPS to tell the auto-pilot where to go, then just sit back and enjoy the monotonous scenery, usually feeling pretty sure that the canals have been dredged and are deep enough for our boat.

We are crossing several wide bodies of water, but they are deceptive because they are also very shallow. The risk here is that the sand can come in near the ocean inlets, and the depth can suddenly decrease to 4’ or less without our knowing it. On the ICW, we have touched bottom twice, but neither time stopped us. It just makes your heart skip a beat. We stay carefully in the channel (which is about 12 - 15 feet deep generally) and hug the reds or the greens, whichever we’ve been told to do.

On Monday I did a lot of cooking and cleaning while we traveled. We had pork sandwiches with bbq sauce and cole slaw for first lunch, and later pimento cheese sandwiches for second lunch. Today we had leftover swordfish for our first course, asparagus with mashed potatoes as the second course, and leftover guinea hen for the third. All of this was from our Spoon River meal.

Charlie the cat is our night watchman on the boat, but he also wakes us up around 2 and 4 to chat and eat. Lately, miraculously, he has been sleeping through the night. I think that’s because Brian throws hats at him when he meows, and he’s learning!

Quickly through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina

I think I last wrote when we were at the top of Florida. Since April 27, we have covered all of Georgia, all of South Carolina, and the lower half of North Carolina. That quick pace was partly because we wanted to get north to have more time to explore the small towns of North Carolina, and partly to be able to reach Virginia before Brian goes to Europe. That would put me in a good location to get to Maryland to see Lauren, Brandon, Hermione and Ellen. As long as the weather continues to hold and the boat stays fit, we are on track to make it.

We saw:

GEORGIA 

4.27                           Wally’s Leg anchorage near St. Simon’s Is.

4.28                           Isle of Hope, Savannah

SOUTH CAROLINA

4.29 & 30                  Beaufort, Lady’s Island, north of Hilton Hd

5.1                            Charleston

5.2                            Georgetown

5.3                           North Myrtle Beach, six miles from NC

NORTH CAROLINA

5.4                           Southport, NC

5.5                           Mile Hammock Bay anchor, Camp LeJeune

4.6                           Swansboro NC

Mostly we’ve been traveling steadily, covering about 50 - 60 miles each day, and cooking on the boat each night. Frequently we had to slow down for “no wake” zones where we must not put out any kind of wake. To do that, we can go only about 5 mph, and that’s pretty slow. When there are several of these, it really adds to the overall day. Low bridges that have to be opened also slow us down, but there aren’t many of those and our timing (so far) has been very good.

After today, we intend to slow down a bit, traveling only about 20 miles per day, so that we can spend more time visiting and exploring the small North Carolina towns along the way. This weekend we’re planning to rent a car so we can see several towns that are pretty close together - less than an hour by car, but all day by boat.

We had a BIG storm last night, just after we dropped our anchor here near Camp LeJeune, NC. There’s a big anchorage here, probably intended to shelter naval vessels in case of hurricanes, but generally used by pleasure boaters along the ICW. The clouds were as black as I have ever seen, it rained hard, and it turned cold. Today we are back to wearing sweaters, it is so cold. All together a dozen boats anchored overnight. Some of them had to anchor during the storm, but we were safely inside the boat before it began. It was very windy all night, and we all swung back and forth like pendulums, but no one was entangled when I looked this morning, thank goodness.

This phase of the Great Loop isn’t as easy-going as it was last year because Brian spends quite a few hours each evening on the phone with his colleagues in Australia. Our evening is when their morning begins. I have taken to reading on the bed during those hours and am making good progress through the library. I’m proud to say that I made it all the way through “20 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne and am working my way through “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Their writing styles are just not what I’m used to, but once I accept their “voice”, the stories are very interesting.

This morning Brian is listening to a web-meeting on his computer, but we’ll get going as soon as it ends. It’s only 15 miles to Swansboro NC.

Worries, No Worries

No worries

Worries