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!