Southbound

November 10, 2022

After pulling out of Baltimore, we headed south, poking our way down the Chesapeake Bay, and into the ICW. We have remained on the boat for a week until today, playing cards, board games, eating well and watching some shows on various streaming sites.

While the Chesapeake isn’t one of our favourite places to cruise it remains chock full of interesting sights and cool little places to anchor for a night. We also had beautiful weather for most of the transit, with flat seas. The air was so still that on one day, we were engulfed in fog for the first five hours of the run, so we moved slowly and carefully through the water.

We arrived in Norfolk just as Canadian warship 337, HMCS Fredericton was pulling out, apparently heading overseas. One of our family friends, Tim B. is serving in the navy, so I checked with him to see if he was aboard, but he is aboard HMCS Harry DeWolf (an icebreaker/warship) and heading North in the new year.

We took an easy run to Chesapeake, VA where we filled up at Atlantic Yacht Basin with diesel (ouch!) and ordered a pizza to quench our desire for land food.

After Chesapeake we made a looong run to the crux of the Alligator River and the Pungo Canal where we anchored to watch the lunar eclipse. While there are plenty of pretty pictures of the lunar eclipse out there, watching it at 5 am from the back of your boat in the middle of nowhere is a special treat. It would have been nice to capture the colour of the blood moon as it hung in the sky with the red haze. It was beautiful, but on a rocking boat, a snap of the camera was the best that could be done.

The last two days have been really windy. Hurricane Nicole has been sucking air from the north to feed her vortex and the winds have been howling so we took a short run to Belhaven, NC and anchored for an evening while things blew.

Figuring that things wouldn’t be too bad yesterday, we set off for New Bern, NC and it blew again. We did make it after dark, anchored in a small bay and will wait a couple of days before we move on.

Boats are backed up all along the coast waiting for the storm to pass and at the same time it is too rough out on the open ocean, so we need to wait out transient dockage to free up since our boat is a little more difficult to anchor just anywhere. We are getting used to not having a schedule, and will hang out until our path south is destined to be smooth.

It is our first time in New Bern, NC and we decided to do some sight seeing. There is a replica estate, of that built for the first governor, the Tryon Palace which offered some interesting history and beautiful gardens.

As in many towns on the east coast of the US, there is other interesting history. New Bern is where Pepsi was born, and so we went to the ‘Pepsi’ store and had a bottle of Pepsi and some popcorn. The memorabilia was also intriguing but we live on a boat and have no place for more silly t-shirts, cups and key chains.

What is left of the hurricane should blow over us by Saturday morning and we will begin to move south again.