1800 Days – Seg. 20, Ch. 5, Pg. 1-4

Chapter 5 – Finding a Winter's Home

 

    When we awoke early on Wednesday morning at our anchorage in Willoughby Bay we were eager and excited and anxious to be underway. This day had a completely different feel. Now we were cruising with a purpose, heading for Beaufort, North Carolina to try to find a home for the coming winter months. This morning we would be transiting Norfolk harbor, one of the busiest in the country and one that had impressed us tremendously during our two previous experiences. And we would be beginning our journey along the famed ICW, the Intracoastal Waterway, being granted yet a third chance to experience what we had come to think of as a major resource of America.

    The name, Intracoastal Waterway, can have several different meanings. To some, it refers to the entire 3000 mile waterway system, mostly inshore but sometimes not, stretching from Maine down the east coast to the Florida Keys, and then up the west coast of Florida and along the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Brownsville, Texas. To us, however, as to many, the ICW is the marked and maintained waterway from Mile 0 in Norfolk, down the east coast to Key West for a distance of 1243 miles. Walter Cronkite has referred to it as the "ribbon of sunshine" while others, sometimes affectionately, sometimes disparagingly, call it simply The Ditch. Altogether it is an amazingly complex system of interconnected bays and rivers, creeks and sounds, estuaries, land cuts and canals. It is maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers and it is a monumental and expensive undertaking requiring constant dredging of one section or another and continual attendance to the buoyage and various channel markers. But this ICW is a national treasure, allowing not only thousands of pleasure boats, but also thousands of tugs and barges with a huge total cargo, to transit north and south along the coast without the hazards of navigating in the open ocean. To us on that early Wednesday morning as we left Willoughby Bay, it was an avenue to new places, to new experiences, to a new life.

    But first we had to get through the Norfolk waterfront following the south branch of the Elizabeth River. This channel is used by huge commercial ships, tankers and container ships, and all kinds of military craft from aircraft carriers to submarines. And there is a constant traffic of barges and tugs; some of these are large ships themselves, at least compared to Summer School, with superstructures three or four stories high. There are dry docks that can accommodate the largest of ships, and huge cranes that dwarf surrounding buildings. On that morning we passed behind an aircraft carrier moored to a dock; no one can truly appreciate the size of such a ship unless they see it from the water in their own small boat. We passed a dry dock where there was a battleship being painted! How do you ever even conceive of painting a battleship? As it had done on our two previous trips through these waters, the sheer magnitude of everything, the scale of the equipment, the amount and nature of the work and the incredible size of the structures, filled us with awe.

The Norfolk Waterfront - A Giant Crane Dwarfs A Naval Ship 

   Yet we could not allow ourselves the luxury of simply gawking. It was necessary to keep a careful eye on the channel markers, the tugs and barges, the other ships and pleasure craft that were heading south just like us. We had planned what was for us a long cruising day of almost 65 miles from our anchorage in Willoughby Bay to Coinjock, North Carolina, a well-known and strategic stop on the waterway. It was almost 9:30 a.m. when we reached Hospital Point on the Portsmouth side of the channel and I brought Summer School close to the marker for Mile 0 of the ICW. We gave a brief cheer and then re-focused on our navigation. Coinjock was at Mile 50 and Beaufort was at about Mile 205. But before we were out of the Norfolk area we had to pass through 6 bridges that would have to open for us. Though three of these were railroad bridges and were normally kept open, we found this morning that there were trains on two of them and we had to wait. Finally we cleared the Norfolk area and entered the Great Bridge Locks, which connect the South Branch of the Elizabeth River to the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal. We remembered the confusion and uncertainty that we experienced here three years previously when we had our first encounter with locks; it felt good now to know what we were doing.

    Once through the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal with its three low highway bridges and one railroad bridge, we entered the North Landing River and the remainder of the day was much more relaxed. We had run the boat hard to make the bridge openings and now we settled back into our normal cruising speed of about 7 mph at 1600 rpm on the engine. It was a beautiful early fall day with a warm sun and cool air. Eventually the North Landing River brought us out into Currituck Sound, the first of the North Carolina sounds. Though the channel was narrow with grounding depths close on the sides, the sound was not large and there were no worries about wind and rough water. Such would not be the case tomorrow, we knew, when we would have to cross Albemarle Sound, one of the most feared bodies of water on the entire ICW.

    The small village of Coinjock is located on the North Carolina Cut that connects Currituck Sound to the North River, approximately where Highway 158 crosses the cut on its way to the outer banks. Although the village is small there are three popular marinas that line both sides of the channel with long face docks. What makes Coinjock such a popular and strategic stop on the ICW is not simply that it is a convenient day's cruise from the facilities of Norfolk or that the competition between the marinas results in dockage rates and fuel prices that are among the lowest on the waterway. More importantly, at least to south-bound cruisers, Coinjock is the last marina stop before crossing Albemarle Sound some 15 miles to the south. In rough weather Coinjock provides a welcome haven while waiting for conditions on the sound to become calm enough to allow a safe crossing. As on our previous trips we planned to stay this night at the marina on the east side of the channel, simply named Coinjock Marina, and at 5 p.m. the dockmaster, Louis, with a greeting that told us he remembered us from our previous visits, helped us into our space on the face dock among all the many other boats. The number of boats at the marinas on both sides of the channel left no doubt that we were solidly in the middle of the annual fall boat migration to the south. We felt the same kind of excitement and exhilaration that we did when we stayed in Coinjock on our first trip south in 1993. And on this evening, as we did then, we had an excellent seafood feast at the marina restaurant before a quiet night and a sound sleep.

The Coinjock Marina - Its Long Facedock Empty At Mid-Day