Albemarle, Pungo, Pamlico, Goose Creek, Bay River, Neuse, Adams Creek, Core Creek

Those of you who are following along and may be, for whatever reason, jealous of our glorious, exciting, romantic, glamorous, interesting way of life, here is your chance to gloat, sitting in your warm home, in front of a fireplace,in your silk jammies and robe, with your feet up, and the maid cleaning for you, and the butler serving you another hot toddy, pipe by your side, you finally have time to relax and read enormously long sentences such as this one, while we put up with four foot waves slamming our little boat on the side and rocking us so much it almost spills the rum, and it's cold and foggy, and the wind is blowing so hard that we have to struggle to get the sail down, and the sky is horizon to horizon gray and it will be for days, and there is no cell phone service, and the chartplotter doesn't work and the TV doesn't work and we have to eat stuff out of a can and we're pretty sure God is pissed off at us.

This was the last smidgen of blue sky and sunshine that we saw for the next week.

On the Pasquatank River, the pride of Elizabeth City is the Blimp Factory, which makes all the blimps (or dirigibles, if you prefer) except the Good Year Blimp, which for unexplainable reasons, are not built here.  (I prefer unexplainable, rather than inexplicable, because when I say inexplicable, it makes me hiccup - or hiccough, if you prefer, which is dumb.)

After getting soundly beat up on the Albemarle Sound, we motored up (or down, I don't really know) the Alligator River, which has no Alligators, as I mentioned before.  And we anchored at Deep Point, the conjunction of The Alligator River, and the Alligator River/Pungo Canal.  I hope you're finding this more interesting than I am, cause it takes a long time to type all that stuff.  We took this picture of our boat, because there was little else to take a picture of. (Notice that I have a blatant disregard for the dangling preposition principle.  I do know what is correct, I just don't care. I'm pretty sure Mrs. Krampf, the only English teacher I had worth anything, is dead by now.)

This is what we can see from where we are anchored in Deep Point.  Pretty, in a drab sort of way, but desolate - there probably isn't a human within 10 miles who isn't on a boat.  At night, it's as dark as the inside of a cow.  With the overcast, there wasn't a star or even a hint of a moon.  You can see the anchor lights of nearby boats and maybe a lighted navigation mark or two, but you can't see the horizon / sky delineation.  But it's noisy.  The wind just whistles and roars through the trees on shore and the rigging and slaps waves against the hull.

We pull up the anchor after staying two nights.  We didn't leave the day before because of limited visibility - thick fog and / or hard rain.

and head on down the Alligator / Pungo Canal.  Which looks pretty much like this all of the way.

After the Canal and the Pungo River, we cross a small corner of the Pamlico Sound and enter Goose Creek where we see this scene - your Coast Guard hard at work enforcing No Wake zones.  It was working, we couldn't see anyone awake.

First couple of times we passed Hobuncken on Goose Creek, there had been an opening bridge here.  But it's since been replaced, as you can see.

Under the bridge, men fish...

and run camoflaged boats around. Can you see it?

  Here's a fleet of big shrimp boats tied up.

Robin Ross (redundant verbiage)

Not sure I'd want a shrimp caught by this rusty boat - might get tomain or something.

 This is the Sharon Nicole...

 

whose Captain runs her into things on occasion.

This is the shrimp processing plant on Goose Creek.

These are Goose Creek fishermen - waving to us.

And this is the same group of Goose Creek fishermen ignoring us. So I cut off the bottom half of the picture. That'll fix 'em.

Next stop, anchor on Bay River.  We took no pix because the weather was crappy.  Then Town Creek behind Beaufort, NC.  where the wind blew and it was cold (it got to 39 degrees) and it rained and it was gloomier than it needed to be.  And so we took a slip at the Town Creek Marina for a day, so we could plug in and warm up.  Then, of course, it got sunny and warm, and we wasted 60 bucks.  But we went shopping and replenished the rum supply and other less important stuff.  But that's another story.  Stay tuned for Beaufort, NC - next time we get an Internet connection.