First Day on the Intracoastal

We prepare for our travels by filing up the fuel & water tanks. Our route is entered in the chart plotter and the IPad is displaying our color coded path. We are loaded for bear and leave Portsmouth…behind a tug pushing a barge full of sand, 5 sailboats and 3 trawlers… all crawling…all crawling at 5.1 knots (half speed) I am jumping out of my skin. We take our place in the parade, breathe, relax slow down, forget about making time and enjoy the scenery as it morphs from the Industrial Navy docks of Portsmouth/Norfolk into the bucolic greenery of Northern Virginia.

Waiting for the first bridge opening, we reorder the group. Without a word spoken, the faster powerboats meander to the front of the pack, so we don’t have to pass the slower sailboats on the next lag. The bridge opens and the power boats all defer to the 80 foot motor yacht, that takes the lead. We go through the bridge and hear on the radio that one of the sailboats has lost its engine, which has created a huge kurfluffle, as no one comes through the bridge for a long time. No matter, we’re with the fast (8 knot) boats and on our way…

A few miles farther, we wait for a lock opening, where we all mill around for 20 minutes and try to hold position while the current pushes us towards the closed and ominous lock doors. Eventually the doors open and those of us in front tie up to a wall with big black plastic vertical fenders. The lock master instructs us to tend bow and stern lines, while the lock changes water level. After 10 minutes, everyone let’s go of their lines and powers out. This is the only lock we will encounter and the logistics are well documented in our travel guides. It was such a nonevent, we couldn’t tell if the water went up or down.

After the lock, we followed the trawler Esmeralde from Jamestown the rest of way to Coinjock North Carolina. We had been tied up next to Esmeralde at Portsmouth and knew that this couple was experienced with this stretch of water so we kept pace a half mile behind them. The Aquamaps navigation was a bust. Our chart plotter showed us clearly on one side of the channel while Aquamaps showed us on the other. Switching back to Navionics was worse, it showed us going over dry land, which we try to avoid. Breathe, relax and follow the channel markers. (And when things get really confusing, drop in behind a sailboat, they almost always run aground before we do)

Coinjock North Carolina is a wide spot in the road and the only place to stop along this section of  the ICW. It is very popular with travelers going in both directions. We were late making a reservation and on the smaller end of the transients, so we wound up on the less desirable western side of the piers, amongst derelict boats and other flotsam. The WiFi didn’t reach here so Kathy couldn’t stream her Tuesday yoga class. We were tied up to pilings on a fixed pier when a large tug went by at 12:30 am and sent a pier pounding wake. I imagined the captain chuckling as the mega yachts rolled their polished topsides against the pilings. SkipStone is built like a seagoing bumper car, with two horizontal rub rails to defend itself from abusive wakes and clumsy captains. They have been well tested in both situations.