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Today was a great day. We had the kind of weather that cruisers love; good cloud cover, (so we don’t fry) nice winds and calm seas. We left Coinjock at 8:00 because we had 5 or 6 bridges and one lock that we had to time. We were with 3 sailboats and 2 other power boats going through all the bridges. It was fun. We saw lots of osprey and their babies on their nests on the aids to navigations.
We also saw our first bald eagle on this trip.
This is a photo of the software navigation that we use. We just wanted to show you the man- made ‘ditch’ that we traveled today. As you can see, it is just a straight shot north!
We were feeling pretty good about going into the small lock as we had a fair amount of practice going through the much larger locks in Okeechobee in Florida. However, we are still re-learning our skills. Lynnie’s lassoing skills need work!
Locking up Following our buddy boats up to Norfolk
Captain Rick Entering from the south into Norfolk
The Norfolk/Southern Railroad lift bridge which is usually in the up position
Coming into Norfolk was as awesome as always. The ship traffic is a bit daunting but didn’t cause us any troubles. The Naval Ship Yard had some really interesting boats undergoing maintenance. The first one, below, is a Destroyer. My dad is retired Navy and left from Norfolk to to go to sea many times. He has told us some amazing stories. He was on several different kinds of ships but one of them was a Destroyer like the one below.
We have no idea what this ship below is but it sure does look like Darth Vador. It appears to be about 200+’ long and a trimaran which probably goes very fast. We in the recreational boating community have come to measure expense in terms of “boat units.” Since the very word “boat” means “bring on another thousand” I wonder what a “naval ship unit is?” I would suspect that the anchor alone on the destroyer above is somewhere in the multiple hundred thousand dollar range … yikes …! I wonder how much Darth Vador’s engines cost?
A rather old looking aircraft carrier getting a face lift
It took us about 7 1/2 hours to get to Portsmouth. Norfolk, Portsmouth and Hampton are cities that are right next to each other. We are now on the face dock of a marina that has great prices for both dockage and fuel. We figure that the price of fuel will only get higher as we move north so we are going to fuel up in the morning. After a run like we made today, the engine room is usually around 100+ degrees so we will fuel up in the morning as we need to use the fuel sight gages located in the engine room to know when to stop putting fuel into the boat. Phew!!
Tomorrow we will leave for a beautiful bay named Mobjack on the southern Chesapeake that we stopped in on our last trip. We will meet up with our friends Todd and Brenda on Lifes2short. We met them in the Bahamas last year and are looking forward to catching up with their travels.
