Day 14

Day 14…Tuesday May 27, Lake Drummond Campground, Dismal Swamp

I suggest you give this a listen:

http://www.gdradio.net/gd.asx

2 weeks since we took off like a fool at the beach who runs and jumps into water 6” deep, but in our case there was no way to stick in our toe first. And only a fool would think there is a way to prepare physically, because it is at least as much mental, using our bodies as vehicles and distancing ourselves from the protesting muscles and managing the pain in a continual roller coaster ride.

The last 2 days have been hard work.

Yow!
And we ain't talkin basketball.
Dismal Swamp, Lake Drummond, USACE Dam Campground deserted except V&me...We paddled most of the way yesterday fm 5 mi below ElizCity and all day today to here and while the rig is slick, it weighs 500lb us included.
We spend most of our time involved in intense thought, as we're involved in intense exercise, that being pulling water...actually pushing with the other arm, alternating with the same balance of a bike rider, making minute adjustments to the path with a harder stroke, a different length...a jolt of water to alter inertia of that 500lb slider with a flat v bottom and hard chine (saved V from flipping at campground when the boat drifted off the dock and she found herself in 2 places at once - the tilt of the boat could have only been done on a hard chine...I think that means the sides of the boat are nearly vertical against the flat v - it'll accommodate a fair tip without going over - that would take a lot.

So, as we talk, the talk is intense as well, about the exercise/wind/wave issues at hand, and while we're stronger, we're trashed after the last 2 days of pulling/pushing and sliding along at 1-2.5 mph...shoulders in shocking pain... while at the same time holding about 12 other conversations, able to pick up where we left off...trying to get better acquainted, testing limits...it is more intense, rewarding and dangerous than the other endeavors, and the scenery's pretty good and gives us this opportunity to chat.
Over the past 2 weeks, it has been about 50/50 paddle/sail, and both have their own good/bad, but given the choice, we'd usually let the wind run us ahead…especially after the last couple of days.

V has a policy: after soaking/cooking/eating beans(turtle)&rice the day before, she won’t eat them for the next evening meal – she fears indigestion or worse. I have no policy.

But in celebration of 2 weeks (we ain’t celebrating – it’s recuperating), we fired up our one burner liquid fuel Coleman stove for the first time ever – we never tried it out after getting it at WalMart a month ago and whacking my feet against the metal fins of the stove for about 10 days before V suggested I relocate it to a less painful location, so I had developed a considerable enmity…it works great! for rice and turnip greens, and V is talking about hot coffee and oatmeal for breakfast – ever, and now we have all the comforts, including a screen-enclosed picnic room with electricity! at this Corps of Engineers Dam campground with only us here…nobody for at least 2 miles in the heart of Dismal Swamp – skeeters and other flies are surprisingly tame – you want skeeters you go to Hobuken NC, a humid bracky ICWW ditch…here in the middle of the swamp the air is fresh and the water pure brown clean. The dam here is where the water from higher Lake Drummond is parsed into the Dismal Swamp Canal, which is dammed a the N and S ends by locks, which in turn drop the water level for boats to sea level…as in Pasquotank River NC in our case this morning or, in a couple of days the lock at Deep Creek on the way N to Norfolk.

Yesterday after we left the PTboathouse we sailed/paddled 5 mi across a 10-15 SW wind up the W side of the Pasquotank R– nice stretch of coast and a nice place to live and got to Elizabeth City yesterday around noon and went in search of…anything, and left an hour later with a couple of cans of tuna and crackers and granola bars as a wild one/day extravagance. OK town, and the best place to live we saw so far. We also sat in a sandwich shop and ate sandwiches…but all the time we were headed back to the boat to shove off and move on.

Above ElizCity the river turns into a river instead of a bay, twisty and winding into the N, except it was party time for the high school kids in their ski boats and jet skis, and we did all we could to avoid the motorized mayhem and merciless punishment inflicted on the engines and ears and water and wildlife…and eventually we wound our way into the freshwater savanna as the afternoon wore out and evening approached, paddling and then catching wind once in a while for a short sailing break…into a long straightaway stretching through the woods as only an engineer would have it, a canal leading to the South Mills Lock (the southern one lifting us up to the Dismal Swamp Canal)…arriving pushing 7 PM. Wind doesn’t do much in the bottom of narrow corridors – the trees block and sometimes the wind goes backward to fill a void as the treetops sway the other way, so we couldn’t hardly sail – too many times the sail suddenly blew us backward. The lock (another USACOE project) didn’t open til 8:30 am, and there was no legal place to camp so I went knocking and we were granted access to a dock and fresh cut farm grass for the tent – the owner had gone to a rest home and nobody was home, but the lady across the street cited a similar incident last year when the owner said it was fine…be clean, etc…so she thought it was fine for us to do it this year. Not much vagrant action through here, I guess. About 25 miles yesterday.

The USACOE guy didn’t appear until 8:30 sharp, even though we hovered below the lock since 8:05, and then not until I blasted my blaster horn…said they didn’t normally let kayaks through or some darn thing…but there was no even difficult way to get our rig around and back in…it would have been gruesome…and we locked up…a s ign in the lock read Wilmington 282 mi, Washington DC 230 mi…so we’re planning on DC and that makes us better than halfway there… and we got to the NC Welcome Center and got some info about the Dismal Swamp and then we stopped to look at a great sailboat for sale…we talked about it some while paddling the last 9 miles– a desperate distraction for desperate people …for a total of about 15 today… to here, in VA. We made it here wore out and it is beautiful in its isolation – a cold front is due tonight and N wind for a couple of days, so we figure to stay here at least a day, get up into Lake Drummond and look around – getting above the dam involves an electric tram-type boat transport – you let the cart on tracks below the water load on and go over the top – pictures tomorrow.