May 25

Day 12 May 25 Memorial Day? Sunday – is not MemDay at the end of the month, like NEXT weekend? I give up.
This blog entry has a whole different feel – things have turned easy. No more pain.

Headed for Elizabethtown, gateway to the Dismal Swamp – real name – main claim to fame being GeorgeWashington engineered the canal through that connects the Albermarle and Pamlico Sounds to the Chesapeake Bay, avoiding the Atlantic and making for easy commerce – back in the 1700s. Today, to us it represents a fresh water respite from the brackish sounds and rivers…tasty but wouldn't want to rely on them full time... fresh water is good. The time of year associated with MemDay, a week early or not, is prime time for biting insects, they tell me…mayflies, those little yellow-winged biters, silent but deadly. I don't believe them…and even if I did I'd still be ready to do combat, having bought 2 NASCAR shirt pins (one for Vickie) that are said to repel anything alive for 180 hours…cost $1 each at the WalMart yesterday at Kill Devil Hills.

We left Nick and Dawn's ShangriLa (picture) this morning rested, repaired and lazy, and tonight it's still lazy – we've gotten soft, and it looks like the thrill is over...no more tornadoes, tempestuous seas… I try to keep track of the weather, and these rivers and sounds cause small-scale wind vagaries that are always fooling me, as well as the forecast from the NWS, which couldn't begin to provide that kind of detail, so sensitive to us in a 500 lb 21' toboggan kayak.

So Albermarle Sound exacted a little more revenge for daring the fickle winds and seas…while all good reason and the weather forecast would have one expect a wind N (coming from the N) 5-10 turning NE, we left Point Harbor going S on the lee side of the peninsula, under the bridge (picture), took a right around the point going W and got whacked with 10-15 and 1-2' waves in the face and hunkered into an slow pull from 8:30-noon…a couple of days ago it would have been deadly to torn arms but today the time passed and I even thought to take a (picture) of an osprey nest, but realized got no shots of the furies of hell a few days back when the wind blew…cameras are a new thing. So after 11 the wind calmed, turned to NE around noon and we raised the sail and the wind veered around behind us as we ran NW around 3 mph and made it to around 5mi S of ElizCity, up the Pasquotank River…great water, dark but clean, like weak coffee…tasted pretty good too…

So in the distance all day as we approached there was a Gigantic Structure, like a highway dept salt building but 1000X larger – like to blotted out part of the horizon, and only the govt could afford or have reason to build – looked like a mega-blimp hangar. Come to find out it is a blimp hangar, built by the Navy some years back. It replaced one that was the world's largest free-arched structure, same size, that burnt years ago. This one now houses advertiser blimps, it is said.

They say the curved wall opens like an pearl oyster. This picture isn't mine – I lifted off a google search.

And you see the boat ramp at the water's edge…at 6pm after a long (9.5 hours) in the kayak, covering around 25 miles that ramp looked real good, so there was a kid who said he thought it would be fine to set up a tent by the ramp – there were no cars or action so it looked great…easy, fire up the Coleman and cook the beans/rice that Vickie soaked in a jar on the deck all day, but she wasn't too thrilled about the spot – something about private property and there was nobody to ask permission, and when the kid's mother drove up and told him she thought we shouldn't stay there but stay further up at a sandy beach, Vickie said let's reload what we unloaded and move on – I felt otherwise, having used the cart to get the boat up the ramp and it looked like one of those gift sites, but she was adamant and there could be no argument or attack to do any good, so we shoved back off and went a little further till I spied a sandy beach and went and asked across the street if it would be ok to set up and then leave first thing in the morning. Turns out we ran into another saint – the world seems to be crawling with 'em, and we've sure been lucky to stumble into them.

So this saint is Mark Small, the demonstrative one in the (picture) with his pals and Vickie. A great soul, a guy we will always revere. Seems his family holds title to a boat house (picture), and he offered it to us for the night. The Navy built the boathouse as a PT boat hangar in days of yore and his extended family worked it over into all the comforts of home but nobody was using it so he thought it would be good for us to use and he was so right– in fact we're thinking about building one of our own somewhere someday – up on pilings on the water… moves nicely. Vickie cooked the beans on a real stove, I charged batteries (some on-board gizmos aren't working as they should after repeated immersion) And he offered a beer upon meeting us and then showed the fridge with more and I drank a second thanks Mark – the first beer I've drunk since early March and this whole trip is going down the tubes – it was supposed to be an ordeal, and all was going great until a few days ago. Now we're getting back to normal again. Maybe the Dismal Swamp'll cure us.