Portsmouth and the Great Dismal

         Our friends Bob and Jeanne came to visit us in Portsmouth.  We went out to breakfast at a great little place Yoolks on Us, who accommodated our desire to sit outside, even though they weren’t officially serving people out there.  

Bob and Jeanne 

Afterwards Dan and I took a short walk through the Olde Town portion of Portsmouth to see the many charming homes and churches.  Each block is named and there are many placards telling the history of the building, home, or entire street.  We didn’t have time to visit the Portsmouth Naval Museum, which was literally beside our dock.  Next time.  Today we wanted to get into the Great Dismal Swamp.

We almost missed the turnoff.  There was a long line of cruisers going south, and all of the ones in front of us chose the other ICW route - the Virginia Cut.  We turned down Deep Creek and made the lock at 1330, officially entering the canal by 1400.  

We love the Dismal.  It’s so beautiful and so peaceful, and this time of year, so colorful.  We cruised along at a pleasant 4 knots, enjoying the solitude.  About half way through the canal we stopped for the night at the tiny free dock across from the feeder ditch that leads to Lake Drummond. 

In the morning we took the dinghy up that ditch, two and a half miles, to the little park and dam run by the Army Corps of Engineers.  There is a self-operated electric tram that portages your dinghy from the feeder ditch into the lake itself.  We used it seven years ago to get to the lake to explore, but this time, it wasn’t in operation and apparently hasn’t been operational for awhile.  We sat at one of the picnic tables to enjoy our snack and greeted a couple of local kayakers who pulled up with their lunch.  They would go on to tour the lake, but we didn’t feel like lugging the dinghy up over the land, so we just went back down the feeder ditch to our boat, untied and started cruising again.  We crossed from Virginia into North Carolina and decided to bypass their welcome center’s dock to tie up at the wall down near the end of the canal.  However, the seawall we’d been expected was between the bridge and the lock, and neither would open until 0830 the next morning, so we ended up turning around and going back to the welcome center, where we met the people on Ektopia, with whom Dan had been chatting on the radio.  We weren’t the only vessel to come in after dark; about an hour later a catamaran came in to take the last spot on the dock.  After we convinced the catamaran to shut off their generator, we all had a quiet night.