The Beauty of Dismal Swamp

The morning is quite with the muted colors on the trees
 and mist slithers along the water's edge as we begin our day.

     We all have been looking forward to this portion of the trip.  We bypassed the Dismal Swamp on our trip south, but we would not end this trip without seeing this place that George Washington surveyed “back in the day.”

The railroad bridge tender's house.

One of the side creeks

     The trip needed to be timed as the locks and bridge only open at specific times each day.  So we needed to be at the South Mills Lock at 11:30 for the opening. Pekabu was fortunate to have the lead today.  It gave me the opportunity to take pictures form the bow. With the cool morning temperatures, there was even some early morning mist rising from the water in amongst the trees.

Entering the 1st lock

     As we traveled further north, I spotted an osprey with it's breakfast.  He also spotted and squawked at us.  As we got closer, he flew further up the creek.   I once again spotted him; he spotted us; he squawked more the closer we came, then few further up the creek.  He actually repeated this 4 times before he few down the creek with his small fish.  I don’t know if he repeated this with the other boats, or if he went up another branch of the creek, away from the “terrible boats.”

  

  The beauty of the ride was simply magnificent.  We removed the canvas connector between the dodger and the bimini just so we could appreciate the vista. Though the trees had completed their blooming, the honeysuckle perfumed various parts of our ride while unknown sweet floral scents drifted from other areas.  Surprisingly, even though this is “The Dismal Swamp“ we never encountered a “swamp” or “bog” smell in our travels today.

I finally got "the" turtle picture!

     What we DID encounter today was one grumpy trawler captain, who didn’t want to be passed (rammed our dinghy in the lock, blaming it on a bad port engine and never apologized), two sail boats, who wanted positions in the first lock so that they would be able to grab the dock at the Visitor’s Center, two logs in the canal and a couple of dead heads on the bottom that gave us significant bumps while we were traveling in 8 feet of water. . .and an ever changing spectacular view.

The lush, but narrow canal that was 8' deep with some submerged debris
that we bumped at 5' below the surface.

    Once we exited the canal we had to wait 50 minutes for the Glimerton Bascule Bridge, which had changed from an on demand to an hourly schedule last November. Dan dropped the hook and we rafted for the first time in 7 months.

We are not in the Bahamas anymore!

It was a great time to spend a half hour rather than circle.  By the time the bridge lifted, there were 8 boats and a tug pushing a barge, which was thankfully traveling extremely slow and was the last to go through the bridge. Unfortunately,

Rafted and waiting for the bridge
to open.

Andiamo needed to drop anchor just at the edge of the channel due to the engine overheating. Martha maneuvered Brunelle over and enabled Dan to transfer over to lend a hand to replace a belt.  After about 40 minutes we were on our way to Tidewater Marina in Portsmouth.  We had already decided to eat at the restaurant at the marina, which was a definite plus tonight considering we were all tied up by about 7:30 PM.

    The ICW Cruising Guide has been put away. Tomorrow we will be back to the Chesapeake and our home waters and well dog-eared charts.

~  ~ (\_~ ~ ~     Kathy and Pete