Cruising the Albemarle Loop

We are underway across the Albemarle Sound, heading southeast from the Perquimans River bound for the Alligator River and the ICW southbound. Seas are one foot on a short period, and we're seizing the window, having been pinned down by high winds for the last four days. It's been an eventful week and there is a lot to catch up.

Super sunset over Vector at the Edenton Town Dock. Historic (relocated) Roanoake Lighthouse at right.

When last I posted we were spending the night at the town dock in Columbia, NC. Monday morning we took a short walk under the bridge to the visitor center, dropping off our trash and recycling on the way. We made a quick stop at the post office before heading home. Louise did one last load of laundry, with the alleged docks with water and power still ahead of us being a big unknown, and we dropped lines to head back out into the Albemarle Sound.

The sound was nearly flat calm and we turned west toward the historic town of Edenton, where reports said there was 10' of depth at the town docks, even though our charts showed far less. It was a pleasant cruise that took us under the Albemarle Sound Bridge and past Hornblow Point before angling toward the mouth of the Chowan River. Just before the mouth we turned north into Edenton Bay. Under way I called ahead to the Albemarle Plantation Marina, our next stop, who allowed we might be able to cross the entrance channel bar, charted at 5.5', and penciled us in.

We approached the harbor dead slow, but we found nothing less than 8' all the way in. We tied to the lone T-head (map), a bit oddly shaped, but with plenty of room and depth for Vector. Save for a lone Duffy day boat, clearly berthed there for the season, we had the entire marina to ourselves. We found working power and water on the dock, including a 100a receptacle for the occasional superyacht. The dockmaster, really a municipal maintenance worker, met us on the dock, took our details, and gave us some information about the town.

Vector at the Edonton Dock. We have it mostly to ourselves.

It turned out to be a lovely stop, and we were surprised by the amount of history here. It is one of the few towns spared total destruction in the civil war, and there are structures and monuments here dating to the Revolution. Among other things, the town is famous for having its own "tea party," organized by local activist Penelope Barker. The visitor center is in her historic home, relocated to the waterfront from a spot further inland.

I had made dinner reservations at the Herringbone restaurant, named for the historic industry here and located in a historic building near the dock.  Somehow they had lost the reservation, and a band was just setting up for live music anyway, so we instead walked over to the Watermen's Grill. We're glad we did; it was a more casual vibe where we ate in the bar, the food was good, and they had some nice drafts. They have a Facebook page, and the next day I was alerted to the fact that they had posted a photo of Vector with the sunset behind her to their page -- small town, small world.

Chowan County Courthouse from 1767.

Tuesday morning we walked over to the visitor center for the 10:30 trolley tour of the town. It was $25 for the two of us, and well worth it. The very knowledgeable guide spoke non-stop for a full hour, even though the whole loop around town could not have been much more than a mile or two. I won't bore you with the details and will instead leave the history of Edenton and its many historic structures as an exercise for the interested reader.

We were enjoying the town so much that on Tuesday morning we also made the decision to extend our stay for a second night; the dock is free for 48 hours. A full day at a dock with 50-amp power, which was a steal at $6 per night, let me spend a few hours top-balancing the lithium house bank. I found two of the six batteries a little short, so performance should now be a little better moving forward. I also put the e-bike on the ground and made a quick provision run to Food Lion and Walgreens. We ended the day with dinner at the 309 Bistro right downtown, which was also good.

Penelope Barker House, with two cannon of the "Edenton Bell Battery" -- the Confederacy had little metal and churches donated bells to be melted into these cannon. War trumps religion.

Throughout the day we had an ongoing conversation with Stacey and Dave aboard Stinkpot. We've decided to take them up on their Thanksgiving dinner offer, and we were working through when we would connect and what their plans were for Elizabeth City. They did spend one night there, but as luck would have it, we are in a cold snap here, with nighttime temperatures dropping into the low 40s, and days only reaching the mid-50s. There is no power at any of the free docks in Elizabeth City, and so they were looking at going around the corner and up the Perquimans to Hertford, where there is a free dock with free power, nominally for two nights. Stacey asked the town about a longer stay to wait out a windstorm, and they basically said they don't throw anyone out unless people are waiting to get in.

Hertford was our penultimate planned stop on the Albemarle Loop, which we had figured to end in Ellizabeth City. We thus planned on spending our final night in Edenton, one night at the Albemarle Plantation, and then we would maybe see them in Hertford, which would be a great place for us to shelter from the same forecast winds.  It's a very protected harbor, and if we could not make the reportedly shallow dock, we could at least anchor.

This handy diagram was in the dockmaster office.

Wednesday morning we dropped lines after topping up the water tank, and made our way to the town pump-out across the marina. The third dockmaster since our arrival came out to turn on the machine, and after we finished our business I followed him into the office to settle up our grand total of twelve bucks for the power. The pump-out was free. Edenton was the best stop on the whole Albemarle Loop and I highly recommend the detour off the ICW to see it. Just mind any south wind; we had light southerlies overnight and they bounced us around a little even inside the breakwall.

We threaded our way out of the harbor and turned east. But before we even made it to the bridge, the forecast for Thursday had deteriorated, and I was calling Albemarle Plantation to wave off. We could see ourselves plowing our way across the shallow bar in calm water on the way in, and then getting trapped there until at least today as the winds either lowered the depth, or made it too rough to want to try a shallow-bar crossing. We also read the whole marina can be miserable in strong winds.

Our own private harbor.

Instead we moved up our plan to go to Hertford, committing to hunker down there until today to wait out the blow, either at anchor or at the dock. We arrived just a couple of hours after Stinkpot, who sounded out the dock for us and left us the deeper and longer T-head. They reported 6' or just a hair under, which sounded workable. The drawbridge on the way into town is normally unstaffed and requires a phone call an hour ahead of time, so we were calling shortly after we turned up the Perquimans.

One through the bridge we were able to angle in and glide nicely to the dock (map), even though the sounder was screaming 5.6' for the last boatlength. Dave and Stacey met us on the dock, and we got secured and hooked up to the working 50-amp power on the dock, which turned out to have two 50s, two 30s, and two water spigots all on the lone pedestal. We were very glad to have it -- we've been running the heat non-stop since we arrived.

Also in the dockmaster office: This 90s-era Motorola VHF, still in use.

Dave, Stacey, and I did a quick walk around the entirety of the minuscule downtown, dying on the vine since the main US-17 route bypassed it on a fixed bridge a few years ago. The drawbridge, just replaced in 2022, carries Business 17 through town. We found one tap house with no food, zero restaurants, some small shops, and a nice bakery. Google said there was a restaurant about a mile away, but it was not open for dinner Wednesday.

Dave put together a nice shepherd's pie and Louise made a salad, and we had a nice catch-up dinner aboard Stinkpot. It was a lovely evening. My contentment was relatively short-lived, however, when the forecast winds arrived with a higher-than-forecast vengeance between midnight and 1am. We ended up putting three more fenders over the side in the middle of the night, as the wind was pushing up against the dock and threatening to push us off the two fenders keeping the piling tops off our paint.

The Church Street "S" bridge in Hertford opening for us.

In the relative calm of the morning, that was no longer an issue. The water had dropped a full foot, putting our rub rails back below the piling tops. The same north wind that had pushed us up against the dock had pushed a bunch of water out of the Perquimans. I put eyes on the heater discharge to make sure we were not sucking mud through the strainers, but all was good and we were just settled in the mud and not sitting on top of it.

With nowhere to go for a while and it too cold for any outside work, I settled in to a dreaded but very necessary project, replacing my phone battery. I had ordered a replacement delivered to Great Bridge after my phone was not even lasting eight hours while we were in DC. Changing a modern phone battery is not for the faint of heart; it is a fiddly process that must be done slowly and with utmost care to avoid breaking anything and ending up with an expensive paperweight.

The battery came with everything needed except the hairdryer to heat it up. That included a bunch of "guitar pick" opener tools and the like, and the eensy-teensy T3 Torx driver required to remove ten screws inside the case. This later item proved wholly inadequate for the task, a fact I learned the hard way only after completing the painstaking process of removing the touchscreen. The splines of the driver crumbled away before I could loosen even the first screw.

"Dial-up access" advertised on a store window might tell you something about Hertford.

And there I was, with my phone inoperative and in two pieces, in the middle of nowhere. I don't have another T3; my nice set of Torx drivers bottoms out at T5. Amazon had several available for overnight delivery, but "overnight" turned into "next Tuesday" just as soon as I entered Hertford for the address.

I was still scratching my head about this when Dave announced he was going to walk the mile and a half to the hardware store and the Food Lion. I needed a break anyway, and so I went with him. It was a nice diversion, but the hardware store, unsurprisingly, also did not have a T3. Dave picked up a 5-gallon bucket to brine the turkey and a bunch of fixin's at the grocery store. There was something both liberating and disconcerting about taking an hour or so errand walk without my phone. I told Louise she'd have to text Dave if she thought of anything we needed at the store.

Returning home I resigned myself to either finding a work-around for the screws, or else putting the phone back together unglued until I could get someplace to receive a new driver. With nothing to lose I carefully filed away the tip of the driver until I was back down to good splines, then used my mini-torch to temper the tip as best I could. That worked for about half the screws, and I repeated the process to get the other half. I had to settle for only lightly torquing them on re-assembly. Making matters worse, the new battery had the fancy pull-to-release adhesive in the wrong place and I had to discard it and use my own.

Stinkpot and Vector at the Hertford dock. Other than the bass tournament, we never saw another boat in four days. Photo: Stacey Guth

I was ultimately able to get it all working and back together, sometime after dinner, and the new battery is lasting much longer. But my phone was out of commission the whole day. That's usually not a problem; I seldom get calls, and I can do pretty much everything else, including texting, from my laptop. So of course this was the day when I got an urgent phone call regarding a family emergency. Fortunately, they also had Louise's number, and when I did not answer after two tries they called her. Dealing with that is what pushed the repairs past dinner time. (Nothing life-threatening or even medical.)

The idea was for me to make my way to New Jersey more or less immediately, and I spent the afternoon trying to sort that out. There are no marinas in Hertford, only the city docks, and while I am sure they would have let us just stay in light of the circumstances, that would leave Louise minding the boat in a place where absolutely no help or resources were available, and where she could not even get to a grocery store. Also, there are no rental cars, taxis, or any other transportation here, so I'd be looking at maybe putting a scooter down to ride to civilization someplace, on busy US-17.

I was able to hand off the most immediate aspects to a cousin who is much closer than I am until I can get myself back there from another stop. That meant, of course, waiting until today to get out of Hertford, when the winds finally laid down on the Albemarle. From here it is a four-day cruise for us to anyplace with a rental car or access to an airport, which would be either New Bern or Beaufort. In either case, my earliest opportunity to get a car would be Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Walking to dinner. Photo: Dave Rowe

Meanwhile, we had previously decided on Washington, NC as the place to spend Thanksgiving. Dave needs power to do the cooking, and there are inexpensive docks there with hookups. Regular readers may remember we spent a lovely three days there almost exactly two years ago. We already had reservations booked, and our collected mail is already en route there from our receiving service in FL.

I consider Washington to be nearly as remote as Hertford or Edenton or Belhaven, but it's a much larger town, with some big box stores and other services. And it turns out there is an Enterprise car rental office in town, a short bike ride from the docks. I was able to book a car right there for Friday, and so the current plan is to continue to Washington as previously planned, but extend the dock for as long as it takes while I am away. It's a real marina with dock staff, there are plenty of resources for Louise in walking distance, and our friends aboard Vahevala, whom we met on our first visit there, should be around if she needs any help.

With the makings of a plan and both car and dock reservations made, we were free to make the mile trek to the 252 Grill, the only restaurant in walking distance, for dinner. Dave and I had scoped it out on our walk to the stores. It was perfectly acceptable casual fare, with a few beers on draft, and we were all happy to get off the boats and away from the docks for an evening.

The old 1928 S-bridge swing span, preserved here when it was replaced two years ago.

Friday was the coldest day yet, and we pretty much stayed aboard all day. I spent a bunch of time doing route and travel planning, figuring my stops and hotels for the drive to NJ and what moving the boat will look like on my return. And I made a little panel with a couple of control breakers and indicator lights for the new transfer switch. I did bundle up in my winter coat to get a short walk in before dinner, wherein Stacey and Dave joined us aboard for one of Louise's stews.

Yesterday was just a couple of degrees warmer, yet we awoke to find ourselves surrounded by bass boats participating in a fishing tournament. I think the 40° weather and the small craft advisory (really) kept a bunch of fishermen home, but the die-hards still showed up. We once again stayed aboard, and I spent the day cleaning the fresh water valve on the master head, which was not flushing with enough vigor. My trouble light broke in the middle of that, so fixing that came right after getting the head back together.

The city's plan to make a park around the old bridge.

In preparation for this morning's departure, I went out on the dock with the boat pole to physically sound the bottom. I was dismayed to find us sitting in just 5'; some water had come back in but not enough. We consoled ourselves with home-made pizza aboard Stinkpot, and ended the day with a phone call to the bridge tender to make sure we could get an opening this morning. Even though the signs say winter hours start at 10am, he agreed to come in at 9 and open it for us.

Knowing we were pretty well stuck in the mud, we dropped lines at 8:45 this morning to see if we could work our way out. Stinkpot stood by in case we needed a tug. It was quite the effort, with lots of scraping and stopping and plenty of smoke from 370 horses, but after five minutes or more of sawing back and forth we got out of the mud and into clear water. In a different circumstance, we might have just stayed at that dock until the water level came up to our arrival depth, but we could not risk missing this window to cross the Albemarle and thus our dock and car reservations.

The tender opened the bridge at five till, and we were off. As I wrap up my typing, we are in the Alligator River, south of the swing bridge, and bound for our usual anchorage near Tuckahoe Point. Stinkpot is about a mile ahead of us and I think is heading for an anchorage just a bit further into Georgia Bay. I expect to be in Belhaven tomorrow, and Washington a day or two after that.

Tonight's view.

Update: We are anchored in a familiar spot on the Alligator River at Tuckahoe Point (map). We're still in the migration: there are eight other boats here. This will likely be my last post before Thanksgiving, and the next you will hear from me will be on our way downriver from Washington, whenever that may be. We wish all our family, friends, and readers a very happy Thanksgiving.

Stacey sent us this nice sunset shot from across the anchorage. Photo: Stacey Guth