Chasing turkey

We are under way southbound in the Croatan Sound, just about to enter Pamlico Sound. Although seas are not exactly flat, they are behind us, and the ride has been smooth enough for Louise to go down to her studio to quilt. Other than a car ferry in the distance headed for the Outer Banks, we have the sound to ourselves.

Sunday morning we dropped lines in Portsmouth at a fair tide to make the 1pm lockage at Great Bridge. We had a pleasant cruise through the very industrial part of the port of Norfolk/Portsmouth, but as we finished rounding Money Point, Norfolk Southern Railroad Bridge 7 announced it was closing. We arrived at the bridge just as it slammed shut, and we had about a 20 minute wait for the train to clear and the bridge to reopen. So much for the 1pm lockage.

We putted along at low speed the rest of the way to the lock, arriving just as the gates opened at 1:30. We tied to the wall at the far end of the chamber, expecting to wait there for a half hour. I nearly shut down the engine; another motor yacht entered shortly after us and tied up right behind us, and I knew there were two sailboats considerably further back.

Shortly after we tied up, the towboat Royal Engineer, pushing a loaded scrap metal barge, came around the corner looking for a lock-through. While we would easily fit in the chamber alongside the barge, and it is common for the lock to take barges and pleasure boats together, the lockmasters thought better of having a heavy tow push into the chamber with two boats at the far end, and so they quickly closed the gates and locked us through early, hoping to turn the lock around before the tow arrived.

Vector at the free dock for the Battlefield visitor center, left.

That put us between the lock and the Great Bridge Bridge well ahead of the bridge's scheduled 2pm opening. We considered just tying up for the night to the bulkhead before the bridge, which is our preferred spot anyway. But on this trip, we wanted to get through the bridge before stopping for the night, to make things easier for timing the bridge openings in the morning.

We were early enough for the bridge that we headed for the bulkhead anyway, wrapped a breast line on a piling, and shut the engine for 15 minutes. We shoved off again just before 2, cleared through the bridge, and immediately pulled over and tied up to the free visitor's center dock (map), which was empty when we arrived.

I had a pair of leftover parts from the great steering project that I needed to return to Amazon, which had to be dropped off at a UPS store. So I put the e-Bike on the ground and rode the two miles down Battlefield Boulevard to the UPS store, not remembering that it was, in fact, Sunday. (We have a wall clock in the saloon with the day of the week on it, for exactly this reason.) Phooey. While I was there, though, I ran into the new location of our favorite Mexican joint, El Toro Loco.

Sadly, while it is an easy bike ride, it's too far to walk there for dinner. This restaurant is one of the reasons we preferred to dock at the bulkhead, which is a stone's throw from their previous location. On our last trip through I got take-out there during their very last week. The building has since been bulldozed to make room for a retail plaza in this prime location.

Where our favorite local restaurant stood.

At dinner time we instead walked over to the Lockside Bar and Grill, which had plenty of outside tables on their waterfront patio, which is, despite the name, not in sight of the lock. They had decent food and draft beer, so it may become our new go-to here. It's across Battlefield from the dock, with no easy way to cross. We walked over at the 5pm bridge opening, which of course stops traffic, and finished just in time to cross back at the 6pm lift.

I got up early yesterday so I could again ride out to UPS for their 8:30 opening, and on my way back I swung by Panera for bagels and the grocery for a small pumpkin pie -- we may or may not find the rest of the Thanksgiving flavors this year, but there was no way I was giving up pumpkin pie. We dropped lines at 9:50, getting a ten minute head start on traffic waiting for Great Bridge.

Normally, this is no help whatsoever, and we usually stay on the bulkhead even when heading southbound. That's because the next bridge, Centerville Turnpike, is just 23 minutes from Great Bridge, and opens on a half-hour schedule. There's no point leaving sooner, although we do try to be first in line at Centerville.

That's because the next bridge, North Landing, is also on a half-hour schedule, but is nearly four miles away. That's 40 minutes at our normal cruising speed, and we can just barely make it in a half hour if I wick it up to top speed in between the no-wake zones. It helps to have other boats with us, because we'll just arrive at the bridge as the last of the other boats is going through; those boats will all have passed us between the bridges.

Their original building was nondescript, but the new location in a strip mall is even more charmless.

In any event, right now, the Centerville bridge is locked open. It was hit by a barge a week or so ago, and while I missed getting a photo, the damage is evident. With Centerville locked open, a 9:50 departure put us at North Landing right in time for the 11am opening without having to break a sweat.

We had a pleasant and mostly uneventful cruise, although I did have to pass the Royal Engineer and his scrap metal in the middle of Currituck Sound. The channel is very narrow there, and I split the difference between the barge and the shallows, which gave me only a few yards on either side. He had spent the night just past the lock, and cleared through the bridge in the morning before we shoved off.

We passed through Coinjock, where we noted three boats who'd passed us earlier in the day tied up, wended our way through the meanders of the North River, and dropped the hook in a a familiar spot off-channel in the wide, bay-like portion of the river before it empties into Albemarle Sound (map). We tucked up near the northern end of the embayment since we had 20-knot north winds in the evening and into the night; at 10pm I had to go out and replace the snubber chain hook which had snapped at some point in the evening.

We had a nice dinner on board and a comfortable evening even with the wind. This morning we weighed anchor early for a long day across the sounds. We'll be anchored somewhere in Pamlico Sound tonight, and tomorrow should bring us within striking distance of Beaufort and Morehead City.

Our tradition aboard Vector for Thanksgiving has been to find a nice sit-down restaurant that is serving the traditional flavors for the holiday, whether plated or buffet style. We're seldom anyplace where we can easily connect with family or friends for the holiday meal, but we were fortunate enough to do it twice in seven years, both involving renting a car and driving a few hours.

Sunday biker meetup at a local bar. The partying was loud enough for me to hear it across the road. Spreader event?

There is some amount of irony, or perhaps it's desolation, in the fact that this will be our first Thanksgiving without pets to keep us from just hopping on a plane and visiting whomever we'd like. That's not happening in pandemic times, any more than we'll be sitting down to dinner inside a nice restaurant. So instead we are looking for a place that is doing the traditional flavors for take-out.

We were already sitting at the dock in Chesapeake when we realized that we were heading into the dark territory of the Sounds, where towns of any sort are few, far between, and tiny, and if we were not careful, the holiday would come and go while we were in reach of nothing at all. That left us the options of staying in Chesapeake for a week, having our Thanksgiving at a later date, or pushing all the way through the Sounds to civilization on the other side in three days.

I found a waterfront place in Beaufort that is doing the holiday flavors till 3pm, and will do so for takeout, and there may be another place or two as backups. Right now we're on track to be at the Beaufort anchorage by mid-day Thursday. After three full days of hard running, we'll likely stay for more than just a night before continuing south to our fuel stop in Snead's Ferry.

We have much to be thankful for here aboard our good ship. We are safe, comfortable, well-fed, and, most importantly, healthy. We wish all our family, friends, and readers the same, and hope that, however you celebrate it, you all have a happy Thanksgiving.