Day 26 – N 35° 45.767’ W 75° 59.683’ Alligator River, NC

Our beautiful clear skies from last night turned cloudy by morning, but the forecast was for bright sunshine and moderate winds from the northwest.  And even though the wind was from the northeast, not the northwest, we decided we would trust our weather sources and set out on the next leg of our journey to the Chesapeake Bay.  The good news is that the sun appeared before we had reached the end of the canal, within 30 minutes of our departure.  But the wind never went over to the northwest – it stayed northeast all day.  We had a lot of northeast in our direction of travel, so we had to motor all day and most of it without an assist from our sails.

Our path through the ICW today took us up to the Pamlico River, which we crossed and entered the Pungo River.  We traveled along the Pungo River for about 3 hours before entering the Alligator River-Pungo River canal.  It took us 3 ½ hours to traverse this canal before emerging into the Alligator River.  Along the canal, we saw a pair of bald eagles roosting in a tree and then Lyn spotted the strangest sight.  She saw a large black mass moving across the canal in front of us.  It was too big to be an alligator, so she got the binoculars to see what it was.  It turned out to be a large black bear swimming across the canal – why?  To get to the other side, of course.

We had originally thought we would anchor within a mile of emerging into the Alligator River, but along the way we heard our “old friends” on Royal Serf talking with another boat and realized that they were only 5 – 10 miles behind us.  Royal Serf is a 42-foot boat, so it moves quite a bit faster than Kite, and we expected to be passed before we arrived at our anchorage.  Lyn called Royal Serf on the radio and discussed their plans for the night, which were similar to ours, except they knew of a nice anchorage in the wide part of the Alligator River, about 10 miles further along than we had planned to stop.

Just as we entered the Alligator River, Royal Serf appeared behind us and had passed us by the time we entered the wide part of the river.  They led the way to the anchorage.  It is a nice spot, protected from easterly and southerly winds, which tonight should be light in any case, and in 10 feet of water with little tide to consider.  It is very remote, and once again we will have to wait until we have decent cell phone reception to post this blog entry.