0630, Thursday, May 21, 2015
Moderate S winds with
predictions for SE twelve to twenty, backing to SSE in the afternoon. Perfect
for a run northward from Ocracoke up through Pamlico Sound, the largest lagoon
on the US East Coast, being eighty miles long and fifteen to thirty miles wide,
with areas of shoaling and shallow waters; not to be confused with an estuary
like the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States in fact.
A lagoon is a relatively
shallow water body separated from another water by barrier islands. Pamlico
Sound, being a lagoon, is separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a long series of
barrier islands, the Outer Banks; and their attendant coastal communities,
including Nags Head, Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke.
Many inlets between the
islands connect Pamlico Sound with the ocean and the resultant inflow of salty
ocean water makes the lagoon salinity uniformly quite high. A small tidal
change of less than a foot facilitates mixing.
Pamlico Sound is
interconnected with Albemarle, Currituck, Croatan, Bogue, Core and Roanoke
Sounds. Individually they are referred to as lagoon estuaries. Taken together as
one water body it is larger than the Chesapeake Bay.
A true estuary is a water
body as described above, except that it has a significant inflow of fresh
water, like the Chesapeake Bay with its Susquehanna, Potomac, Rappahannock and
James rivers and all their tributaries. An estuary, like a lagoon, also has an
intimate connection with an ocean and thus is influenced by ocean tides. So on
a twice daily basis, tidal inflows of high salinity waters mix with fresh water
inputs to create a horizontally and vertically stratified salinity regime
ranging from fresh to brackish to hypersaline waters. This condition exists
with a degree of regularity and predictability and makes for diverse flora and
fauna. That is naturally the case in the Chesapeake Bay, except in today’s
world where overwhelming pollution inputs from various sources have severely
degraded that estuarine ecosystem.
Why do they call Pamlico
Sound a sound and not a lagoon? I thought you would never ask.
A sound, as defined by Wikipedia,
is a narrow ocean channel between two land bodies. The definition goes on to
say that a sound is a sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a
bight, and wider than a fjord. Confused yet?
Let’s just call it a sound
and be done with it.
So we left Ocracoke at
7:30AM dutifully waiting until the Ocracoke to Cedar Island and Ocracoke to
Swans Quarter ferries left. Don’t want to be caught in the Big Foot Slough
Channel with those guys bearing down.
We left Ocracoke with
“Surprise”, a thirty foot Allied Seawind (older model than Flicka), captained
by Peter and “High Water”, a thirty foot Hunter single handed by Paul, both
Canadians we had seen at various places on the ICW. I’m not making those names
up.
Having formed a vague plan to
stick together during the passage up the sound, we negotiated Big Foot
Slough Channel and then entered the sound proper. Rwarded with fifteen to
twenty knot SE and then SSE winds.
Sailing first
on a close reach, then a beam reach and finally a broad reach all the way up
the sound, flying along, sometimes hitting eight knots. It was exhilarating. A
note on points of sail. You are sailing on a beam reach when the wind is
perpendicular to the boat’s beam (amidships). On a close reach the wind is more
forward of that point and on a broad reach it is more toward the stern.
Emily and I were in the lead most of
the day and gradually Peter and Paul fell behind. We pulled significantly ahead
toward late afternoon and decided to continue on and pass under the Dare
Memorial Bridge connecting the mainland with the southern part of Manteo, NC then
under the William B Unstead Memorial Bridge that connects the mainland with the
northern part of Manteo.
Peter and Paul, moving more
slowly, decided to anchor close to the western Manteo shore. Our plan is to
pass under the bridges and anchor off Reeds Point in Croatan Sound
As we approached the first
bridge a thunderstorm was developing dead ahead and NOAH weather was putting
out tornado warnings for most of eastern NC. Time to sweat bullets. Onward we
charged sails down under power alone. The rain came before Dare Memorial, seas
running four feet and confused. At least we are running down wind (wind on our
stern) pushing us along at six to eight knots.
Passed through Dare Memorial
in heavy rain but not much wind. On to William B. Umstead, the more challenging
bridge, with a center height of forty-five feet measured from high water. We
were going through at low tide but the tide change here is only half a foot so
we had forty-five and one-half feet to play with. The distance from the top of
our mast to the water is forty-three and one-half feet.
What could possibly go
wrong?
Onward to the bridge in a
driving rain. No other boats about. As we begin to pass under the bridge panic
set in and I suddenly thought about the boat lifting and falling on these now
two to three foot waves and how that might affect our margin.
Intense moments as we passed
under the bridge. Too late to turn back.
And pass through we did. The
twenty seconds or so it took to pass under that bridge was one of the longest twenty
seconds on record. I guess we will never know by how much we missed that bridge.
Onward Flicka flew toward
our anchorage, through the rain and now freshening wind (getting stronger)
which was shifting around to the west, right where we are going, into a little
embayment off Reeds Point. The guide book says do not go all the way in in
times of diminished visibility, like right now, because of fish traps and
various stakes and other potential obstructions to navigation. So we pulled up
short of the actual anchorage in a pretty exposed location.
Still raining and now
blowing hard, I went forward to deploy the anchor and with Emily at the helm we
managed to get it and eighty feet of chain down in ten feet of water. Set the
snubber line (more on than later) and tried to relax while the rain pounded
down and the wind howled. A good day’s run of sixty-five miles, mostly under
sail.
Fifteen minutes later the
sun came out, the wind died, we mixed a drink and I called my good friend Steve
Moore to chat. We settled in for what we were hoping was going to be a restful
and peaceful evening and night. Boy were we wrong.
But that is another story.
Good night.
