Pamlico Sound

 

 

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.