We left Elizabeth City on Friday morning. Even though we left around 7am we were the last boat to leave. It was cold again and the layers came back on. I think I might have lost a couple of the top layers – down from 6 to only 4. We tried the autopilot and to our great dismay it did exactly what the old autopilot we had just ripped out was doing, turning to the left for no reason at all. Oh no!! Well hopefully there is some adjustment we can make. We continued south with me at the wheel.

We heard a boat we knew from Annapolis on the VHF radio. They had taken the other route south and were to our east. They were stuck in a dense fog. We looked to our east and it was very foggy there but we were now in the Albemarle Sound – a large body of water that has a reputation for being very difficult – and it was really clear. We crossed the Sound calmly and easily. We were heading into the Alligator River and all of a sudden the fog caught us too. In the picture above you can see the fog coming in. We called the boat you see in the picture on the VHF, he was with us for Thanksgiving dinner. He had been through there a number of times before and we were going to follow him. All we had to do was not lose him in the fog. Luckily the fog started lifting and we had no issues getting through the approach to the river.

We had to go through the Alligator River Bridge next. It is a swing bridge. You have to call the bridge tender and he puts the barriers down across the road and opens the bridge on demand for boaters. The bridge was having mechanical issues though and he wasn’t sure he could open it. Those barriers that stop the cars would not go down. The bridge tender found out that if he kicked the mechanism hard enough it would work. Luckily for us we were able to get through. It would have been very unfortunate if we could not go past that bridge.

Sometime during the day Bill researched the autopilot again and found he had set something incorrectly before – the autopilot worked flawlessly! We were now able to use it when we were not somewhere that we needed to steer by hand. What a relief – I forgot how wonderful it is!

We are discovering that this journey down the ICW has a major social component that we hadn’t really considered. We spent two days travelling with four of the boats we were with on Thanksgiving. Last night we took our dinghy over to visit with them. We were so thrilled our new dinghy engine worked so well, until we tried to start it to go from one boat to the next and it would not start! After helping finish the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie leftovers we had to get towed back to our boat by another couples’ dinghy! Luckily we tried it again today and it started right up. Not sure what happened last night – I think we are just finding all kinds of ways to show we are newbies!

Today we didn’t go too far. It was so cold and windy today that I went back to 6 layers – and that wasn’t even enough. We spent most of the day going down a 20 mile long canal – the Alligator River - Pungo River Canal. We had heard you can’t expect to get through the ICW without going aground – and today we did hit the bottom in the canal. Luckily it didn’t stop the boat, it was more like going over a speed bump. It is supposed to be very cold tonight – the coldest yet on our trip – 29 degrees. We are not looking forward to that!