SOLITUDE: On toward the Chesapeake Bay Region

If we have not stated it before, there is a lot of secluded and undeveloped parts of this country. As we finished our trip in North Carolina the last but certainly not the least was the Dismal Swamp Canal. This river is part river and part man made canal. The fascinating part of this was that George Washington had surveyed this area and thought it would be an good place for a canal to move goods back and forth between the states and to make it easier to ship tobacco and cotton to England and Europe. So almost 300 years ago the canal was dug by slaves that were taken off the fields by their slave masters and put to work on the canal. The slave masters were paid to have the slaves work, but the slaves never received any money. The work was hard and grueling through a bug invested, snake invested, brown water swamp. It sounds like a terrible job. But as you can see from our pictures, it is a beautiful and scenic waterway today.

Interesting as the canal is marked with the mile markers which is a very good thing as there are no red and green markers for us to know where we are.

There are two locks and two bridges on the canal. The bridge tender is also the lockmaster and controls both of them. Here is a picture of a turtle on a log which we took while waiting for one of the locks.

There is a welcome center at the Dismal Swamp also. Here is the welcome flag.

There is a dock that you can tie up to for the night and a it is also a rest area for travelers on the highway which runs parallel with the canal. It was a unique experience for us with the boat tied up next to a highway rest stop.

We took a short hike over this bridge (which goes to the other side of the canal) It is closed on the canal during the day for the foot traffic and folks on bicycles. They open it for boats coming through. Here is a picture of the bridge open and closed. It is run by the State Park.

This is the nature center at the State Park that we visited. It was great.

The second lock and bridge that we went through was an event. First we had to wait while the lockmaster got the valve working that was stuck on the chamber. (It fills the lock with water) Then after we were let down to the height of the river, the gates on the lock groaned and creaked and would not open. The lockmaster went over with a hammer and started to pound on the machinery to get it to release! It was quite an event. After a little while he did get one of the gates to open and we left with one open and one closed, good thing we are not very wide on the beam of the boat. This is a picture of our buddies, Heidi and Ken as their boat left the lock with one gate closed

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The next state that we crossed into was Virginia. We traveled to Norfolk to a busy harbor with lots of ships and navy vessels. We anchored across from the Nauticus Center at Hospital Point. We took the dinghy across the busy shipping channel on a very chilly morning. We toured the Nauticus Center which is packed with history of the area. We also enjoyed a guided tour of the warship S.S. Wisconsin. It was the size of a small city. During the height of the ship in operation there were over 2,900 men that were assigned to the ship! Can you imagine? They had their own barber shop, laundry, bank, snack store, 200 cooks, and it was quite an eye opener just to see how vast the interior and exterior were. Here is a picture of the boat at the dock. Let me tell you when we pulled up with the dinghy I felt about as big as a speck of dust.