April 15, 16, 2007

April 15, 2007 – Here we are in the Dismal Swamp which is beautiful and haunting and we are waiting out a very big spring storm which is just twenty miles away in Norfolk, VA and really beating up the coast. We are so well protected from it that we are getting some little wind ripples on the water but a hundred feet up the trees are swaying with the force of 30 to 45 mile per hour winds with gusts higher at times. The rain comes down in sheets and will stop for a few minutes. We all get out of our boats, go up the hill and use the welcoming center for North Carolina’s bathrooms and bam; here comes the rain and we are soaked again. This has gone on all day and night and tonight it has added some more cold to it. Bob is freezing and our diesel heater has decided that it only likes to run part time. We have the boat sealed tight and feel that maybe it is starving for oxygen or that we had some fuel we added from our supply and that it might have had water condensation in it. We had run it all night the night before and cooked on it as well and it was fine. We have a generator on board and could hook it up to our electric heater but it is raining so hard and we are not sure that we can set it on the dock in the rain or whether it would die on us and then we would drown in rain getting it back on the boat as we are rafted two deep at the center. Of course the big boats all have their generators humming and are toasty. We know however, that this too will pass if we just wait it out. I have Bob in all the extra warm clothes that we have on the boat.
April 16, 2007 – This morning we got up and finally the sun was shining where we were but they are still punishing us with the cold weather. The boat was wet on the inside this morning and condensation was everywhere as the boat cooled down dew formed on the inside because we had everything shut up tight. The diesel heater did not work well last night either. I plan on solving the problem when I get to Norfolk as I need to get Bob to his doctors appointments and then we are going to wait a month before we go north some more and hopefully the cold weather fronts will work themselves out and the weather will at least warm up ten or twenty degrees so we can be comfortable. I have been from shorts to long johns so many times on this trip I can’t count them anymore. I think our dockmates probably thought we were slightly daft when we took off for Norfolk, VA from the middle of the Dismal Swamp this morning. It was practically calm in the channel and we were giving this up for a storm blowing 30-40 knots and maybe more for the peace and quiet. We went the rest of the way through the swamp okay and reached the lock before Norfolk in fine time. As we went out of the lock the wind hit us with its gusts and we started down the intracoastal to mile zero where our marina for the night was waiting for us. When we got in front of the marina they couldn’t believe we traveled today as the weather was pretty fierce. They asked us where we were and we said out front. All they could see was this ball of spray coming down the channel they said. We told them that was us. So tonight we are tied up safe and sound in the marina and listening to the wind still blowing past us and it is again getting real cold tonight but I believe tonight we can keep Bob warm as the heat is on