Day 11: November 26, 2008

Port: Pungo Ferry, the VA Pungo (36.63N 76.05W)

Weather: Today’s weather was clear skies, calm wind, and temperatures of 50 degrees, dropping to 27 degrees F during the evening/night. The humidity averaged 57%.

What a day! We made it through so many cool things today. It will take an hour to write this blog.

Today we left Little Creek and had to cross the Chesapeake Bay to the Elizabeth River. The cross over was very windy and cold, probably some of the coldest (other than the trip to Deltaville) we’ve been. We crossed over the Hampton Roads Tunnel which was a little strange, having drive through the tunnel. We passed Fort Wool, which after researching we found was built in 1826. Robert E Lee himself was one of the engineers of the Fort. It took a long time to build, but was never finished according to original plan. They put an experimental, supposed awesome gun at the Fort, which fired at the Confederates during the Civil War, but did no damage to them. All in all, it’s a pretty neat looking fort on a man-made island of rocks. After that we came to the Elizabeth River, which is covered on both sides with Navy and other government property. We started with all the large ships, coming to the sub pen, and wound down to more tankers and supply boats. It was so neat to see them all. I probably took 400 pictures today and they are all of Navy gray. Passing downtown Norfolk, we saw the Nauticus museum with the USS Wisconsin, which Scott and I toured on last year. We also passed a beautiful 3-masted schooner sitting at dock. To make this a little shorter, we came to the red buoy 36, which marks Mile Post 0 of the ICW. We officially started the ICW at Hospital Point in Norfolk. Shortly after that, we hailed our first bridge opening by VHF. It was very neat to see (there is a video). We hailed several more bridges today and completed a lock (Great Bridge). There are pictures for all the bridges and some video. My favorite is Great Bridge, which is the green one. Dad and I made a bet on the swing bridges as to which way they would swing. He won on the first bridge, I did on the second. We like it when we both win.

Now for the story behind the Naval powerboat with the guy who yelled at us. It was more a warning… that we were too close. Haha… we couldn’t help it. We wanted to see more, so we drifted, I guess, too close to some invisible boundary that marks the ICW from the Navy. He came zooming out and told us to back away and stay further out. The soldier riding with him glared at us for some reason. I didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. I was taking pictures of everything, so maybe he didn’t like that.

Also, another special treat… we saw the USS Simon Lake. For those who do not know, the USS Simon Lake is a submarine tender on which my grandfather, Gil, was an XO. The USS Simon Lake was decommissioned in 1999 and has been sitting here in Norfolk. It was so exciting to see the ship that Gramps had worked on. For my mom, it brought back many memories, especially a relevant one about a Thanksgiving dinner on board. Pictures are posted. For those wondering what the E means, it’s on a caption of the one picture.

Tonight, we managed to get to MM 28.5 and docked at an abandoned marina in Pungo Ferry, VA. There is a Pungo Creek and Pungo River in North Carolina, so it gets confusing. The marina was apparently the first marina established in the state of VA, but had since closed down. It was a little spooky. There was nothing around it, but trees and bare land. We couldn’t even see any town nearby. We docked at the still very stable dock for tonight. All in all we traveled 41.3 miles, a long day, and had a blast seeing everything.

GWHS!