Intracoastal Waterway: The Virginia Cut

Excitement returned to our lives, but the good kind of excitement, the one that goes together with the anxiety of facing new challenges.

But before getting into that, I’m sure you want to know the fate of those unfortunate brackets. Only an evil genius would have come up with such a simple and effective plot: my Yanmar contact said he didn’t have time to paint the pieces, so he kindly and unsuspectingly sent a can of paint together with the brackets. The paint indeed spilled and made enough of a mess that UPS decided the whole contents was unrecoverable and threw the package away. For sure the brackets were intact, and I was ready to fish for them myself knowing that they couldn’t be too far, but UPS refused to reveal the coordinates of their grave.

Fortunately, the Yanmar boys assigned high priority to the task of manufacturing yet another pair of brackets for these desperate souls, and a couple of days later we finally had shiny new parts. Unpainted. With no can of paint in the package. But very welcome.

I installed the bottom brackets version 2.0 as soon as I received them. If you recall, we made it to Portsmouth with version 1 brackets, one of them broken and repaired. Well… shockingly, the other one came out broken! It must have happened at the last minute, when we were docking. Good thing we waited (and waited some more) for the new brackets.

That same morning we cast off and headed to the uncharted waters of the Intracoastal Waterway. Okay, okay, very well charted waters, but entirely unknown to us. According to Wikipedia, “the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is a 3,000-mile (4,800 km) inland waterway along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the United States. […] Some sections of the waterway consist of natural inlets, saltwater rivers, bays, and sounds, while others are artificial canals. It provides a navigable route along its length without many of the hazards of travel on the open sea.”

It officially starts precisely at Portsmouth. The first 15 miles involve passing through one lock and underneath eleven bridges. Of those eleven bridges:

• Only two are high enough to present no challenge.
• Two have a fixed height of 65 feet (which could be less, depending on the water level). The tip of the antenna at the top of our mast is 63 feet above the water. From deck level, there’s no way to judge whether the boat will fit or not. In fact, when it’s that close it always seems it will not fit.
• Four of them are opening railroad bridges that are usually in the open position… except, it seems, when Ñandú is coming. We had to wait almost one hour circling around with other boats while they were working on the second railroad bridge, in the closed position.
• The other three are highway bridges that open on demand or every 30 minutes, except that they won’t open during rush hour traffic. One of those is in the community of Great Bridge, and is appropriately called Great Bridge Bridge.

On top of that, the ICW is quite narrow, and even when you see water to both sides, if you deviate a bit from the center you risk running aground or hitting submerged obstacles. Things can get hectic when boats pile up in that narrow waterway waiting for a bridge or lock to open. Then you have to know and follow the radio protocol to request openings. On one lift bridge the operator lifted the bridge only partially and then announced “bridge is open to 80 feet”. The instant we were about to pass underneath it I figured I should have double checked… (“what if she said 60 and I heard 80?”) but by then our mast did the check for us: it was 80… or something larger than 63 anyway. Whew.

The lock, which had us the most anxious because we were completely new to that experience, was surprinsingly smooth. Just wait for the lock to open, proceed through the gate, approach the rubber-padded wall, handle the dock lines to the attendant who will pass them around a pile and return them to you, tend your lines while the water level drops (about two feet), chat with your neighbors, wait for the exit gate to open, retrieve lines, continue.

Those 15 miles with no distractions allowed had enough challenges for one day. Exhausted and ready to go to bed, my loyal Android phone, always providing those bits of unsolicited information, notified me that Tidewater marina (from where we left that morning) was a mere 22-minute car ride. Exactly what I needed to know to top off my sense of accomplishment, thank you.

The next day we continued through the Virginia Cut until it opened to the North River in North Carolina: still a narrow and challenging waterway, but with a much wilder landscape and only three bridges for the whole day. We are now tucked in a secluded anchorage waiting out the winds of a passing cold front.