The Town Dock – Oriental, NC

We are waiting out a rainy weekend in Oriental, NC. Oriental is a friendly little town on the Pamlico Sound with 3,000 boat slips and only 850 permanent residents according to the experts at local coffee shop, The Bean. On The Bean’s front porch, the locals have an excellent view of transient boaters attempting to land and tie up at the Town Dock and the marina across the street. There, they rate the navigational abilities of arriving boaters using Olympic-style placards. As you can see, we got an average score of 4.7 (out of 10) but hope to do better upon departure.

Oriental has a fascinating website www.towndock.net which has a harbor webcam. In the current HarborCam, Serendipity’s mast is visible on the left behind the low building in the foreground (The Bean).

Over the past week we made good time motoring down The Ditch except for two nights and an entire day spent at anchor on the Little Alligator River waiting for dense fog to lift. The fog had not been predicted and we awoke at 5:30 AM to be ready to weigh anchor and set out at first light in order to cover the maximum distance during daylight and arrive at our planned destination before dark. As it gradually got lighter, we realized that we were in fog so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few yards from the boat. We spent the entire day expecting the fog to lift any minute and regularly adjusting downward our travel expectations. About 2:00 PM we finally realized that we would be staying at anchor for another night and relaxed. A good reminder to pick our anchor locations well.

One of the interesting challenges of traversing the ICW is dealing with the many lift and swing bridges along the way, as well as some locks, each with its own schedule. After going through the Alligator River Bridge we heard many complaints on the radio that the bridge had just closed (right after we were through), apparently for at least a day, for repairs. It underscored the importance of schedule flexibility when traveling by boat.

The canal down the Alligator River has been another eye-opener. While the canal itself is wide, the sides are shallow and littered with tree stumps and debris so the navigable portion is very narrow – in places potentially too narrow for two boats to pass. We were worried the entire time about running into one of the wide river barges that routinely use the ICW going in the opposite direction. In fact, the canal had us so spooked that when Dave lost his favorite hat to a wind gust, we didn’t even think about turning the boat around in the narrow channel to retrieve it. The area is quite beautiful and much more rural than expected but very remote. No cell phone access for three days was quite a surprise!

We expect to leave Oriental tomorrow to continue to Beaufort NC to pick up our mail and then continue south. In the meantime, we have some time to prepare to try to improve our docking score for the regulars on The Bean’s front porch.