Saturday Nov 15

Saturday, Nov 15

This morning was cold again but bright and sunny. Rick did the 250 hour maintenance and I did the clean up. We talked to a guy from a trawler called Tautug, from Maine. He was helping take his dad’s trawler this far and his brother will take it the rest of the way to the Bahamas.

The Gemini Los Dos left this morning and we will be too shortly. There is an enormous old-style Atlantic yacht tied up at the end of the wall, like the ones in old Errol Flynn or Clark Gable movies...Kennedy types.

At 1:30 we entered the Dismal Swamp... that’s what the waterway for 22 miles is called. Apparently it was owned b George Washington after he stopped being president, and he was trying to drain it to harvest the trees. Didn’t work. Check out the pictures of the houses. That shows how dismal it really is!

We got to the upper lock on the swamp  at 2:00 pm behind another Catamaran. He called the lock and said he wasn’t sure what the process was, or how hard it was going to be to lock through.

The lockmaster replied, “It would have been a lot easier if y’all had let me know you were coming. You missed the lock by 15 minutes! Now y’all gotta wait until 3:15” So we dropped anchor and are sitting here talking to a guy on shore who’s fishing for speckles. 

It’s interesting: everyone we’ve talked to so far thinks they would be so much better off living in Canada. They are taxed heavily here but they seem willing to pay the prices being charge for merchandise. I guess the small business people suffer the most. Not sure what the happy medium would be. Fresh food is a bit more expensive down here. Butter, eggs, bread are all more expensive. Wal-Mart is the measuring stick, and the prices here are the same as at home, not counting what the exchange is.

Not sure where we’ll anchor tonight so I will post this now. The pics are of the unending construction and naval yards leaving Norfolk, and houses in the Dismal Swamp. They are pretty spectacular altho' Rick's pics don't really show it.

‘Til tomorrow...