Oops, forgot the grounding

Elizabeth City Visitor's Center
No LL

I forgot to write about our latest grounding in yesterday's blog.

It happened at the mouth of the Alligator River in the same place we went aground two years ago. It's very frustrating. The problem is that the charts are out of date. Our paper charts and our GPS charts both show that one has to make a slight dog-leg turn to get out of the river entrance and to avoid shoals. However the shoals moved and the correct route is to go straight through the markers with no dog-leg.

We are well aware of this problem. We ran aground there our first time through two years ago. Now it is our third or fourth time through. On those other trips we always saw other boats grounded in the same spots. In fact we've never been near this point without seeing some boats aground. All we had to do was to not go where those boats were and we were fine. The boat towing services must make a fortune from that spot.

Yesterday we had the handicap of fog. We couldn't see the red and green markers. Therefore I tried to steer a compromise course halfway between straight ahead and the dog-leg. It didn't work. Bump bump and we came to an abrupt halt.

Fortunately we were able to back off again without getting stuck, but before we did along came a motor boat that ran aground too. I got a little disoriented and was confused of which way to go to get back to deep water. Luckily for me, two big power boats came around me and then suddenly stopped dead. They were nearly grounded and did panic stops. After that, the two big boats crept ever so slowly northward and I merely followed them. 30 seconds later I could see the red and green markers ahead.

I made a trail of saved waypoints on my GPS to guide us through this trouble spot on our next time through.

Another subject. This must be the season bad for electronics. My portable radio/mp3 player died. Our digital camera also died and our radar stopped working right in the middle of that fog. The marine environment is tough on electronics, especially consumer electronics. The mp3 player was only a year old and the camera two years old. Our radar should still be under warranty, so I'll contact the dealer on that. Anyhow, frequent replacement of electronic gadgets is just part of the price of our marine life.