ICW - Dismal Swamp

The weather forecast for today, Saturday, November 1st, is not good – winds 15-20 with gusts up to 45 mph and waves 2-4 feet.  This means we need to get across the river and into the ICW and down to the Dismal Swamp Welcome Center for the night.   The ICW (Intracoastal Waterway) is actually 4,000 miles long and starts in Boston, Massachusetts and ends at Brownsville, Texas and is the most extensive protected coastline in the world.  The most common reference to ICW is from Norfolk, Virginia to Miami, Florida which is 1,098 miles.  This is the route we are taking on the Sail Rally and hope to arrive by December 20th.  We passed the Norfolk Military Shipyard before passing the red buoy 36 which marks Mile 0 of the ICW.  We had to wait for several bridges to open and some are restricted and only open on certain hours of the day.  There are two routes you can take for the first 65 miles of the ICW 1) Dismal Swamp or 2) Virginia Cut.  The majority of our Rally chose the Dismal Swamp, but if your draft is 6 feet or more you cannot take this route.  Today we encountered the first lock of two on the Dismal Swamp and from start to finish it took 2 and 1/2 hours!  The water in the Dismal Swamp is brown due to the amount of tannins in the water – we will have to clean the mustache off from Silent Dream when we leave the swamp.  The Dismal Swamp was dug out by hand by slaves in the 1760’s and it is very narrow – not sure how two boats would pass each other in opposite directions?  We arrived at the Dismal Swamp Welcome Center after almost 10 hours and 42 statute miles.  There is only room for three boats on the dock so all of eight of us had to raft off the three boats already there – good thing boaters are friendly!

We stayed a second night at the Dismal Swamp Welcome Center – the dock is free, but there are no services such as electric, water or showers.  The temperature was 32 degrees on the morning we left.  We had to scrape the ice off the dodger windows, not to mention we froze trying to sleep. Thank goodness we are headed south!

Sail Magazine is also keeping a blog of this rally – check it out at http://icw.sailmagazine.com/blog/10/the-icw-snowbird-rally/