32 Island of crabbers

There is always something special about arriving at an island.

We coasted into the entrance channel past rows of sheds on stilts in the water with crab boats tied alongside.

You can get to be a bit ambivalent about crabbers when you are cruising. At the lower end of the Chesapeake we were dodging crab pots all day. (We met someone who got one tangled in his prop. He spent hours in the water hacking through thirty turns of polypropylene which had fused itself around his shaft). Although there were plenty of crab pots further south there don’t seem to be any up here.


Anyway we coasted along this watery street and tied up at a dock belonging to a Mr. Parks, a crabber whose dock doubles as a tie up spot for visiting sailors. His crab boat was there, one of those long open boats with a cab crammed up in the bow. All his crab pots were piled up on the dock.

Milton Parks, it turns out, is a spry 77 years old. He has alert blue eyes peeping out from under the cave of his cap and some spittle on his lip. He loves to talk to his occasional visitors and was as curious about our lives as we were about his. He took us on a tour of the island on his golf cart. It did not take long. Tangier island is no bigger than Algonquin and Wards combined, most of it only a few feet above the high water mark. Six hundred people live here all dependent on the crab trade. They are descendents of Cornish fishermen who came to the island years ago. Several of the wooden houses along the walkways have graves in their front gardens: ancestors still at the same address.
We asked him where all the crabbers were.

“Gorn down the bay.”

In winter the female crabs migrate down to the mouth of the Chesapeake where the water is more salty and suitable for releasing eggs. The males move into deep water and bury themselves in the mud. In the spring the females move up the bay and the males successively stir from their muddy blankets as the temperature rises. The crabbers follow this awakening up the bay. There are no reserved zones. Anyone can put crab pots anywhere they like.
“They would put them in your living room if they thought there was crabs there.”
“How do you know when to put your pots in the water?”
“After 45 years of crabbing, you just know.”

The shallow trays on Milton’s dock are for watching crabs. About once a month crabs shed their old shell. If you catch them at this and take them naked from the water, the delicate new skin does not harden into a new shell and they fetch a good price as “soft shell crabs.” Restaurants fry them and serve them whole in a sandwich. We tried one once. It was tasty enough but, with those eight limp legs dangling out, it was a bit like eating a tarantula on a bun.

31 Norfolk

You come out of that tranquil lock, around the bend, and all of a sudden you are in Norfolk docks and the US Navy Base.

The sky is full of cranes and bridges and battleship towers. The air smells of oil and rust. A clanking mechanical digger on shore is attacking a mountain of gravel and throwing dusty armfuls onto a barge. From the Navy shipyards comes the shriek of grinders on steel and the smell of grey paint. A shuddering military helicopter keeps prowling about overhead What with all this and the howl of police cars and the piping of backing trucks, we have to shout to each other in the cockpit. The river is full of traffic. Stealthy barges creep up on you unawares. A tug is sliding sideways in the tide toward us. You feel the throbbing of the engines through your feet and smell warm diesel smoke from that hoarse funnel. And here comes an oil tanker escorted by two blue flashing police launches on either side and coastguard cutters in front and behind with guns on their foredecks.

At a US Navy base you take no chances.

30 The Great Dismal Swamp

You get to love these small waterside towns.

Only sailors come to Elizabeth City. Motorists rushing down the I95 see only intersections with motels, gas stations and Burger Kings. Elizabeth City got left out of these advances: a forgotten eddy beside the stream of progress. The streets are wide; stores have false fronts; you meet Norman Rockwell people.

Fred Fearling (now 90) came down to the town dock on his electric scooter. He has been greeting sailors for years. If there are four or more boats he brings wine and cheese and a rose for each of the ladies. He had all the useful information.

“The library has internet. You can eat over there at gourmet prices if you like, but at the ‘Colonial’ you get a full meal, and I mean a full meal with tea or coffee, for $5.95. I go there all the time.”

We went. It was a full meal. He was there.


Elisabeth City is at the entrance to the canal through the Great Dismal Swamp. The canal (opened 1804) looks just like the picture on the home page at qcyc.ca Only today, the sun is out; the Bog Cypress trees, which stand up to their ankles in water on either side, are putting out catkins and bright new buds; and the water is dusty with pollen and the petals of the early flowering trees. It is not in the least dismal. It is all very disappointing.

At the North Lock Robert Peak, lockmaster, asks us in for coffee before he lets the water out. We are in no hurry. We are accustomed to this rural life.

29 Kill Devil Hill

It is a blustery day out here in the skinny outer bank islands north of Cape Hatteras. The sand dunes are certainly big here. Kill Devil Hill for example is a cone about 90 ft high.

The two brothers came here to experiment and practice.

Back in Dayton Ohio, they ran a bicycle company. Quietly and systematically they were pursuing another idea. They experimented with kites; they built a wind tunnel; they watched how birds made turns. They made gliders that you could lie on. In the winter they put the bits of their latest version on a boat and brought them over to the bank islands. They launched each other from Kill Devil Hill where it was always windy.

After hundreds of glides they established that you could not build a glider that would fly itself (any more than a racing dinghy would sail itself). You had to actively control pitch and yaw. And to turn you had to bank not just steer with rudder like a boat.

They became pilots.

Then they worked on engines and propellers.


The ‘Flyer’ is bigger than you expect. There is a copy of it here. The wings are forty feet across. It looks so delicate and fragile you would be afraid that the wind would flip it over and crumple it up. The wings, covered in white cloth, are separated by slender laths clipped into place and held by tensed wires. The engine (which got red hot after a short time) drives the propellers through bicycle chains. The driver lay in the middle, controlled the elevators with his hands and the wing twist and rudder with wires attached to his hips.

It was blowing 27 knots on 17 December 1903 but they went ahead anyway. In the first four trials they took off and flew 120, 175, 200 and 852 feet from their workshop. The National Park Service has placed granite stones at each of these points.

Just five years later the Wright Brothers were flying 20 mile circuits around Paris.

28 The Lost Colony

It looks like a reasonable enough place to start a colony.

The soil is deep brown, there are lots of hardwood trees, and it is on a defensible island in protected water. (It was also going to be a base for privateering against the Spanish).

Anyway this is where Raleigh (then 31 years old) set down hundred or so men on the tip of Roanoke Island in Albemarle Sound in 1585. This was to be Britain’s first settlement in North America. The men made a fort (in case the Spanish attacked them first) but were evidently not experienced campers. They became dependent on the Indians and quickly antagonized them. (They stole from the Indians’ fish traps and shot the Indian chief at a ‘peace’ meeting). When Drake showed up the next year they grabbed the chance to get a ride back to England. The venture was not entirely wasted. Thomas Hariot (25 years) recorded and John White painted in beautiful detail the Indians and their customs, and the animals and plants that were unknown to Europeans.

The next year Raleigh came back with a hundred or so new colonists, including women and children. But when ships returned in 1590, they had vanished.

Archeologists have identified the remains of the fort. It is a park now. You can walk through the trees, which are full of edible squirrels and birds, and look at the mounds and moats that were probably surrounded by palisades.

27 North Carolina

We didn’t like the last bit of South Carolina and the first bit of North Carolina. The shores of the ICW are built up all the way. In places the land has been shaved of all vegetation and houses set down as tight together as boxes in a warehouse.

Then things improve.

Beaufort’s marine museum is run by volunteers, scores of them, mostly old men, men who love boats. Men perhaps who have known a prow biting into the tide, the tension of ropes, the stately movement of ships, the touch of shaped wood. Now they are retired and happy doing anything to do with boats: repairing them, modeling them or just welcoming you to the museum.
“No. It is free. Please sign the visitor’s book”.
The museum has three courtesy cars for boaters.
“Take one when ever you need it… top up the gas if you use a lot.”





And there is the village whose name is an adjective.

A lady suggested the name to the town after she found fragment of wood from a shipwreck bearing the word “ Oriental…” It is a serious fishing village (shrimp in season, flounder just now). Behind the warehouse of the seafood packing plant small wooden houses are set down on the grass. There seem to be no cars. The streets are so quiet that the robins’, grackles’ and mocking birds’ evening chorus sounds like a full orchestra. Dogs take themselves for walks and chat to other dogs.

26 Waccamaw River, South Carolina.

It’s a frosty morning promising a beautiful day.

We are motoring quietly up the Waccamaw River north of Georgetown. High forests line either bank. An occasional plantation house set back from the river is the only sign of human presence. Loons, now in their summer uniform, float on the still water and dive as we approach. An otter looped along the surface wet and shiny.

We are back in deciduous forest. The bare branches are just beginning to sprout tiny leaves. Each tree seems to be enveloped in a haze of colored dots. You would not believe how many greens there are. Some buds are lemon green, others that grey-green of Spanish moss, yet others the white-green of the innermost heart of a lettuce. And they are not only green. Some of these tiny specks are chipmunk-red, others raspberry. The buds are so minuscule that the forest remains delicate and transparent in a way that is impossible to describe.


This peaceful country had its days of misery. The British tried to secure South Carolina during the American Revolution. Local rebels like Sumter and Francis Marion maintained a skulking resistance, skirmishing with the British and fading into the forests they knew so well. The British stole the farmers’ horses; burned their crops and homes. The British colonel Tarleton, arriving at the home of a rebel officer who had died six weeks earlier, made the widow prepare him meal, dug up her husband to see what he looked like, then drove her cattle, pigs and chickens into the barn and set it on fire. He reported to the leader of the British forces, Cornwallis:
“…I laid the houses and plantations of the violent rebels to waste…the country seem now convinced of the error of the insurrection….”

We just passed an osprey nest on Marker 41. There was something stiff about the two birds looking down at their accumulated pile of branches that reminded you of a married couple having a disagreement about a carpet. They gave us an icy stare as we passed.

25 Georgetown, South Carolina

The ICW is passing through marshland again. Now dykes have appeared at either side with curious draining devices. It seems that these marshes were once rice paddies.

It was found, almost by accident, that rice could be grown in the marshlands around Georgetown. You could use the tides to move the brackish water in and out on demand. By 1840 half of all the rice grown in North America was “Carolina Gold.” The wealthy built fine homes in Georgetown. Many (from 1750 onwards) are restored and lived in. They are more modest that the ones at Beaufort but well proportioned and attractive.
It is such a pretty town we stayed several days.
We got to know these landmarks well.


* * *


In the silent black and white movie “Pied Piper Malone“, a misunderstood mariner’s reputation is restored by a throng of children he has befriended. It was filmed in 1923 right here in Georgetown. Thirty local children (including Muriel Higgins, 8 years) were recruited for the all-important throng. The film was forgotten; all copies lost….until one showed up in, of all places, Russia. Today they are going to screen it at the Strand theatre, Front Street, which is right opposite the clock tower.

The whole town turned up. Some had walkers. Muriel Higgins and five other surviving ‘children’ arrived in antique cars.

A white haired lady from the historical society stood and read an introduction. Mildred’s grandson sat down at the piano to accompany the film. The lights went out.

A steamer, with a thin funnel amidships supporting a column of black smoke, brought the hero to the dock near the clock tower (just ahead of where we are tied up now). The flickering drama unfolded. The audience gasped as familiar streets and homes appeared. The hero’s honor was restored. The girl with the white face and black eye shadow loved him after all, and the swarm of children waved congratulations as his ship departed.
When the lights came on, everyone applauded the screen. The theatre was full of chatter.