After leaving Jordon Lake I drove east to Edenson, NC. I stayed the night in a motel and got the web site updated and all my email finished. From there I finished the drive to the coast and tried to get a site at a campground jutting out into Currituck Sound not far from the Virginia border near Virginia Beach. I hung around for a while looking for someone to pay. When no one showed up I continued on and ended up on the North Carolina Outer Banks.
Last night was in the high 30's or low-40's which is fine by me. I ran 5 miles (the most ever for me and not bad for an old guy) this morning. After breakfast and a shower I launched from the campground into a small canal with lots of fishing and crabbing boats tied to the banks.
Many of the coastal roads seem to have canals on either side. The whole coastal area is flat and this really seems strange after the mountains and paddling Maine all summer. People are fishing the canals too. There are a few cypress along the canals with their weird, gnarly root systems, like knobby knees, sticking out of the water. Those are a first for this old boy from the north.
Coming out of the canal, I was faced with a 5-10 knot wind from the north. With no particular destination in mind, I turned into it and towards Kitty Hawk Bay. Kitty Hawk, of course, is where the Wright Brotheres (Orville and Wilbur, I think) got the first airplane off the ground into the air for a short flight. Kitty Hawk is, in fact, a small town on the Outer Banks. The next town is Kill Devil Hill followed by Nags Head.
The temperature was in the 40-50 degree range. When I thought of it I measured the water temperature and I clocked it at 50 degrees even. This was the first time ever for measuring water temperature by me. The first thermometer I bought was broken before I got to use it. The second one I set on the deck in preparation to using it, forgot about it and when I remembered, it was gone. So this was a first for me.
Unbelievably, there is little tide an area this close to the ocean (on the other side of less than a mile wide barrier island. Bodie Island, this part of the chain is 40-50 miles long with no breaks. The first break in the chain is Oregon Inlet between Bodie and Hatteras Islands and it is not very wide. The next break is even farther down the chain. Only so much water can go through Oregon Inlet (the current must be horrendous) during a tide and apparently there's not enough to effect the upper part of the sounds. Wind has more effect on the water levels.
Before reaching Kitty Hawk Bay I had to negotiate my way through or past several grass islands. The simplest thing was to simply go all the way around them. The islands were made up of individual clumps of marsh grass. It looks as if they had been grown in pots and then transplanted but that's just the way they grow. The front line of plants fights the waves and provides protection for those behind them where ground gradually builds up.
Kitty Hawk Bay is approximately 3 miles square or round or whatever. The actual coast is moderately developed and the only real relief is these grass islands.
Although the bay was flat when I got out on it, it started to act up a little when I was about half way to another set of grassy islands. Uh oh! The spray skirt was behind my seat when a couple of waves broke over the bow. I was about midway between the two sets of islands so it didn't matter a whole lot which way I went. I kept an eye on the 1-1.5 foot waves as I continued on.
Naturally I started thinking about bad things. Like how both neoprene hatch covers were in the hatches rather than on them. Why? I took them off since I wasn't paddling and wanted to keep the hatches aired. So now all I had on was the plastic outer covers.
No monster waves crashed on top of me and I got to the island with no mishaps. My hands and feet were both cold and I had a coupe of sneezes and considered turning back. The main reason I was out there was more for conditioning than anything else. I'm trying to alleviate a probable case of tendentious in my left forearm so I'm working on a more correct paddling technique. My previous (current) style was all arms. This was fine by me because I wanted the exercise. But it put a lot of strain on the forearms. I switched from a feathered to un-feathered paddle this summer because of minor pain in my wrists and poor technique. Hopefully these corrections will prolong my paddling career.
I saw no wildlife and scared up only a lone sandpiper type bird with a long skinny beak and a lone blue heron. I thought the heron was going to let me take his picture but he took off as I reached for the camera.
When I got back to the islands near my put in I decided to try to negotiate through the islands rather than go around. I knew I might run into a lot of dead ends but had the time so what the hell. The channel was very easy to follow (I'll pay for that someday when I'm really, really tired) and I found my canal right where I expected it.
After a late lunch I drove down the road to Jockey's Ridge State Park (don't ask where the name came from). This S.P. is for these huge set of sand dunes. DeLorme's says there's one 140 feet tall but the brochures only claim 100 feet. I didn't see that one but saw some I thought were 40-50 feet tall (but must have been the 100 foot one) and maybe 100 yards long forming a basin. I shot a couple of pictures and did their nice nature trail.