Great Dismal Swamp

We woke up this morning docked in the Great Dismal Swamp, one of the earliest canals developed to support inter-coastal trade. George Washington was one of the folks who invested in draining and logging the swamp beginning in 1763. He engineered the canal we took the boat through. It is a narrow canal with a fair number of logs and tree limbs floating in it.

The North Carolina tourist bureau offers free dockage at their visitor center on the Swamp. They claim it is the only visitor center in the US where you can arrive by car or boat. We were the only boat on the dock that night but we've heard that there can be as many as four or five boats rafted up (tied to each other with the innermost boat tied to the dock) at the height of the season. The "season" would be in the fall when boaters take their boats south or the spring when they head north again.

To get into and out of the Great Dismal Swamp you have to take your boat through a lock at either end. A lock is a device for raising and lowering boats between stretches of water of different levels on river and canal waterways. In the Swamp you are raised 8 feet when you enter and lowered the same amount when you leave.

You motor up to the lock entrance, wait for the lock tender to open the lock and signal you that it is OK to enter. Then while Jim drives the boat, I pass the lines up to the lock tender who loops them over a piling above my head and hands the ends back to me. With one of us on the bow and

one of us on the stern, we take up the slack in the lines gradually as the lock tender opens the gates at the front of the lock slowly letting the water in to raise up the boat. At the end, we even with the top of the lock. The whole process took about 30 minutes on each end.

The lock tender who let us out of the canal regaled us with a conch blowing demonstration while we were lowering. He claims to be the world's best conch blower. For those of you who have never heard a conch being blown, it is shell that makes a loud noise. Someone who knows what he is doing can actually play a bit of a tune.

He also had to play "log wrangler" when we were locking through. A large log entered the lock at the same time we did. He had to hook it and pull it out of the lock before he could lower us. If he hadn't done so, the log could have damaged the boat in the turbulence created by letting the water out of the lock.

All in all, we had a nice trip through the Great Dismal Swamp and saw only one other boat through the entire 30+ mile trip.

On to Norfolk, VA!