After leaving Vero Beach… we’ve been steaming steadily north, up through Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, with all their “no-see-ums”, the tiny but extremely voracious bugs of this region.

The first visible sign you’ve hit North Carolina on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is the Sunset Beach Pontoon Bridge — literally, a bridge on a barge. This is the only such bridge on the ICW; even most of the drawbridges elsewhere have been replaced with high fixed bridges that don’t need to open before boats can pass.

Because it’s on a barge, the bridge is affected by low tides just like the boats traveling past. At low tide, the water is too shallow for the barge to move, so the Waterway is completely blocked for hours a day. At other times, the bridge will only open on the hour, so all the boats headed north or south must wait in this narrow channel.

Most of the bridges on the North Carolina portion of the ICW only open once an hour, while the bridges in other states open on request, or in some cases every 15 - 30 minutes. Since the bridges are never multiples of an hour apart, waiting at bridges for 30 - 45 minutes is just something you have to factor into boating through North Carolina.

We stopped at Oriental NC and visited friends Jo (Narnia) and Bob (Tiger), and visited family inland. We continued northbound after Father’s Day.

After Oriental, we stopped at the River Rat Yacht Club for a few days, then continued to Elizabeth City, Deep Creek, and finally Norfolk, where we stopped for the summer.