Alligator River

7/6/07 – The sun woke me up this morning again so I got up and ate oatmeal for breakfast. The wind had shifted during the night so I was no longer on the windward shore; the waves were able to build up for miles before they hit me so it was a bit of a rough location. I got underway at about 9:30am. I raised the main, weighed anchor, and sailed out of the Belhaven harbor. I sailed for about two hours before I got to a narrow canal. There was a bridge with a big dredging barge right under the center span. They would not answer my calls to them on the radio to see if I could get by so I took down the sails and slowly motored up to them. They gave no acknowledgement of my presence for several minutes but then moved so I could get by. The canal continued for about twenty miles. When I was about halfway through, I saw clouds and heard thunder. I could not get the NOAA radio broadcast because I was out of range and I could not get cell phone reception either. I took the sails down again and fastened everything down in preparation for a storm. It began raining extremely heavily and lightning was all around but there was very little wind, which surprised me. It passed over in about an hour and the sky cleared up again. I exited the canal and entered the Alligator River for the evening. I picked out an anchorage near the windward shore and ate some macaroni and cheese for dinner. There is another thunderstorm just to the east of me. I could hear it and see lots of lightning but it doesn’t seem to be moving towards me. It looked really cool just after the sun had set because it was still illuminated in brilliant orange light while everything else was getting very dark.

I put the screens up to keep the bugs out but soon realized that I had trapped more flies inside the cabin than were out on deck. I opened the screen to try to get them out but they seemed very content to stay inside. They kept waking me up throughout the night because they were very loud and they used my face as a trampoline every few minutes.