Day 10: Belhaven – Upper Alligator River (44 miles)

I arose an hour or so before dawn and took an exercise walk around town. River Forest Marina was also packed with boats that had taken shelter from the weather. This would not have been a good night to have been at Dowrey Creek as they are very exposed to southerly winds.

When I got back to the boat, we then broke our fast with lox and cream cheese, boiled eggs, whole grain bread, OJ and coffee, and were the first boat away from the marina.

Winds were very light; a real “powerboater’s” day. We motored north into the Alligator-Pungo Cut. Buck had the helm most of the morning while I relaxed with a book. We went lightly aground one time while trying to avoid a large southbound powerboat, but were able to back the boat off.

By early afternoon we emerged from the canal into the Alligator River. Rather than turning to starboard and heading down the river toward the Albemarle Sound, we turned to port and headed to the Upper Alligator.

I’ve read about and wanted to explore the Upper Alligator for years but had not had the opportunity to do so until now. The river twists and turns a lot, but if you follow your chart plotter and pay attention to the advice in the NC Cruising Guide, you should have no problems. There is plenty of water for most boats: I only had one brief segment of about 20 yards where the depth sounder dropped to 6.9 feet under my hull. Most of the channel was much deeper. Surprisingly, as we got further up the river the water got much deeper. We continued on up the river even after we ran out of chartplotter. I used the paper chart, Cruising Guide and my intuition as we slowly crept on up the river at 4-5 knots. At the fork of the river, we went left and immediately dropped anchor as it was a very beautiful location. Unfortunately we had to move as we had a depth of 30 ft. and the channel was too narrow to allow the boat enough swing room with any more than a 3 to 1 rode which I didn’t trust with the hard bottom.

You can see our route and the coordinates on this screen shot from the chartplotter.

We pulled up the anchor and continued up river another ¼-1/2 mile to another beautiful anchorage. This one was only about 12 ft deep and at least 500 ft wide. It is well protected from any point of wind.

After securing the ship we watched a river otter play for a while; then we were buzzed by 2 mature bald eagles. I then tried my hand at fishing. We were too far out in the middle to attract any bass although I tried. I then re-baited my hook with a bit of ham rind and tried bottom fishing for cat fish. Here I was more successful. After a couple of strikes, I hooked a 14-16 inch catfish that literally bent my rod double. Buck pulled out our net; we then landed and released the fish.

Given that the ladies were not around and the water much colder than we would prefer, we only performed simple ablutions, then poured our cocktails.

After enjoying a beautiful sunset, I headed to the galley where I whipped up a simple supper of rare seared sesame tuna steaks, brown rice and salad, with banana bread and sautéed cinnamon apples for dessert.

The evening cooled down nicely and we were quite comfortable with our 12V fans.