Elizabeth City to Coinjock, NC (with Video)

March 26, 2024: Four days after my Dismal mistake, I finally make my escape from Camden, NC, and get back on track to continue my trip north.

After four nights of gorgeous but cold and windy weather at Lamb’s Marina in Camden, NC (near Elizabeth City), I finally decided it was time to try moving on. I had conflicting weather reports from the National Weather Service and the Windy app — one said waves 1-2 feet and the other said waves 4-7 feet — but time was ticking away and I still needed to make two stops before I could spend a few days at Hampton and then continue up the Chesapeake Bay.

So I pulled out early on Tuesday morning.

The start of my trip down the Pasquotank River from Elizabeth City.

What followed was a mostly uneventful cruise that, for the first time in a while, I recorded parts of on a pair of GoPro cameras. I edited the resulting 3-hour trip down to about an hour and then cut another 10 minutes of mostly crab trap dodging and slow cruising out. The resulting 50-minute video is me narrating the most interesting parts of the trip. It’s been on YouTube for a few days as I write this and has gotten some really positive comments, so it can’t be bad. You can watch it right here or, if you have access to YouTube on a big screen TV, enjoy it in 4K video.

Anyway (spoiler alert) I wound up in Coinjock at the marina. The rates had gone up to $2.75/foot/night (from $2.25) and power for one night would have cost an extra $15. I did pay $15 extra for a pumpout. This place is a gold mine for whoever owns it. Everything is basic, although the dockhands are better than average, and if they own the restaurant, too, they can get us all kinds of ways. I hope I never have to stop there again. By the time I left, I felt fleeced.

I had lunch and then dinner at the restaurant. I tried to give the prime rib another try and, once again, I was disappointed. (I don’t know why people rave about it. Maybe they’ve never had good prime rib? Coinjock’s prime rib is incredibly average.) I ate half of it, took the rest back to my boat, and wound up trimming off a ton of fat (for my dogs; I don’t eat fat) before slicing and grilling the leftovers. It was better for that dinner than the one at the restaurant.

Although I was the first one to arrive at Coinjock, I was joined by a gaggle of larger boats and one a little smaller than mine. I suspect they all ate in the restaurant, too.

I made a video short for YouTube of a passing barge.

I had a nice quiet night and slept well — and that’s all that really matters, right? In the morning, it was foggy. I did a load of laundry while the other folks at the marina headed north into the fog, one by one. By around 9 AM I was ready to follow.

But that’s another story.