Saturday, April 29. 2017 - Pungo Ferry Road - North Landing River
As you know, I bought truck (Ford F-150) over the winter to replace my much loved Honda Element. Throwing the kayaks in the back of the truck is soooooooooooo easy. We look forward to many, many trips on the water this year.
As is tradition at the beginning of the season, we started out at Pungo Ferry Road.
The City of Virginia Beach purchased the old Captain George's property a few years ago and has made a bunch of improvements to this site over the past year. They repaved and restriped the parking lot to accommodate boat usage. They added a formal boat ramp for power boats and a dedicated kayak launch area along the beach. There's also a porta-john and a couple of picnic tables. It will be interesting to see how much more traffic this site (which typically was fairly quiet) gets throughout the summer. Lots of people were using it today and it's only April.
There's also a water level and climate station at the site that is managed by USGS in Partnership with the City of Virginia Beach. It has wind speed and direction as well as precipitation gauges in addition to the water level gauge. Click here to access the data in real time. Below you a can see a static image of what the levels were when we went out. The water level was pretty high plus there was a consistent 10-15 mph wind out of the southsouthwest. The water levels on the North Landing River are heavily influenced by wind.
This was the second weekend in a row with temperatures in the upper 80s to 90 degrees. What the heck?! It's APRIL!!!!!!! Luckily, there was a consistent thin cloud cover the whole time and since it's only April, it was hot, but no oppressively so. The water temperature felt fine. Not warm, per se, but definitely not cold.
So we launched from the little beach area at Pungo Ferry dodging around some power boats that were beached/docked there. Since the wind was coming out of the south, we went south under the bridge to have the wind at our backs on the way back in. As I mentioned, the water level was really high. You can see it on the old fueling platform and on the bridge supports. There was a pretty good chop on the main river. Lots of big boats going up and doing the river. We tucked into the oxbow south of the bridge and then into a small creek that heads in the general direction of Princess Anne Road. We were able to find a geocache in a tree along the creek and saw flowers (mostly irises) starting to bloom.
Most of the marsh grass is still brown from the winter. We had to keep reminding ourselves that it was only April despite the warm/hot temperatures. The osprey are out in full force guarding their nests. We tried to convince them that we were no threat to them or their babies, but they still put up quite the racket in protest.
Great day today. First trip of the season so we didn't overdo it. 1 hour and 25 minutes on the water and 2.6 miles on the GPS. Scroll below the pictures to see the track map.
This guy wasn't super thrilled with us passing by the nest.
