Alligator River Marina - things get dark

Well, there's still room, so far.

We arrived here Monday but some have been here since Thursday waiting for the bridge to open. Today was supposed to be the day they first tried to open the bridge as a test. The test failed. The bridge engineer will not promise any date and now it's very open-ended. In truth, we have no idea of when it will be repaired. There are a dozen boats piled up in the marina (but there's still room for a half dozen more) and the mood is not optimistic. The bridge crew works from morning to 7:30 but are now looking to Thursday for even a test run. All they say is that they are "working on it".

The dark picture matches our spirits

Meanwhile, life goes on and we did a laundry today. The marina has two washers and two dryers but unfortunately, none of them worked! You only found that out by throwing your laundry into the washer only to find out that it would not pump out the water. So now you had soaking wet clothes which we hang rung to put in the dryers. Just like the washers, they were nonfunctional. What to do? After a call to the manager, we were taken to the residence house and finished the washer there - but only after finding the dryer there was also nonfunctional - but al least that was fixable by unblocking the exhaust tubing.

In the middle of all this, I gave a 1.5 hour presentation on the status of the ICW south of here to a group of boaters similarly stuck north of the bridge. So we are all waiting. I saw a post today asking whether we thought the bridge would be fixed by the time he arrived in mid November!

So we wait and wait. There is an option to go around by the outer banks but it's a big detour and not possible with strong winds. Towards the end of this week, it becomes a possibility. It's a daily wait and see, ugh.