Ocracoke Island to Manteo NC


We left Ocracoke at 7am this morning to cross the length of Pamlico Sound before the waves got big.  We made it part way before it got wavy. (Enough to get through the skinny water by Ocracoke before it bounced us around). 


This area is pretty windy which is why the Wright Brothers chose the outer banks as the place to experiment with aircraft.   They were from Ohio, after all.    The national weather service gave them the windiest places.  Chicago was #1 but it wasn't remote enough for them to avoid mocking and or spies...  So they chose #6 on the list.  Kitty Hawk.   


It's a pretty good run so we put the boat up on plane and ran for a couple of hours.  It was time to give her diesels a workout anyway..    That burned a lot of fuel though....  Time to get more.  Found a great place (via online research) in Wanchese (a seafood place) that would sell their own bulk diesel at retail.   Great deal.


Manteo it's a very cute little town surrounded by new modern developments that are very cookie cutter.  


68 miles today.    Before 1pm....

Because we did 20+ mph for most of the morning we got to Manteo in time to go explore.     We grabbed an Uber and took off for the Wright Brothers National Monument.  The place where humans first took powered flight.  


There is a large monument here in tribute to their contributions to flight.  


It sits atop the highest hill in the area - a former sand dune. 


They planted grass on it to stabilize it.  


Here over several years the Wright brothers experimented with gliders and bike controls and underwear fabric to create controllable gliders.    Then they added an aluminum gas motor and counter rotating props to balance the affect of the props.  


And here they performed the first four powered flights carrying a human.  They ranged from 100 to 800+ feet and within a couple of years could fly for miles.  


They have reproduced the original garages they built to house themselves and their gliders as they experimented.    They lived in a tent for the winter the first year....


A fun thing to tour and visit and learn.  

It's funny that they in just a few years were giving exhibitions of the flying machines and flew to Europe to show it off.  Their plane was damaged in shipping and lots of little gliding machines were puddle jumping just to get across a field.  Once their parts arrived they took off and flew seven laps around the exhibition stadium.   Needless to say at that point they were infamous.   

Not bad for a couple of printers (yes, they had a print shop before the bike shop and the two businesses funded the creation of the airplanes).  Within a few years they had contracts with the military and before the last brother died people and flown across oceans and broken the sound barrier.  Had he lived 20 years longer he would have seen a man on the moon.    Parts of that first plane are on both the moon and Mars.   

Tonight we are at a free dock in Manteo.  Good, since we blew $960 on diesel today (cash).   Time to find another ATM...


Off to things further north tomorrow....

Not much of a sunset tonight I think.  Cloudy.  Time to be off the big water.   A storm is a comin....



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