THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 16, 1996 TAG: 9603160365
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SOUTH MILLS LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
For many a pleasure-boat sailor, a special rite of spring will occur today when the Army Corps of Engineers reopens the Dismal Swamp Canal.
The 55-mile-long alternate link in the Intracoastal Waterway system connects the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Albemarle Sound and has been closed since Sept. 6, 1995, for lock repairs. A few miles to the east, a parallel - and deeper - intracoastal passage between Great Bridge, Va., and Coinjock, N.C., remained open.
Low water last summer in the Dismal Swamp watershed caused the engineers to halt boat traffic in the more westerly intracoastal cut that starts in South Mills, Va., and ends a few miles north of Elizabeth City on the Pasquotank River.
``It was a good time to perform maintenance and repairs on the locks at both ends of the Dismal Swamp Canal, and this work has now been completed,'' said William Brown, a spokesman for the engineers in Norfolk.
Summer droughts in recent years have caused repeated closings of the canal.
The long, quiet ribbon of water that runs almost arrow-straight beneath overhanging trees in the Dismal Swamp was first surveyed by George Washington. The canal was opened early in the last century to take the harvest of North Carolina's farms, rivers and sounds to the deep-water port of Norfolk.
The canal, which now runs in part thorugh the Dismal Swamp Wildlife Refuge, remains much as it was nearly two centuries ago. Deer and other wildlife often stare from the west bank as small pleasure boats pass by.
Brown warned sailors that there is a shoal area in the canal where the water depth is only 6.3 feet ``between mile markers 19 and 20 about 1.5 miles north of the (Lake Drummond) feeder ditch.''
In the past the engineers have tried to maintain a controlling depth in the canal of 9 feet. by CNB