2014-15 SAILING AWAY AGAIN

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Trying Verizon’s MIFI tonight to see if the blog will fly out to you all. It connects my computer to WIFI from our mooring.  Please put your email address in the upper right hand corner if you want to get these posts when I write them (not daily).  Also love to read comments you can write below.

   First night back on board, readying Shawnee to sail south.   

   My sister, Chris, and her husband, Bill, who live in Sharon generously donated time to drive us to the boat otherwise we’d have to take an expensive cab ride.  During the week Drew and I drove down to Marblehead from Exeter several times to load up. Since the MYC launch doesn’t run Mondays and Tuesdays at the end of the season we used our dinghy, Tweety, back and forth. 

   The four of us stopped in Salem (Drew with a witch city ghoul) 

to view the Alexander Calder exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum – a great show with his well known mobiles and stabiles.  We had a delicious lunch in the garden café on a spectacular sunny classic New England fall day.  Chris and Bill then dropped Drew and me off with all our food at the Marblehead Yacht Club.

   To keep up with the repairs we did have the genoa repaired last week after splinters were found in a ripped seam – an untold accidental error when workers took off the sails and laid them on the dock to do the bright work this summer (varnish the teak).  The teak does look beautiful.

   The bilge pump isn’t working properly and Drew will find out why. (It’s under the floor of the salon where water can collect.) . Usually, automatically, the bilge pump sucks the water out. It’s a pretty important feature to prevent the boat from filling with water.  All boats include a hand pump to empty the bilge from the cockpit in an emergency.

 Mazu is on board getting ready to sail.   

She just passed her Pet Partner test last week that keeps up her certification as a therapy dog – allows us to take her everywhere and gives her a liability insurance policy. Looking a bit pensive here.

  We are having our dueling weather apps discussion tonight, reading information from about a half dozen sources to see what the wind and weather forecasts are for the next 4 days so we can arrive safely in Hampton, VA.  There is usually a debate between us about when is the best time to leave, what time is slack tide at the Cape Cod Canal, when is the ideal and safest time to go through, must figure in time to fuel up in Pocasset, MA, etc.

  I prepare sandwiches ahead and leave a list of food we can grab as we sail off-shore for 3 days straight taking turns at watch (Zone bars for Drew, cheese sticks, nuts, fruit cups, yogurt cups, apples, bananas, cold tea, cold-cuts, cereal, water, peanut butter crackers for Deb.  With the rocking and rolling I only “cook” scrambled eggs and Stouffers frozen meals on the gimbled stove/oven at sea. 

   It can get boring at night unless a tanker gets in our path or comes zooming up behind and scares the #*&#! out of us. Audible books app reads aloud to me through my night watches, Zero to One presently.  I am at the helm 10 to 2 AM with my headphones on, eyes open.  Of course we are on auto-pilot, a preprogrammed route the boat follows through a navigation system with way-points. 

  Beautiful moon tonight.  More later.

Pocasset to Provincetown sail and motoring to Marblehead, MA

August 7

At 6:30 am we left Pocasset to get through the Cape Cod canal before the current became too strong against us.   3 k pushed against us as we motored through.

 After the canal we sailed 30 miles to Provincetown and saw this beautiful schooner tall ship headed out of Provincetown Harbor.  It was a perfect day of sailing - right speed, right direction, sunny.

 

 We dropped anchor at noon in about 10 ' and dinghied into town for lunch.  Drew had a business call for about an hour or so and then we strolled around the shops.  Great people watching here.  We headed to Ross' restaurant, a place we had gone to 7 years earlier when we'd visited by car.  We slipped onto the bar stools, looked at each other and noticed, "That's the same bartender."  We remembered him and the restaurant.  We told him it was so good we came back. He said, "I'm Ross.  I now own it!"  We congratulated him and then took this picture of the view from the restaurant complete with a rainbow.

 We went to the movie "Boyhood" which we highly recommend.
It was time to sample some of the great bakery goods.  We bought a couple of items at the Portuguese Bakery,  a salted caramel creme brulee, and carrot cake. Mmmmm

AUGUST 8  We spent the night and headed out by 8:30 am after breakfast of lox and bagel at the Coffee Pot. We lifted anchor to head out for an 8 hour trip to Marblehead.  We could sail for about an hour and then the wind was dead ahead again so on went the motor.
It was nice to arrive at our familiar mooring field and Marblehead Yacht Club on Friday.  We took a shower on the boat and headed in to use our club food card for dinner on the deck.  Our good friend, Steve LaLonde, who had convinced us to head to the Keys in the first place was there.  Great to see him.  With dinner we had a bottle of Prosecco that had surprisingly survived the Florida heat.

   AUGUST 9  The next morning my friend, Pam Derringer joined us for a sail to watch the Classic Boat Corinthian Yacht Club race.  There were many beautiful yachts and tons of boats sailing out to watch the noon start just outside the harbor.  Thanks for the pix Pam.

Me, Drew and Chris in the cockpit.

 My sister Chris.  She drove us back to Exeter Friday afternoon.

AUGUST 10, Sunday in Exeter with my niece, Lisa, visiting I blew out the candles on her gift.  Mmmmm  Fun birthday and finally home sweet home.

The sailing blog will return when we sail back down with fewer fixes in the fall.  Sailing north felt wonderful and gave us a taste of what it would be like to go with everything working well.
Excelsior!

The trip to Cape Cod outside

We left Saturday, August 2 and cruised up to the North Street Landing in Portsmouth, VA at a free dock we discovered on the way up 11 years ago.  We just locked up, stepped off, and restaurants were right there.  Easy.   

 

We left at 10:30 pm, Everything is all lit up everywhere because it is a huge Navy yard. A Portsmouth pamphlet said it’s the deepest natural harbor in the world.   The Navy Yard is in Norfolk, but it’s called the Portsmouth Navy Yard.  Portsmouth is located across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk.  Like Maine and NH the shipyard is called the Portsmouth Navy Yard, but actually the boatyard is across the Piscataqua River in Kittery, Maine.

  There are tons of things to look at.  Fortunately no huge boats, like aircraft carriers were coming in or out of the channel for us to maneuver out of their way. 

All of Sunday, August 3 we motored inching up the coastline.  Drew never stops moving and feels great.

quick selfie

Monday, August 4

The Iridium phone didn’t work this sunny morning when I called the Master Gardeners Association meeting as we past Cape May in NJ.  Because of all of the metal around like the mast, the phone kept cutting out.  We are also moving, and it doesn’t like that either.  Don’t recommend one of these phones although it was very easy to use – turn on, wait for the Iridium registered text on the phone and dial.  So much for that – I missed my meeting and Drew is not going to use it for his since we’ll be on land by Wednesday morning. (stopping at Parker’s Boat Yard).  The instructions for the Iridium say to use only outside, not near any buildings or high structures, and stay in one spot.  Drew and I were thinking, how does anyone use this thing reliably?  I guess it’s for the army in a field, not woods.  There are many articles on this device, but I wonder where they use it. Drew called the office today but got cut off because we rocked and rolled with the low waves.

The night and day were incredible. Sunny, warm, light winds with very glassy seas and low wave action all day long.  It almost felt like we weren’t moving.  We finally were honored with viewing a group of dolphins that glided next to the boat. One came right over to the side of the boat where I was standing and did a beautiful arched jump.  She/he almost winked at me. Another small, young one played around and swam under the boat. So cute.

The nightly entertainment, the sunset, was glorious.  We never tire of watching the red ball descend into the horizon with  different colors every night – still have never seen the green flash that some say is real just as the sun disappears at the horizon.

  After “cooking” the Stouffers dinners in the microwave oven, before we sat down to eat, we danced to the Ipod, “The Way You Look Tonight.”  The ¼ moon cast a long, silver rippled line to the boat like a pathway to the horizon. 

  Gentle seas are the way to go.  We have hardly sailed once since we left because the winds are not from the SW to help us go. The winds are from ENE hitting us on the nose.  And several times there just wasn’t any wind.  We left early to beat Tropical Storm Bertha. We are about 50 miles off shore. 

 

 Flat ocean picture

 Me in my spot.

 If you want to feel time stand still get on a boat at night with clouds covering the moon and stars.  There’s no sky or land, just floating on black.  No schedule, no phone, no Internet out this far.  It’s quite magical.  I am on watch as I write this- the boat is on auto-pilot following a track Drew put in.  I glance up periodically to look around and check the radar that tells if there are any boats headed our way.  We also use the paper charts and the Ipad app, Navionics.  These are the three ways to watch where we’re going safely.

 Dolphins during the day.  Tried to upload video.

Tuesday Aug.5

Continued the trip.  In the middle of the night there was a large group of bold dolphins swimming with us for about a half an hour: jumping out of the water, under and all around the boat.  I was on watch and enjoyed their show.  What made it especially spectacular was the phosphorescence in the water.  These are tiny creatures that light up in the water, like fireflies in the water, especially where the water is stirred up or in the wake of the dolphins.  They’d make the "pshh" sound as they breathed before diving under.  I then looked up to the star studded sky and figured we must be in the Pleiades because there were shooting stars about one every 5 minutes short ones, long ones, fat and thin lines across the black night. 

During the day a moth flew in and landed on the ceiling of the bimini.  It skirted away into the ropes and stayed there until we arrived at Parkers Boat Yard in Pocasset, and I undid the ropes to let the dinghy down.  It flew away to the nearby land.  Nice trip for the little thing. 

  There was pea soup fog that greeted us at Block Island. For most of the day we navigated by auto-pilot, Maxsea's course and radar to avoid other boats.  The fog horns blared every note especially through the shipping channels with the big barges and tankers. 

 Fog with low visibility

All these days out our Iphones say “No Service” even with a couple of bars as we approached land passing Long Island, Block Island, and the Elizabeth Islands.

  After the fog lifted in the afternoon as Drew napped in the salon I cut the engine and sailed for a while on light 5 to 9 k winds.  He woke up and said, “Hey, wait. You’re having way too much fun up there.”  I played with the wind for a while but soon returned to motoring because we wanted to get to the mooring before 5. 

  We met my roommate from college, Jean and her husband Steve for dinner in North Falmouth just as we had done in October on our way down.  The first thing Jean said to Drew was, “You lost weight.”  He always does on the boat.

  Funny to walk on land with the feeling of motion gone after our constant balancing on the voyage.  We returned from dinner about 10, dinghied back to Shawnee, and crashed into bed.

Wednesday, August 6

Got up late in time for Drew’s conference call with work scheduled for 10 to 3 pm on his cell phone. 

  Gorgeous light wind day. 

Our view from the mooring - someone else's boat.

 I called for the launch to bring me in.  I am  sitting here in a comfortable Adirondack chair writing the blog and emailing overlooking the harbor bordered by two blue hydrangea bushes.  The plan for Thursday, August 7 is to go 30 miles (5 hours) to Provincetown for the night and then head west 48 miles (9 hours) to Marblehead on Friday.  My kind sister, Chris, is going to meet us and drive us back home Saturday morning.

Back on Shawnee after teak work

Atlantic Yacht Basin, Chesapeake, VA, 12 miles south of Norfolk

Friday, August 1, 2014

We are back on Shawnee, two months after a beautiful job by Atlantic Yacht Basin redoing the varnish work – 9 coats.  It just gleams.  Highly recommend this yacht yard.   They clean up, are extremely helpful, enterprising, and do superb work.

We rented a car one-way, stopping in Brooklyn to see grandkids. Drew saw new Celia Twombly, one month old.  We stopped in Long Island City, 4 miles away, to see daughter, Sarah and husband, Yeang as well.  We slept there for 4 hours and headed south.  We left at 2:30 am, a great time to see NO traffic in NYC.

We arrived at Chesapeake, VA and spent Friday grocery shopping, testing the rigging and engine to make sure that when they put the mast back up everything was connected and tuned correctly.   It was all set, we were ready to turn around in the basin. I turned the ignition key and nothing happened. No sound at all.  Drew noticed that the batteries weren’t charging properly when the engine turned on.  So within an hour the boatyard brought us a new battery. Drew replaced the 10 year-old battery, a couple of fuses and says he still hasn’t diagnosed the whole problem completely.  “There’s too much resistance.” for those of you who understand electronics.  We’re spending the night here.

 Mess in salon to fix the battery

 beautiful newly finished table

I sit and read or clean during these periods of big fixes.  At least I’m reading a good novel, The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd. The Internet is intermittent so I can’t send this blog yet or do email today.  It may be interference of heavy rain as well.  We are snug and dry inside Shawnee.

This trip we will motor up the ICW, past the Portsmouth Navy Yard to Norfolk and then directly out to sea at Cape Henry, the mouth of the Chesapeake.  Our plan is to beat the LO Bertha, a tropical storm in the Caribbean, and go straight to Cape Cod or Block Island.  There is little wind predicted so we’ll motor (ugh) most of the way. 

No Mazu this trip.  She is spending some time with the Patches, her vacation home and family she loves.

Drew has an important meeting as do I next week so we rented an Iridium phone to talk at sea, an interesting and expensive experiment.

Since it’s absolutely pouring I’ll go watch a DVD.

Summing UP

We're back home in our house in Exeter, NH and feeling too busy again.  Few days with "no events" on the calendar.   Drew lost a size and is in shape.  Now he's back to arm chair computing for his company job and not moving.  No raising the dinghy twice a day, hauling lines, upside down in the bilge to fix valves or install new things, and the rubbing/cleaning of daily maintenance.   I, on the other hand, am playing tennis, going to yoga, and hauling bags of soil to get gardens in at home and Cross Roads House homeless shelter.  I am also updating my teacher credentials presently.

This blog was used by a couple of teachers, but future plans are to make lesson plans directly related to the traveling.  Daily one minute minders that students can figure out - geography and map skills with where we are going, vocabulary about the boat, problem solving situations to figure out with tide, current and wind variables, reading supplemental children's books about sailing or traveling the world. 
  I'll use Mazu, our dog, as the commentator.

Does anyone have other ideas for this -- Anna?  Input from others would be appreciated.

More to come -- stay tuned.

Leaving Shawnee in Sunny VA

Thursday, May 22

Tuesday May 21, 2014

Atlantic Yacht Basin  MM 12 on ICW

Mazu at the helm

 Shawnee dockside where we'll leave her for 6 weeks or so.

 We watched high schoolers practice crew on the River  girls and guys.

 The whole boat looked like this after our mayfly swarm.  I used a number of cleaning products to wash off the speckles.

 The Great Great Bridge site of first Revolutionary War battle, supposedly.  Boats wait until bridge goes up on the hour.  There are many bridges on this section of the ICW.  The captain must call on the VHF radio to request an opening.

  We have spent our time dockside here at an excellent boat yard   (check out the boatyard at this website:  www:http://atlanticyachtbasin.com/

figuring out the next maintenance items and that is after James Taylor, the proprietor, gave us an estimate on redoing all the teak on the outside of the boat.  It takes 4 weeks to do the work and they can’t get to it for 2 weeks.  This is a maintenance item like all the others, keeping the boat looking good, in top condition – like painting a house.  This boatyard is known for quality workmanship.  They have lower per hour labor costs than New England boatyards.  The treatment to the teak lasts about 10 years. 

  Our other question we must answer is should we leave the boat here and spend next winter down south again.  We have mixed feelings about it.  We decided to leave the boat here and maybe fly back without Mazu to sail it north in mid July.  We’ll take it one step at a time.

  Did the laundry, we took Mazu across the canal to a long trail walk in the woods, and continued cleaning off the mayfly speckles.  At the marine store we actually bought “bird & spider stain remover.”  I worked on the stainless and polishing it this afternoon when it was cooler outside.

 

A couple of things we’d do differently: 

 1.  Store wine top side rather than next to hull in a bin when the  water temperature is 84.  We threw out a few bottles of wine that turned to vinegar.  Ocean water in New England keeps wine at exactly the right temp.  That’s why the drinks are stored close to the hull.

  2.  Bring our own car down south by train for $800 rather than rent all the cars for back and forth travel.

We drive north this afternoon in rental car for NYC and return mid July when the work will be completed.  

12 hour day white knuckle in the ICW

This is the part where we go on twisty turny waters and some canals.  We are white knuckle push button sailing on auto pilot and occasionally quickly switching to stand-by to avoid shallow water.  The sails come up and down as the puffy winds blow 5 to 35k.
  We are exhausted after these days because when either of us are at the helm we are constantly watching the depth sounder.  There is nothing worse than watching the depth go 10.8, 10.5, 9.9, 7.9 as the depths get shallower showing we are going out of the narrow channel and into the sides where a boat can quickly go aground in sometimes 1' or 2' places.
 We should be enjoying the ospreys in nests on top of every channel marker with little baby bird heads peeking up.  We should have looked for nature going through the Alligator River Reserve.
  We did sail in the areas we could North River, Albmarle Sound.  We tried to anchor at the side of the channel, but nothing was deep enough.  After the 12 hour day we motored dockside into Atlantic Yacht Basin, the place we stayed on the way down south after winning a free night here.  We arrived at 7:50 pm.  Late dinner of sausage, beans and rice. $1 a foot, frugal place to stay.  We are considering leaving our boat here to do the gargantuan job of the bright work (revarnish all the teak on the outside of the boat) a hefty sum and job.

  Colorful boat single handing by Mark from Amsterdam in Oriental Harbor at town dock.

The weather has been spectacular.   Temp 80 during the day 56 at night.  No rain during the days.