Being out on the ocean has given me a new appreciation of the sky. It is so vast and colourful, both in the day and the night. I love seeing the sunrise and set everyday and seeing how it makes the ocean pink. Last night we were the only boat in our anchorage and we lay on the back of the boat under the milky way and watched shooting stars. I’m becoming so fascinated with clouds - the patterns, textures, and colours are beautiful.
Since our last blog post we have travelled through the Chesapeake, the Delaware Canal, Virginia, North Carolina, a large part of the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) and are in South Carolina. We have encountered some very interesting anchorages. Several of the most memorable were: in Cape May outside a Coast Guard training base where they yell military-style songs ALL night long, a military base in NC where you are not allowed off your vessel and where you can hear them detonating explosives after dark and a small creek in South Carolina where a massive casino sails past several times a night taking people off shore to legally gamble. This was the same anchorage where a shrimping boat screamed at the boats anchored there to "get out of the channel" everytime he sailed past despite no boats being near the channel and there being plenty of room to sail past us all. There is definitely some animosity towards pleasure craft vessels.
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| Norfolk Military Base, Virginia |
We’re doing better with breakdowns - I can’t tell if they’re happening less or if we’re just becoming more adept at dealing with them but either way they feel less dramatic. I basically don’t expect our engine to turn on in the morning so when it does I’m quite pleasantly surprised. I think our starter will need replacing or the solanoid cleaning (not sure if this is a thing??) as there are surely only so many times one can hit it with the end of a screwdriver and be successful. But for now that seems to do the trick to start her up!
We continue to meet the most incredible people. A couple of weeks ago we were in Maryland - which I think has been my favourite state - near Annapolis and we met Paul and Rosemary. We had anchored our boat in Harness Creek and were aching to get off the boat for a bit. We went for a dingy ride around the creek - it was so peaceful and the trees were changing to beautiful fall colours. The houses were stunning - it looked like a magazine spread from Architectural Digest. Each house had a private dock with at least two boats. There we were putting around in our “vintage” dingy with old smokey our engine making a lot of noise and smoke. This man kayaks over to us and I thought “oh here we go, we’re getting kicked out”. I was sure we were going to be told that our boat was too big for the little creek or that we weren’t supposed to be using our engine there so I pretended to be utterly absorbed in taking photos. Boy was I wrong - the guy was inviting us over for dinner!! He comes over to the dingy and starts chatting with us about our boat and where we were from and says why don’t you come over for a drink later or just come for dinner? And we said oh that would be great but we really need to go grocery shopping and don’t want to walk home in the dark. So he says “oh no problem we can take you”! We said bye to Paul and went over the State park for a trail walk. Later on we got cleaned up (as best we could) and headed to Paul’s house for a drink. We met his lovely wife Rosemary and their best friends who were visiting from Scotland - Joan and Gordon, as well as their son and his girlfriend. We chatted over drinks and snacks and then Rosemary announces dinner was ready and they had already set places for us at the table! We stayed for fish and shrimp and fresh vegetables (these are gold when you live on a boat). By the end of dinner it felt like we had known them for years. They told us to come back in the morning and they would drive us to the grocery store, as well as to bring our laundry! We went back the next morning and they made us coffee and breakfast and were very disappointed that we hadn’t brought our laundry (we felt like we would have been taking advantage) and they offered us showers! They took us to the grocery store and offered to take us to some sailing stores if we needed anything. When we got back to their house they gave us beach towels and started brainstorming of who they knew along the East Coast who we could “mooch off of”! They said they were coming to Charleston and their son lives in Savananah so if there was anything we think that we need to just let them know and they could bring it to us. Before we left Rosemary said to me “well you’re family now whether you like it or not” - I like it very much! We were both quite sad to say goodbye to them. We’re really hoping to catch up with them again.
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| The Dismal Swamp |
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| Harness Creek, Anapolis |
From there we headed to the Chesapeake Bay. For a novice, sailing the Chesapeake in 20-25knots of wind was done with my heart in my throat for most of it! But James was insistent that I could do it and stood back. It was exhilarating. The world famous Annapolis Boat Show was just ending and there was more than one person sailing their shiny new $500,000 boats home. We looked completely out of place with our ripped falling apart bimmini and shabby dingy hanging off the back. We crossed the Delaware Chesapeake Canal and over to Virgina. There is one crazy big military base in Norfolk! It’s so strange to hear on the VHF “This is US War Ship …”. Once the Railroad bridge in Norfolk Virginia opened we were at Mile 0 on the ICW!!
There are so many bridges and locks in the ICW. The first lock we came to the bridge tender was such a friendly character - he told us a brief history of the ICW and he played a conch shell like a trumpet - notes and all! The first night in North Carolina was spent rafted to another boat as there was no more room for docking - we woke up the next morning and there was ice on our boat - not impressed. Happily the days of layering in everything you own and dressing up like Bonhomme seem to be behind us!
In the ICW we took the “Dismal Swamp” route which is a little slower and windier than the “Virginia Cut” route but apparently more scenic and lots more wildlife - sadly we only saw one turtle but it was very scenic. While we were motoring through the swamp, which is very shallow (5.5ft in places) and narrow, James comes up to the cockpit to tell me something is leaking and our bilge is full and our bilge pump isn’t working. He then yells “shit watch the mast” - in my panic over the full bilge and no working bilge pump I neglected to see an overhanging branch and hit it!! It made a god awful crack and branches came flying down into the water and all over the boat. For a dreadful second I thought it was our mast falling into the water. Other than a very dirty, messy, buggy boat we came out unscathed. I worked at throwing the tree pieces overboard and James discovered the source of our leak - the boot on our heat exchanger had split and was spraying sea water into the bilge. The split was caused by the pipe being too short and the tension eventually was too much and pulled the boot until it split. We wedged an empty soup can under the pipe to change it’s angle and lesson the pull on the split. I then went to work on gorilla taping the hell out of the boot and the pipe and was able to stop the leak. James was most impressed with my taping skills and I informed him it was from trying to tape IVs in place on furious 3 year olds. We then set about bailing out our bilge! We coasted into Elizabeth City, NC “The Harbour of Hospitality” held together with duct tape, gorilla tape and an old can in classic Highland Shite style.
In Elizabeth City you are met by Gus - an old guy who spends everyday in the park and greets all the boats arriving with the noon bridge opening. The city offers free two day docking! So we lassoed (like actually lassoed) ourselves to piling and settled in for 48hours. First things first - we had long hot showers - it was heaven. We met up with our friends Larry and Shannon who have the same brand of engine as us and were able to tell us where we could order a replacement boot cap. We called the company who had the part sent to the public dock the next day! Now nothing on our boat is simple so of course replacing it was a right pain in the arse but at least that leak was fixed. Turns out there was another leak contributing to our full bilge. Our sea water pump was leaking like a hose on full power. We realized we couldn’t leave with a leak and no functioning bilge pump so we said bye to Larry and Shannon but our friends The Joyces arrived that day. It was so great to catch up with people. The Joyce’s made us dinner and got us rather drunk as they said it would make us “forget about our engine trouble”.
The Harbour of Hospitality is an odd place. It was an incredibly smart business move to provide somewhere with free docks and clean hot showers along the ICW. Boaters stay the 2 days and eat in the restaurants, do laundry in the laundromat, buy groceries, go out for coffee, and buy supplies at the hardware stores. The city has a “Rose Ceremony” where the retired mayor comes and does a little schpeal on the city and encourages you spend money while the tourism beaureau plies you with free beer and wine and presents you with a rose. Meanwhile the city is a complete food desert (over an hour each way on foot to anywhere to buy food) where you walk through “the other side of the tracks”; A completely segregated black public housing area where I tripped over an insulin syringe that may or may not have been used for insulin. Not sure the tourism dollars were trickling down there.
Again though a town with super nice people. James and I were walking to the laundromat bogged down with almost everything we owned. A lady reverses through four lanes of traffic to ask us if she can drive us anywhere! After dropping all our stuff at the laundromat James headed back to the boat as our part was being delivered. I hung out with the old dudes who worked at the laundromat and bought them breakfast as they gave me the tips for the best consignment stores in the city - $9 got me a rash guard, a denim shirt, a handwoven angora blanket from Scotland, a JCrew t-shirt, a fitted sheet for our bed, and a long sleeved local baseball t-shirt. The laundromat guys were bang on! On my way back to the boat with all our clothes a man pulled over and said "Darlin' I just can't watch you struggle with all that, can I please help?" Southern manners are impeccable.
While in Elizabeth City we met Al, a high school shop teacher from Bathurst, NB who is my new hero. The leaking saltwater pump was completely seized and we could not get it off - like a pro he used a hammer and a screwdriver and got it off in no time and had a workshop on his boat that allowed us to clamp the part down to open it. There is no way we would have been going anywhere with out this man! He helped us get the old seal out and reassemble it with new seals and impeller. Getting it off and reassembled and back on took the entire day. James then took the automatic bilge pump apart and it decided to work. We left the next morning!
We had some bad weather a few days ago and rode it out in Wrightsville, NC. A fun friendly beach surf town. Coming into Wrightsville you have to wait for a bridge to open but the distance between two bridges and their opening times is too far to make in a sailboat so you have to wait almost an hour for the next bridge to open. The current is so strong that we turned off our engine and drifted down the river towards the bridge - we still went too fast so us and about eight other boats spent a harrowing 40mins dodging each other in 2+ knot current waiting for the bridge to open. Once the Wrightsville bridge opened there was a Sheriff boat waiting. It followed us for a while then turned it’s lights on and “pulled us over”. Getting pulled over entails their boat matching our speed with three heavily armed United States Coast Guard agents actually running and jumping onto your vessel. We were nervous about getting boarded since our vessel is registered but we haven’t yet changed the name or the port on the stern of the boat. The coast guard didn’t care about that at all. They were very nice chatty guys who did a full safety inspection and advised us where to anchor for the night!
We had read a lot and heard a lot about how your personal hygiene really slips while living on a boat and man is it ever true. It feels impossible to keep everything clean and using potable water to shower is a real sacrifice. Plus it's been too damn cold to shower in cold water! We also have a tempramental water pump and often just don’t have enough water pressure for a shower, which is shocking since everything else on the boat is in perfect working order ;). We have become experts at “showering” naked on deck after dark in a lifejacket with the salt water anchor wash down - we like to keep things classy. So we were desperate for a freshwater shower but the marinas in Wrightsville don’t let non members use the showers so desperate times as they say… we showered on the beach! You know the showers put in to rinse sand and salt off your surfboards or off your feet before you put your shoes on? Yeah we showered there shampoo and all! We got some dirty looks. When we were leaving Wrightsville a dolphin came right up to our boat and swam along side us for at least five minutes! It was incredible, it just kept going from starboard to port so close we could have touched it. It was a massive dolphin with a curly fluke. A definite highlight for me!
Yesterday we decided we needed a break from the ICW and made our way back out the ocean. The ICW is an incredible thing - a waterway that essentially links the country top to bottom. However, it is busy and narrow and shallow and private sport fishing vessels really like to do Top Gun style flybys that generate a lot of uncomfortable wake. It’s also impossible and illegal to sail in portions of it so you basically motor day after day waiting for bridges to open. We’re on the Atlantic again today planning on Halloween in Charleston - shrimp and grits here I come!
