Monthly Archives: November 2012

We seem to be bad weather magnets. We made it safely to Portsmouth, VA, ahead of a storm system and the storm did move a little off the coast here, but still, we’re glad to be tied to a dock and don’t have to endure a frigid dinghy ride to get anywhere.

We paid a fee to the marina down the street for the privilege of using their showers and laundry facilities.

What a pleasure to stand under hot water for a while and scrub away, not to mention getting four loads of laundry washed and dried. We met Alan for coffee in town and did a reconnaissance lap around Old Town Portsmouth to find a place to watch election results Tuesday evening. We settled on Roger Brown’s Sports Bar and it turned out to be an excellent choice.

We asked for a table with a good view of the screens and it turns out every table is nearly perfect. This place must be awesome on game days. We got a booth in full view of four giant screens showing FOX, CNN, NBC and MSNBC. There was a speaker in the booth, and a bank of switches to select the audio feed and control the volume. This was even better than watching at home!

We’ve rarely had so much fun watching election returns. Whenever one of the networks would call a state a cheer went up in the bar. We were surprised and delighted that it seemed most of the patrons shared our political bent. We expected to be the odd men out but we weren’t.

At 10 o’clock we came home and set up our own media wall using a phone, the iPad and an excellent Internet connection courtesy of a nearby hotel.

We stayed up way past our bedtime and we’re taking it easy today.

Holeing up in Back Creek, Annapolis, in an attempt to avoid the worst of Sandy turned out to be a good decision but left us cold, damp, and drained. We had to get South but, believe it or not, a serious cold front materialized out of the aether waiting for us at the bottom of the Bay promising very strong winds and rain. We thought that if we could get down to the bottom of the Chesapeake fast enough, we could duck into the Elizabeth River and maybe even the ICW before it strikes. In bicycling that’s called riding on the rivet which, back in the day, bike seats were made of leather and riveted together and the last rivet on the horn of the seat was where you ended up riding if you were maxed out, but too tired to stand on the pedals.

We averaged over seven knots on our journey to Norfolk and that’s without use if our mainsail, which is something I really don’t want to talk about, except to say mistakes were made. But with the help of friends we were able to straighten out the mess and, as they say in North Carolina, we lucked up!

We found a mini hurricane hole at the ferry dock in Portsmouth which we are tied to as I write this. No services but the price is right.

This was another free dock on the Piankatank without services including no pizza delivery!

That’s life on the water.

Yes, that’s the cruising life. One day you’re down, the next you’re back on top.

We made Portsmouth in record time and were happy to get ahead of the weather. Just as we were leaving the Tidewater fuel dock we got a text from Alan who said there was room at the free dock by the north ferry landing. Yippee! Another free dock night! This is purely a tie-up, no water or electricity, but we sometimes like a break from the drudgery of anchoring.

Alan took our docklines and helped secure Escape Velocity, then climbed up on the roof to take a look at the boom. “Do you mind if we have a go?” he asked in his understated Brit way.

We untied the sail and while i manned the furler with a manual winch handle he and Jack pulled and tugged and wrangled and yanked on the sail, unbolting and removing the broken battens as they went.

It took a good hour, a bit of Alan’s blood and the rest of the energy Jack and I had left but eventually the whole thing lay on deck. We got the foot reattached properly, flaked the sail on deck and carefully refurled it, an exercise that took several tries because without the battens the sail was difficult to get completely straight on the mandrel. We think we’re pretty close to good on that. We still have to remove the furling line, which is half wound onto the drum. It shouldn’t be when the sail is furled.

It appears the sail is no worse for having suffered our errors. We’ll need new battens and some stitching, maybe a new batten pocket, certainly a new cover. Of course we have yet to try raising it, but that will have to wait. And we owe Alan big time.

We’re planning to stay tied to this dock to wait out the weather and watch the election returns, then we’ll motor into the Intercoastal Waterway again, this time toward the Great Dismal Swamp.

The past couple of days have not been what you would classify as fun. I’d still rather be aboard Escape Velocity than anywhere else but I sure wish we were someplace warmer.

We have well and truly screwed up our mainsail and furler. We returned to the anchorage after the mishap but couldn’t even assess the situation until the next morning because of high winds. When we finally got a good look, we could see that when we furled the main back on while the sail was out of control (that was our biggest mistake) the battens got caught and shredded in the mechanism, and now are jammed against the boom, keeping us from turning the mandrel to release the sail.

We assume that detaching the mandrel from the boom would allow us to lift the whole works out and release the sail and broken battens but it isn’t obvious to us how to do that, and we’re reluctant to try and effect this kind of operation at anchor in 40 degree weather.

Complicating things is another storm brewing along the coast that’ll reach our current position on Wednesday with conditions approaching what we experienced with Sandy. No, thanks. We decided to wrap the mainsail up, lash it securely to the boom and get the heck outta Dodge. Sunday there was very little wind, and what there was was on our stern, so we put up the jib for a little push and motor sailed as far as we could in a very long day. The sun came out and cheered us a little but added no heat whatsoever.

We made it as far as Deltaville, VA, and went in the back way to give us a head start in the morning. Our cruising guide advised there is a town dock where you can tie up for free. We found it easily and despite a sign warning no overnighting allowed, we stayed put.

We had a fantasy that we would call for a pizza to be delivered to the dock, but no, we’re in rural Virginia, the Bible Belt, and everything is closed on a Sunday night. Jack and Izzy settled in with a blanket while I cooked dinner.

We both had a fitful night, worrying about the mainsail and the weather, and the unfamiliar sounds of being tied to a dock for the first time in months.

We got underway again at 7am, before coffee even. I helped Jack navigate the narrow channel back out and we touched bottom briefly on a falling tide but we made it out safely and while Jack got us back on our southerly course I went below to make coffee. NOAA is predicting worsening conditions later today and we’re hoping to get at least at far as Portsmouth where we can fuel up and get out of the way of the coming storm.

We left our comfy anchorage about 8:30 this morning expecting 15-20 knot winds on our quarter. As we got out of the river we turned into the wind to raise sails and realized too late that the head of the mainsail was not in the track, either because it hadn’t been fed in properly or because it slipped out, who knows? About a third of the sail was flapping wildly, not attached to the mast. We should have just dropped it on deck and refurled from there, but in a panic, we furled it back into the boom, and as the wind gusted up to 30 knots it furled back from the mast instead of staying even with the mast. Hard to describe.

In any case, we fed the sail back into the gate and started raising it again, but as it got further up, a combination of a huge gust and the bad angle of furl from before pulled the bolt rope out of the track. Now we had a mainsail that was halfway up and we couldn’t pull it up or lower it down. The wind continued to pick up and the sail was flogging. Who’s making these weather predictions anyway?!

The only thing to do was to remove the gate so we could get the sail down. While I held the boat into the wind, Jack tried a succession of screw drivers and some PB blaster and finally got the gate off and we were able to drop the sail. It’s so easy to write that but it took a long time and a huge physical effort for Jack because of the size of the sail and the strength of the wind, and for me because we were encircled by fishing boats who wouldn’t stand clear, wouldn’t answer the radio and kept making me turn to avoid hitting them, which put pressure on the sail.

Finally the sail was tamed and tied down and we headed back to our anchorage to assess the damage to the sail.

Obviously we screwed up by not having the sail well into the track before hoisting, and for not just dropping it on deck at the first sign of trouble instead of trying to refurl it in those conditions. Live and learn.

The yellow cross marks our location during the storm.

In the aftermath of hurricane Sandy we felt all at loose ends. We were exhausted but anxious to get going. Of course the conditions weren’t great so we had to wait. I guess we should have gotten some chores done but the hurricane brought with it a serious cold snap and we were having a hard time staying warm. That means very little sleep and that means very little got done.

Meanwhile much of our family in New Jersey is without power and phone lines. I couldn’t reach my sister for days except for the occasional text to reassure us that they were ok. We finally were able to talk on Thursday but they don’t know how long they’ll be without electricity and it’s as cold there as it is here. Luckily they have a fireplace they can cozy up to.

Our first order of business was to get our absentee ballots mailed as soon as possible so they would arrive by the 5pm Friday deadline. Jack launched the dinghy late Tuesday and made the cold and rainy trip to the PO so they’d go out that day. He took a walk toward town to see how they fared and found some minor flooding, but all in all, considering how close we were to the eye of the storm, we did much better than so many places much further away.

Early Wednesday morning Dave from Auspicious came over to walk me through a couple of radio net check-ins. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that despite the fact that I’ve had my ham license for 11 years, this is the first time ever on the radio, mostly because I didn’t have a radio. So now I know how to do that, and it also confirmed that our equipment is working well, but we do need to straighten up our tilted antenna. We’re not quite sure why it was installed at such an angle.

Dave said his girlfriend’s house was flooded and Jack and I offered to help wet-vac the basement. The house was without power but Dave has a small generator that could run the pumps and the ShopVac.

On the way back to town we saw a crew working to restore power. Dave pulled over to thank them and we learned that this crew is from western North Carolina, which we could have figured out by the accent alone even before we asked. The foreman said normally this small enclave of houses would be lower on the priority list except that the storm had taken out a few poles that held the main lines for a larger area. His crew had already re-wired but they were waiting for the ground crew before digging to reset the new poles, and that Dave’s neighborhood would have the power back that afternoon. “You lucked up,” he said, and we all thanked him.

That night we met at the Chart House for a post-Sandy celebration.

Finally the weather started looking good for a departure south. Alan left early Thursday but we had to wait for our cockpit window repair. We took the opportunity to visit a marine electronics guy we’d spoken to at the boat show and he was very helpful with some options for replacing our intermittently failing GPS antenna that feeds the chart plotter.

We loaded up the bikes and generally tried to get ourselves back into cruising mode after being in one place for more than a month. We got the window panel back into the enclosure but couldn’t get it fully installed, either because we did the steps in the wrong order or because it’s just so cold our fingers won’t work, but we blessed it and will live with a slight draft until we’re in a warmer place and can work on it.

We had a last cozy visit with Jim aboard Little Star and after another cold, cold night aboard EV it was time to go. We know it’ll be a long time before we see our beloved Annapolis, our chosen home port, again.

We had a rollicking sail down the Chesapeake to Solomon’s Island where we dropped the hook and enjoyed a very brief bit of sunshine that brought no warmth. I think it’ll be weeks before we can pack the fleece away.