Monthly Archives: December 2012

Road trip

It had to happen, sooner or later, sooner rather than later. We had to either pull the trigger on new cockpit cushions or forget about the whole thing. That meant renting a car and driving to St. Augustine Marine and finalizing all the details in a project this size.

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That’s Alan our friend from Snow White folded into the back seat of the 2-door Speck rental. St. Marys to St. Augustine takes about one and a half hours and we couldn’t wait to be back in one of our favorite towns again. St. Augustine Marine was bustling and we left with more sample books to further confuse the situation. Alan had checked out the new anchoring rules in St. Augustine’s harbor and we toured the town.

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Strange local native customs

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It’s always a shock when we see holiday lights like St. Augustine’s light up night display. We invariably look at each other and say,” oh yeah, it’s Christmas!”

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This beautiful town square is the old slave market. Of course they don’t emphasize that but it’s a nice place.
We drove home in the rain and by the time we got to St. Marys we decided that we needed a snack and a drink and there’s only one place to go and that’s Seagles. It’s a funky hotel bar and we walked into a birthday celebration for the owner, a loud bawdy woman of a certain age.

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We had a great time and to top it off, we think we have a winner fabric for the cockpit cushions.

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Down time

We’re in St. Mary’s, Georgia, for a week until we can move south and that gives us an opportunity to just chill and get a few little chores done. First and foremost is boat cleaning. It’s been so cold and damp that neither of us had any impetus to scrub either the inside or outside. Running the heater for weeks and the heavy fog recently have increased the condensation inside and made everything feel damp. What we wouldn’t give for a week of dry sunny weather so we can throw open all the hatches and portholes and dry everything out! But slow and steady wins this race, so yesterday we started with the cockpit. We gave it a good scrubbing, re-installed the seat cushions and shook out the floor mats. Right away we both felt better about life.

Then it was time to tackle the freezer. It wasn’t terribly frosted up and I attribute that to plugging the drain hole in the fridge as suggested by the Manta list. This kept moist air from getting in though the bottom and definitely reduced the frost. But the fridge temp was creeping up and I suspect the fan that controls how much cold air is sent over from the freezer is iced up. It happens. I probably ought to have started on the fridge because that’s where the problem is, but instead I emptied the freezer first. Everything went into two soft coolers we have tucked away for this job.

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The empty freezer never looks too bad, but it takes a long time to get all the frost out of there, and there are always a few places with large blobs of ice that refuse to melt.

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While I was cleaning it and scooping out the ice I noticed that there were screws missing on one side of the heavy lid. Jack scrounged some appropriate screws and caulk and made the fix.

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After about three hours I was able to dry and repack the freezer and turn it back on.

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When I closed the lid I saw that it no longer seals. What?! I opened it, I closed it. I could see that it no longer sits perfectly flat and even with the countertop. Putting those screws in has somehow distorted the lid to where it no longer fits properly. We removed the hinges so the lid can just lie flat in the space and yep, it doesn’t fit anymore. We took out the screws and it still doesn’t fit. This is crazy! Now we have a real problem on our hands because if there’s no tight seal the freezer will just run constantly and use up our precious energy. We’re still working on it.

While all this was happening Jack amused Izzy with his shoelaces.

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Alan brought Escape Velocity a Christmas gift — a laser pointer that’s fun for the whole family. We all get endless amusement out of Izzy’s stalking of Mr. Dot.

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Thanks, Alan!

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Redux

We had a nice night tucked away in our private little creek. Very remote, narrow, and quite shallow with a tidal range of over 7 feet. NOAA had wall to wall dense fog warnings forecast for the coastal waters making the ICW dangerous to navigation. Dont we know it. We expected to be socked in first thing in the morning. The forecast was definitely worse than the day before but the day dawned relatively clear and bright. I began to get excited because if we got an early start we might make St. Marys today.

The sea fog was predicted to move into the coast just like the day before, but you never know. I kept climbing up onto the house roof to look at the high rise bridge off in the distance only to have Marce say no way, the fog’s coming in and we’re not going to do that again. Like clockwork it suddenly got dark and we looked at each other and we both knew, without saying a word, that was that. Marce made pancakes and we waited.

Around 11am we noticed that it was lightening outside. I could see the bridge but I could also see a lot of the creek bank which meant that the creek was at low tide, and it was none too deep on the way in. What to do? In true Escape Velocity tradition we decided to go for it. Cautiously we nosed out into the waterway with,at times barely a foot under our keels. High five for crew!

We were greeted with sporadic patches of fog, but we were old hands with this stuff by now and it just wasn’t as thick as the day before. Very soon we noticed a strong current pushing us along at 8-9 kts. Normally at this engine speed we would expect maybe 6 kts. As this persisted we slowly began to think big. Maybe we can make St. Marys after all, or at least get very close. The problem with getting close is there aren’t many anchorages as you close with St. Marys. It’s kind of an all or nothing deal. You either make it or you’re fumbling about in the dark trying to anchor safely.

We were sort of on schedule when we decided to stop for fuel at Jekyll Island, which is the final checkpoint for a go or no go into St. Marys Sound. The Sound beat us up pretty well on the way up north. As we tied up to the fuel dock I noticed four boats that we either shared anchorages with, talked to on the radio, or heard hailing someone on the radio. It looked inviting, kicking back in the cockpit with a sundowner…sundowner! Everybody back in the boat.

As we rounded Point Jekyll we got some good news and some bad news. St. Marys sound was not its usual rowdy self but the current, due to our late arrival, had decidedly turned against us. Go, or no go? We go! I gave EV another 400 rpm and brought her up to 6 kts. Not enough but we were counting on a longer twilight due to being farther south, but it began to cloud over and what light was left was getting kind of thin. As we past Cumberland Island with its beautiful wide open anchorage we looked at each other and smiled. I turned her into St. Marys River as a Ferry, returning from Cumberland Island, passed us close aboard, waking the crap out of us. Three more miles and the flood we had been fighting was now with us. Eight and a half knots. Our friend Alan called us and said he could see us coming, he’d given up on us today.

Anchor down in just enough light to see what I was doing. Celebratory pesto, Escapee style, with sundried tomatoes, black olives, corn and cavatappi pasta. Alan dinghied over and we finally got that sundowner.

We like St. Marys, but the best thing about it is that we can see, just like Ms Palin, Florida from our boat. 20121210-170337.jpg
And that’s the view from the back porch.

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The view from the back porch

Day three of dense fog.

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One year ago today

On December 9, 2011, we signed the papers on the sale of our beloved little house on Gettysburg Street in Pittsburgh and said goodbye to the life we had carefully crafted for twenty-some years. Goodbye to our friends and neighbors, our favorite bike trails, cafes and shops. Goodbye to the strip district and the best store in the world, Pennsylvania Macaroni. Goodbye to Home Depot, Target, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s within a two-mile radius.

At the same time we said hello to an uncertain dream of finding a boat we could afford that would take us to faraway places safely and comfortably. After nearly five months of wandering the east coast sleeping in cheap motels and crashing with family and friends we found the boat of our dreams. Looking back we can hardly believe it’s been a year since we left Pittsburgh. Our life together has changed so much and we’re looking forward to seeing what’s over the horizon.

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Pea soup to nuts

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I awoke to a familiar sound that says wake up now! The sound of a boat engine and screw carries right through Escape Velocity’s fiberglas hull like it was in the boat with you, and I knew our ex neighbor in our anchorage was getting a very early start. I peeked through our stateroom port window and it was awash in scarlet light. I could hear fog horns in the distance and we began to hear VHF conversations or sometimes just securite announcements of a vessel entering a particular creek or river.The nervous buzz was palpable. This stretch of the Waterway is often narrow, twisty, and shallow. It’s well marked but if you can’t see anything… At sea, fog is just eerie. There’s little to run into and with a chart plotter and radar it’s relatively safe.

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By 0730 a curtain of patchy fog had begun to settle in, but we could still see the marker on the ICW. We decided to give it a go. After about 10 miles it was obvious that this was nuts, we were in trouble trying to negotiate all these tight turns, and narrow dredged channels, without any visual clues, due to the heavy curtain of pea soup fog that had blanketed St Catherine Sound, and both plotters were acting up.

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It was time for plan B! Hey Marce, do we have a plan B? Not exactly. Lets find a creek that we can nose into while blindfold. Good plan. Not 500 feet away she found us a candidate. Anchor down, Marce made breakfast and we waited.

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By 1030 we thought it looked a little better so we raised the anchor and cautiously poked our nose out into the Waterway. Still very patchy but as soon as we were ready to pull off the ICW again due to a nasty stretch of twists and turns it started to lift in earnest. Now we were way behind and really had to make up time. While I cranked up the Volvos, Marce cranked up the watermaker and helped me navigate the trickier sections. Suffice to say we didn’t see too many boats out today.

We made 58 miles and our chosen anchorage turned out to be less than described in the guide books but Marce came up with another right across from it. Ahhh, nothing but the sound of dolphins breathing as they surface, birds squawking, and more stars than you can imagine.

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Izzy enjoys the view from the back porch

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No complaints

Yesterday was a chilly, dreary mess with rain predicted all day. While Jack scrubbed the bird droppings off the boat I baked a couple of loaves of bread to warm the place up. The rain never came, and in retrospect we probably could have knocked 20-30 miles off in the afternoon, but sometimes you just have to veg out for a while. I took advantage of a pretty good wifi connection to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes, family history research, and made some serious headway on a friend’s paternal line.

Last night we kept hearing sounds we recognize as 15-20 kt winds, but when we looked at the wind instrument it registered only 2-3 kts. Hmmmm. That’s obviously wrong and we’re going to have to look into it. We got spun around every couple of hours by the wind and current and by morning our track at anchor looked like this:

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Looks like we had too much chain out. Our chart and instruments said we were anchoring in 18 feet but once the hook settled in and the tide went out it was really only 10 feet so we swung quite a bit. Luckily we had plenty of room.

This morning we planned for an early getaway from Nowheresville but the currents were against us until after 8am so we had another cup of coffee and a more leisurely start. There’s a heavy dew hanging in the air and the rain that didn’t come yesterday looks threatening today.

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I can’t believe how much cold and bleak weather we’ve had these past three months. In the Hudson River, in Annapolis, in Portsmouth and even Charleston there’ve been few sunny days and fewer warm ones. When we lived in a house I loved this kind of weather. I would stand at our kitchen door looking out at the gray sky and dripping rain gutters and feel incredibly lucky that I had a roof over my head and a warm place to sleep, that my family was well fed and safe. There are too many people in the world who don’t have those basic needs and I know that my good fortune is just an accident of birth.

Here on the boat I like it less, but only because this particular boat doesn’t have a diesel cabin heater. The only way we can heat the joint is by running a space heater on a noisy generator. If we were planning to spend more time in temperate climates we’d consider installing a system but they’re expensive and we hadn’t really planned on being north for this long so it’s really our own damn fault for not heading south with the snowbirds.

Besides, we have a roof over our heads and a warm place to sleep. We are well fed and safe, and we have the luxury of being able to move our home to a warmer place. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

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Bird doo

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It’s been strange, this Hilton Head thing. I mean this place has cache, gravitas, buzz. Maybe it’s because, recently we’ve been to one charming southern town after another and here we can’t even find a town. The information Marce found said that there were three canvas shops on the island so we felt that we had a good shot at finding someone with current sample books of marine canvas. Due to a major rethink about our yellow cockpit cushions we needed to finalize the choices right now!

Now, dear escapees, you may recall that we’ve discovered that not all of us have the “finalize gene”. It’s sad but true, and it can cause problems.

So…the first shop to actually answer our call said she was at her real job and wouldn’t be at the shop until 4pm. The next call raised a guy that said we could dinghy to his shop and he had sample books. Perfect!

It was a good half mile ride in the dinghy before we thought we had found his dock. Nice guy, not the right stuff, but he offered to give us a tour of Hilton Head, which turned out to be a string of sleepy suburban developer gated communities with bad traffic.

Marce found that we were near a Chart House Restaurant and it’s close to happy hour. Putting the two together seemed like a good plan so we dinghied back to Escape Velocity, off loaded the groceries and as we headed back I used another boat as a bearing line to EV because Hilton Head allows no nighttime ambient lighting so it’s going to be pitch black on the way back. Passing close to the boat we noticed that it was covered in bird doo. Must’ve been here for a while.

A couple of Mojitos and sliders later, we hopped into the dink and headed back towards the bird doo boat and as I snickered about all that doo on someone’s pride and joy, turned toward EV’s anchor light. After nicking the prop on an ebbing tide we made it back aboard. In the dancing circle of light from our flashlight, we climbed the steps to our deck. It was hard to tell in the darkness but it looked like someone with incredibly dirty feet had walked all over the steps. I didn’t remember that when we left just a few hours ago. I made a note to check it out in the morning.

The morning light revealed head to toe bird doo! All over the mainsail, jib, solar panels, roof, deck, stanchions, line bags. You name it, if it’s on this boat it’s comprehensively coated with bird doo. No snickering now.

It took most of the morning to scrub it off. We gotta get out of here before it happens again.

But then that’s life on the water.

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Hilton Head and bust

We dropped the anchor in Skull Creek, Hilton Head Island, about 11am after a short run from Beaufort. We couldn’t figure out how to get anywhere ashore but assumed we’d need a cab to take us to a canvas place to look at the sample books. We called the first one on our list and learned that we could dinghy along the shoreline to within a block of the place, but not until 2pm. No problem. I ran the watermaker and topped up the tank and Jack scrubbed some of the grunge out of the cockpit. There are always boat chores.

At the appointed time we launched the dinghy and motored along the north side of the island which didn’t look at all like what we thought Hilton Head would be. There were several marinas filled with small boats, many dilapidated fishing boats, and not a mansion in sight. We found the right pier and tied up by a couple of leakers.

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Unfortunately, Kevin the canvas man didn’t have the sample books we wanted to see. As a consolation, though, he offered to drive us to Walmart so we could stock up on cat food.

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Then he gave us a tour of the island, which apparently is the Birthplace of the Gated Community, sort of a Boca North. We couldn’t see one thing to convince us that Hilton Head was worth more than the half day we’d allotted. But it was nice of Kevin to drive us around.

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There’s rain predicted tomorrow. We’ll sit tight, maybe wash the decks if it’s not too cold, and wait for a good weather window for a passage south.

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