04/13/11 Kevin's day 10-11 on the Packet Inn

Wednesday's forecast was generally acceptable.  The storm had passed, and the winds were supposed to swing around to the north, then west which should allow us to sail. Didn't quite work out that way.

We started a bit on the late side, because when we went to bed, the rain was still heavy and we knew we'd need to let it finish and clear the area, and wait for the next good tide time. That worked out to be mid morning, so we got up around 9 and got ready to go. I grabbed some breakfast sandwiches at the luncheonette to go and met Tom at the marina store where we took a few moments to say goodbye to Bob and pet the kittens again. Then we loaded up and headed out.

As we got away from the docks, it was clear that it was more foggy than it had looked to start. So we decided to stage near the exit of the harbor - in the anchorage where we originally stopped on our way in. We sat there for about an hour, watching the fog come and go, trying to figure out when it was on it's way out. 3 other sailboats passed us on the way, so we pulled up anchor and started to follow them and Tom talked to the biggest one, Morgan's Cloud on the radio as they exited the harbor. They reported the seas were calm enough (we had been worried about the swells stirred up the storms east wind) and recommended we follow them out with our radar. Except, we don't have any radar. When Tom mentioned that, they said we should stay inside as it was low visibility. So we went back and anchored, and the other two smaller sailboats (Moonshadow and Turning Wind) came back in too.

After about another 3/4 hour, the fog appeared to be on it's way out, We could see a mile and Morgan's Cloud was reporting it was lifting and they had visibility of about 2.5 miles. So off we went out the inlet, which was much calmer with a gentle outflowing tide than it was when we came in. The seas were a little bumpy, but not too bad, about the same as the night we came up to Cape May, and my stomach was now handling them fine.

Unfortunately, a while after we got out, the fog stopped getting better, and started to get worse again. We kept on, hoping it would continue to improve, and at times it did seem to, and then a little while later it would get worse again. At times we had maybe a mile or more of visibility, and then it would shrink back down to maybe only

200 feet. We could see sun up above, and at times even blue sky, but horizontally, the visibility sucked. We were sure it would burn off, but by around 3pm when we had already had the warm part of the day, it became clear it wasn't going to.

This wasn't good. The problem was that without radar, we don't know what's around us, and there are other boats out here, some of them quite large and some of those moving fast. We did not want to run into a fast moving boat, especially something big. There are working fishing boats that all come under that category out there, and while most of the big boats have radar, it doesn't mean someone is watching it. We hear stories of well equipped boats that run aground on autopilot because everyone is out back cleaning the catch or otherwise occupied. Running over a sailboat while similarly engaged seems all too possible. So we were both looking around to the limits of our vision in the fog, keeping the radio turned up loud to catch any conversations or hails and listening for the sounds of any nearby motors. We did hear Turning Point and Moonshadow talking back and forth to each other about possibly hearing each other's engine. They had left the harbor behind us more or less at the same time, and were thinking they were maybe 1/4 mile apart in the fog and unable to see each other, but able to hear a motor. They talked for a bit, then went quiet and we didn't hear from them again.

After a couple of hours of listening for noises and staring at the white wall, it was clear to us that the fog wasn't going to get better on any schedule that would help us, and that going on into the evening up to Sandy Hook was out of the question, so Tom got on the chartplotter to find us a harbor.  He found a marina in Great Egg harbor, about 7 miles south of Atlantic City. Atlantic City might have been an option, but the costs to stay there were going to be much higher, and it was another hour and half away, getting too close to sunset in the murk which would have been dark quickly. We took the nearer option to get off the water, and worked our way around an interesting approach to the marina. One issue was that their were shallow areas of breakers on either side of a narrow entrance channel.

Fortunately we had enough visibility to see at least two markers at a time, and the breakers as well as hear them. We got to the marina, with some guidance from a friendly voice on the radio from the local towboat operator,  but couldn't get into the diesel dock to park overnight as they had offered. Someone had parked a small dredging barge in the middle of that end of the marina, tied it in place in the water with a couple of cables to pilings, and then draped a flag string *in the water* blocking our access to the dock we wanted. I'm glad nobody came in there in the dark or in a hurry or there would have been a mess.

Once we got docked and tied off, we had a visit from the marina security guard. Joel had a uniform, various buttons and badges, a helpful attitude, and lots of theories on 9/11, "things coming out of the fog", the Bermuda Triangle, CIA plots, and all kinds of other good stuff. I think he even had on a leather holster, with a pad or something stuffed in it.  He was obviously a' very important person'

around the marina, who was "given all the keys" as he made sure to let us know. However he was helpful,  and turned us on to the better of the various take out restaurants in the area, who would deliver right to the dock. When the delivery guy arrived, he ran him down to the boat in a golf cart. Tom thinks he was hoping to be invited on board for company, I think he is probably fairly lonely at his job, but we were too bushed to handle much conversation. In fact, we ate a pair of Stromboli's, washed up, and pretty much crashed exhausted by 9 pm. The topic of dinner conversation, probably spurred by Tom's conversations with Joel, was UFO's.

Because we were at the gas dock, and not at a regular dock, we didn't have any of the amenities like electric, so we lit up the oil lamp, and the LED light. It was cold and we took out the propane heater and ran it for a while to warm up the boat. It's easy to forget how much we take a warm house with electricity for granted. Being without even for a night makes you appreciate it. Once the boat was warmed up, we shut it down so we didn't have to worry about having enough windows and vents open.

Thursday April 14

Thursday dawned with a nice bright sun, and we got underway out of the gas docks without bothering to transfer any fuel by can to the boat.

We were heading out of the harbor there by around 7:30 and out in the Atlantic again before 8 am. Today's weather was *much* better.  The seas were very much calmer which was nice, and it was sunny and no sign of fog! We got out and headed north to Sandy Hook. We did not have much in the way of favorable winds, but all in all it was an acceptable trade off. Tom went below to fire up Captain Bligh's Cafe and delivered up a nice breakfast of cheesy scrambled eggs, sausage, and hash browns, washed down with nice warm coffee. Life was good!

An hour or so later, life was a little less good. I was fussing around at my bunk near the companionway getting something or other, and noticed a pink fluid on the deck. Hmmm, are we leaking RV antifreeze?

Why would there be antifreeze on the boat in this season? I got a paper towel and mopped it up and smelled it. Not antifreeze, diesel fuel. I showed it to Tom and we checked the stored plastic containers of diesel, thinking one of them might have had  cap come unscrewed or something. No problems found there. Next he popped the engine cover, and took a look. Bingo! We could see a steady drip around one of the fuel filters. It was a pretty significant drip too, at least a drop per second. Tom was worried it was the filter or it's O-ring, which he said was a real bear to work on. Not something he wanted to attempt at sea. We shut down the engine and locked the transmission in reverse and continued under sail while he did some troubleshooting. That slowed us to about 4 knots, and put our arrival at Sandy Hook at any reasonable hour in jeopardy.

Tom fussed for a while, got out various wrenches, and thought about what he'd seen. Tried a couple of things, fired up the engine, shut it down, fussed some more. Finally he found a banjo bolt that had come loose about 1/4 turn, and tightening up that seemed to stop the drip.

We started up the engine again and continued on, checking every once in a while for drips. We were able to get our speed back up to near 6 knots and proceeded onward. As a bonus, fuel consumption over the next day or so improved quite a bit.

While we were in Cape May, we had tried to figure out a fix for the muffled radio problem. We didn't want to run the handheld radio up at the helm because first of all, it has a small antenna at ground level so it doesn't hear very well at all compared to the main radio, and second we want to make sure the battery is charged up when we need to transmit, and running the radio all day to listen for calls runs the battery down. We hit the marine supply store in Cape May and Tom bought a small speaker. I had my doubts about how well it would work but I helped him wire it in and he set it up just outside the hatch on one side of the dodger. It worked very well! We could now hear the traffic on channel 16 whenever it was busy which was very helpful through the rest of the trip.

While on watch, I would be looking around and kept being surprised by seeing splashes on the water not to far away as if someone had thrown a good sized rock. It turned out to be some of the seabirds fishing.

They are moderately sized birds, I think a species of Tern. They have black tipped wings, and a pretty yellow beak. As I watched, I noticed they would often fly right down on the water - right down in ground effect with their tips skimming the water, zooming along with hardly a wing flip. But then they climb up and circle around and then dive at the water and hit it fast with a substantial splash. They tuck in their wings, and obviously go down pretty deep because they are often gone for 20 seconds at a time. It's startling to see how hard they hit and how fast they come down. They are just flying along, and their wings go in like they've been shot and they just plummet out of the sky and crash into the water. But 10 or 20 seconds later they pop back up and are fine.

I've decided I'm too used to computers. As I was sitting in the cockpit, taking the notes in a notepad that these write ups are based on, I was scribbling away and misspelled something and waited for the little red underline to appear so I could click the correct spelling. 

Oh yeah, paper, pen. Not going to happen....

We had passed Atlantic City (or Trumpville as I was calling it) around

10 am and kept on pace north. The chart plotter was predicting arrival at Sandy hook around 10 pm or so and we were beginning to consider going past there as the weather was continuing to be great, and the forecast for Saturday was not so great. Around 12:30 Tom reported he could see the Barnegatt Lighthouse, which was another potential harbor should we need one. That lighthouse was in sight for a loooong time.

We could see it for 10 miles or two hours before we passed it, and for another two hours after that before it disappeared off in the distance. I guess that's what you want with a lighthouse - good visibility!

Most of the Jersey shore is fairly .... uninteresting. I'd say desolate, but it's well populated. From a couple of miles out (we were generally 2-3 miles out to be in 30-50 feet of water) it looks like a continuous line of houses along the beach, with about every half a mile a water tower standing up. Those are kind of interesting because they vary in shape, most look fairly smooth and rounded, but they are definitely not uniform. About the only thing that breaks up the coast is the occasional city/town, and a couple of amusement parks.

Otherwise it's pretty much a long run of beach and beach houses.

At 6:12, Tom reported he could see buildings in New York city! We were making steady progress and feeling good and talked seriously about continuing on into NY harbor and getting up to the 79th street boat basin or perhaps beyond before quitting for the evening.

As we continued north along the shore, stuff started appearing in the water. For most of the trip, I hadn't really seen much in the water that wasn't natural, but now I was seeing various bits of flotsam and jetsam. A cardboard box, various bits of paper, a piece of plastic. We passed one weird orange and black  Unidentified Floating Object that I at first thought might have been an immersion suit or possibly a life raft.  We went back to make sure it wasn't. It turned out to be some sort of marker we think that had been inflated and then collapsed? Tom recognized it as a type he knew about. A while further on, I kept running into bunches of straw in the water. Not weedy stuff that looked natural, but what looked like chopped straw used for bedding or maybe as a packing material. Our theory is that maybe a packing crate or container went overboard and this was the packing material out of it?

While we were chugging along (why do they call it a sailboat daddy? We never turn off the engine!) I got out the ham rig again and listened around for a while and then made another contact. This one was K9WP down in Florida. It was interesting because he was running a manpack radio at about 20 watts and I was using a radio that can be adapted to that at about 10 watts. He had a better antenna though, a 10-30 mhz log periodic beam. He was working at Harris, where I used to work ages ago, and had been up to the Rochester NY plant where I had worked, only a week or two before. So we swapped notes on Harris then and now and I got nostalgic for the old days of working in long range HF radio.

I also got busy with the AIS stuff. AIS is a system similar to APRS where the boats that are equipped, mostly larger vessels, broadcast their position, direction and speed information and that can be seen by other boats in range with the right receiving equipment. It's also picked up by shore stations and relayed to the Internet. I had discovered that you can see the information on a computer

(www.marinetraffic.com) and we were able to watch it on the computer connected to the Internet via my droidX phone. Then I noticed that the web page mentioned an android app to see it, so I downloaded that and installed it on the phone. Voila! We could see some of the traffic in the cockpit while at the helm. This was going to be handy for NY harbor!

Captain Bligh's Cafe served some sort of fried fishy stuff and boiled potatoes for dinner. I asked what kind of fish, but Captain Bligh has a "don't ask, we'll never tell" policy about that. I think it was the marine equivalent of road kill. Tasted good though!

Whenever we were under way we would have the marine radio on channel 16, the main hailing and distress channel. As we got to the top of NJ, the Coast Guard started up a new PAN PAN PAN announcement of a boat being overdue. It was Moonshadow, which had left Cape May just a little behind us. Again, the announcement was so monotonic and read so quickly (as if it get it out of the way, rather than actually communicate it's contents to anyone) that it took about 4-5 listen's through and all we really got out of it was that Moonshadow (and perhaps a second vessel) were overdue at their destination in Boston, and anyone having any knowledge was asked to contact the Coast Guard.

I began to wonder if they had less luck in the fog than we did. I remembered one of the boats saying they could hear a nearby motor.

Perhaps it wasn't the sailboat they thought it was, but something bigger and faster? We kept hearing that broadcast every 30 minutes or so as we made our way north.

About 10 pm we made Sandy Hook, and had already determined to head on into the NY harbor and go as far as we could before we tired out. The boat was running well.  We were reasonably well rested, and the weather was still favorable. The moon was up and going to be up for hours giving us some better visibility. The tides were nearing ebb tide, so we hoped to have some favorable flow going our way as we entered the harbor, and we thought it was late enough at night that maybe some of the daily traffic would have calmed down. I took at look at the AIS data as we passed Sandy Hook and while I could see there was some traffic, it didn't look too heavy. We headed onward.

As we got closer, the traffic did ramp up. I think part of it was the bigger ships getting out of the harbor with the outflowing tide. Some of them came out a few miles, and then just dropped anchor outside in the area between Sandy Hook and NY. We were watching one tanker on the AIS, and couldn't make sense out of his movements. First he'd be pointing one way, then another. He'd show a little motion, but not all that much. Finally he was pointed our way, aiming directly across our path, but we seemed to be gaining on him and going to cross his path before he got to the intersection point. Tom called him on the radio (we had his ships name from the AIS data on the phone) and he told us

he was no factor, he was at anchor. Doh!   That explained the pointing

every which way. He was lit up like an amusement park - we could see him for miles, all the way to the bridge.

As we made our way towards the Verazanno Narrows bridge and the entrance to the harbor, more and more ships came our way. It was like a big, slow, shotgun - belching out behemoths at us two or three at a time. Plus we had to be sure we wouldn't get run over from behind. We were making maybe 4-6 knots. Most of these ships were running at least 20, and some quite a bit faster. Tom was trying to find the channel he wanted out of all the red and green buoys on the water, and we had to cross it between the ships running through it, and get to the far side (red side) so we could flow with the direction of traffic, but just outside the channel if the water was deep enough, so we wouldn't get run over from behind. The AIS app on the phone was useful, but a little bit behind. So we had some sense of what was moving around and towards us, but while the app might say it was ahead on the left, it might have already crossed our line of travel and be on our right side. Still, it was a help, just not as real time as we'd have preferred.

It was hard to see some of the ships, and hard to make out what they were. While we had the moon, it wasn't all that bright on the water.

It was up high in the sky and didn't reflect off the water like it would at a low angle and back light things.  We could see their lights, but couldn't always make sense of what we were seeing. We had been looking at one set of lights on the right that looked like a brightly lit field over on Long Island. We had been seeing it for a half hour to 45 minutes and trying to figure out whether it was a ball field, or park or airport or what. I looked at it again and realized it looked brighter. And bigger. Holy Crap! That's a ship, coming at us!! He'd been on an intercept course. When something is coming right at you (or going right away from you) it doesn't appear to move left or right - just gets bigger or smaller.  This one was getting bigger.

Fortunately we recognized it a ways off (they are big) and ducked left a bit and he passed by safely about 10 minutes later.

Eventually the flow out of the harbor subsided, and all we had to worry about was traffic from behind. One ship was coming up the channel we needed to cross, so we kept to the south side until she passed us. She was the Suzuka (reminded me of my old motorcycle, a Suzuki 750 that I rode to Alaska on), a car carrier, and she had a weird configuration. The bow was rounded, almost bulbous,  looked like it had a wide glass window, about halfway down to the waterline, all lit up. Like a big lit up grin. She passed us by a few hundred yards off, and we crossed her wake and the channel and settled down to going buoy to buoy along the red side to the bridge. Once we had the line up of the buoys figured out and were about an hour out of the bridge and the traffic had pretty much all cleared the area by our visual watch and the AIS, Tom told me to go below and rest up for a bit to spell him later. This was about 11 pm. I bunked out and tried to sleep and got maybe 2 hours of napping on and off. I couldn't fall totally asleep. But laying down and resting was helpful and I did feel refreshed when I got up around 1 and dressed with everything I had to go up and spell him. I put on long johns, flannel shirt and jeans, fleece, down vest, coveralls, and rain jacket and pants. The outside temp was in the 40's, but the wind chill had it down near freezing.

Kevin

Barge Parking

Captain Bligh's Finest

Flags blocking pumps

Morgans Cloud

New York City at night

Some of the other traffic

Trumpville

Unidentified floating object

04/12/11 Kevin Feeney Day 7 and 9 - Norfolk to Cape May

First Mate

Heron at lock after his finner

Dock cat snoozing on bait box

I wonder how much they charge them per foot?

Navy Ship lit up and ready.

Our marina at Cape May

Seems to have run hard aground.

Tom contemplating his next boat.

Are you going to eat me.

We are not too sure.

Monday morning at 1 am we woke (well Tom woke, and then kicked me out of my bunk) and got dressed and ready to head out. Rolled in the electric cord, checked the motor and preparations and fired up, and headed out. We got out of the Tidewater Marina at 2:30 am and turned east into the channel. The early start was both to run with the out flowing tide and to give us an early enough start that we'd arrive mid day at our destination and not after dark. The best estimated time to make the run was about 30 hours, which would put us there at 6 am, average 36 hours which would have us arrive at noon, and hopefully the worst case would not run past sundown at 7 pm.

We had seen a bunch of military vessels coming in from the south in the repair and scrapping yards, but now we were passing the more active yards with working ships ready to stand out to sea.  Lots of interesting ships in there. Tom said the really large ones, like the nuclear powered aircraft carriers were actually further to the north up in the Chesapeake. One large ship that looked like a carrier turned out to be a supply ship. A bunch of missile frigates and such. Even though it was night, it was fairly bright out. Many of the ships were lit with lots of large lamps so that work could take place at night as well as in the daytime, and with the high cloud cover and the moon above that, the way was reasonably well lit. There were also a number of commercial ships, including one being loaded by what looked like oversize fork lifts. We first noticed them with all the flashing yellow lights. When we used the binoculars to check it out, we could see them all shuffling about, easily 10 times taller than a car parked near by, but didn't see them actually carrying any boxes. But three of them were busily shuffling about.

In the dark, the cranes that were all over the area looked interesting and a little sinister. It started to feel like a scene from War of the Worlds. As we passed one building, there were a pair of cranes that had two 'feet' on the dock, and two more on the roof of the building they were next to. They looked like two insectoid robots  caught in the act of walking over the building.

Being early Sunday morning, there wasn't much traffic about, but what there was was big. We were about an hour down the channel when we heard a hail over CH16 for "the sailboat outbound near marker 19". It took a moment looking at the chart plotter to figure out that was us.

We called back, but didn't hear anything. After a bit, some of the lights ahead of us resolved into something big moving our way. The call came again and we answered it but were a bit confused, thinking it was the ship ahead of us. Instead, it was the Golden Hope, which we had passed back in the yards getting loaded. She was now apparently underway and coming up from behind a mile or two back and had spotted us on the radar (yay for the radar reflector hanging up in the

rigging) along with the incoming freighter and was worried that all three of us wouldn't pass in the channel very well. They asked us to move south of the marker and run alongside the channel, which wasn't a problem since there was over 30 feet of water out there and a lot of the non commercial traffic runs just outside the channel to make room for the heavies. We agreed to run outside and then faced the on coming ship, which was not talking to us. She passed to our port a few minutes later, and then we ran into her wake, which was substantial but no real problem to take on the bow.

But with the Golden Hope coming up from behind, we were a bit concerned taking her wake on the stern. As she approached, we kept watching her close,  300 yards, 200 yards, 100 yards. Tom had decided that the best way to take her wake was again on the bow, so as we got to a wider spot and she came abeam we swung out in a tight right hand turn and caught the wake when we were facing back, crossed it, and then turned in behind the Golden Hope. She had also done us the courtesy of slowing considerably as she passed, which we didn't recognize until we hit the wake and didn't see her pulling ahead as fast as she had been catching us. She then powered up and motored on to the east, A third freighter coming in hailed us about an hour later and repeated the process, passing us to port again and leaving a substantial wake.

We did not see a lot more traffic. Near the Navy vessels, there were a number of RIB boats chugging around with grim/bored looking guys with black suits and head covers cruising about. As we got out past the naval yards, I noticed a vessel approaching us from the rear on what looked like an intercept course, and showing a bright light our way. I kept trying to make sense of what I was seeing, and kept checking the handheld radio to make sure it was still on channel 16. It looked like the ship was medium sized, like a Coast Guard patrol vessel, but I couldn't see the usual red band on the hull. As it got closer, I could see something angling out to the sides like small gun turrets. Uh oh!

I called Tom up from below to take a look. We thought it must be a Navy or Coast Guard vessel that wanted to talk to us, but as it came closer it veered off on a course parallel to us and we could see that it was a fishing trawler and what I had thought were guns trained out to the sides looking at it bow on, were fishing booms. False alarm. I still don't know if they were shining the light on us to signal us, or if that was just part of their normal lighting. The fishing boats tend to have a brightly lit rear deck area for the folks working back there.

It took over 4 hours to get from the marina out to the mouth of the bay and into the ocean. We crossed over two bridge/tunnels and then as the sky was starting to lighten in the east, we came out to the anchorage at the entrance. There must has been 25 tankers or freighters anchored out there, in several groupings. Many of them seemed to be riding pretty high, indicating they were empty. I don't know if they were going into Norfolk to get filled (with what?) or had discharged their cargo and were just waiting out the night to be on their way. The Golden Hope that had passed us before said she was a fully loaded coal ship heading out. I wondered where the coal was going?  (china?)

As the sun came up, we got clear of the anchorage and turned a bit north. We had to go out and around for a bit before we could bend the course north but eventually settled down at a course of about 45 degrees to follow the shore line about 3 miles out. We had to work our way around a couple of areas of shoaling based on the charts. We went outside one and inside the other as we chugged our way past Hog Island and Cobb Island.

Now that we were outside the sheltered area, the waves were more substantial, and a problem began to rear it's head for me - sea sickness. I'm not generally real prone to it, but the side to side motion of these waves was getting to me a bit. Tom had said there was 'all kinds' of anti nausea meds in the medicine cabinet. That turned out to be one package of Bonine that had expired in 2006.... whoops.

Fortunately when I was topside it wasn't as bad, and through the day the motion and my stomach both settled. By evening when it got rougher again, I was handling it better and not feeling too nauseous. The waves were mostly fairly gentle swells of maybe 4 foot, with occasional pairs of taller waves from the east that would rock the boat fairly strongly.

As we cruised along, I looked at the various sea birds, and for other boats. We didn't see to many other boats, just a couple of cruisers and some smaller fishing boats out, mostly either closer to shore, or further out than we were. We are apparently well ahead of the north bound herd, so we don't have much company out on the water. Makes you look around and go "hmmm, I wonder why nobody else is out where with us. I wonder what they know that we don't?" Probably just that it's too cold to be going north yet! At one point I shouted "Whoa!" and pointed astern. Tom panicked until he realized I'd seen something, not a problem with the boat. (he said he's grown up around horses - "Whoa means stop!") I saw what might have been a porpoise arching up and diving, saw the curved back and dorsal fin of something dark. 

Hopefully a porpoise. Might have been a shark, that's ok.  Just nothing with tentacles please.

Every once in a while we would hear some traffic on the marine VHF radio, but that is down in the cabin at the navigation station, and can't really be heard up topside when the hatch is closed against water entry. When we'd hear something, we'd turn on the VHF handheld, but mostly it doesn't hear nearly as well and we missed most of the traffic. Sometimes when one of us would be below we'd hear it better and be able to get the message. The Coast Guard was going on incessantly about a sunken barge we'd passed back by the Gilmore bridge in the Elizabeth river leading into Norfolk. I think they would make a broadcast about every half hour announcing that they'd be giving out more details on another channel.  However later in the day the calls got more interesting.

In the mid afternoon we heard the "Pan Pan Pan" (pronounced "Pawn, Pawn, Pawn - from the french) announcement that indicates a safety message and they asked about any vessel which had heard a call "by a male voice speaking about a lifeboat on fire". If they can get the reception reports from multiple vessels, they can estimate where the call may have come from Tom said that shortly after, several coast guard vessels went by to our south a good speed, along with a tug, and that he could see some black smoke on the horizon! We never heard how that might have come out. Just a reminder there are no guarantees I guess.

Later in the evening there were multiple calls that took many tries to sort out. The Coast Guard radio procedure is terrible - first, they pick a guy called "mumbles" to read the announcement, then he reads it really fast in a monotone so he can sign off as fast as he can! It finally came out that it was something about a female, 230 pounds, 5'

11" who was seen in the water by the Delaware bridge.  It took about 5 listens through to get that from the broadcast. Fortunately, later broadcasts indicated she'd been pulled from the water, and is hopefully doing better.

By later afternoon, the winds had come around to the east and were picking up some so we put out the sails to augment our speed. We were able to add nearly a knot of speed, doing middle 6 to low 7's, and cut the motor RPM down to 2200. Into the evening, the winds kept swinging more to the south, so eventually the main was blanketing the jib and we took it down. Tom had to go forward and fix a problem with the reefing and then let it down while I tried to keep the boat into the wind in the dark. At one point I got confused by the wind vane reflectors and had us 180 degrees from where we had to be. I think we pirouetted around twice before we got the sail down and pointed back in the right direction.

While we were motoring and sailing north, I got to working on the autopilot. It had not been tracking well, over correcting and basically doing a drunkards walk whenever it would get perturbed off course. If the motoring was steady, with no winds or sail, it could hold reasonably well, but if anything made it lose course and it tried to correct, it just kept swinging back and forth making S turns along the course. We had tried upping the sensitivity to the rudder and a couple of other adjustments with no good results. The manual isn't very good about suggesting what settings to use and why you might change them. Finally in frustration, I had gone web surfing the last time we were in port and downloaded a couple of conversations about the autopilot with that problem. There were some new suggested settings in there, so I entered them into the system. Voila, it settled right down! Which made the autopilot back into a useful tool again. Which is a good thing because the steering on the boat is stiff and my arms were getting tired of racking the wheel back and forth and back and forth every 20 seconds or so. Having a functioning autopilot is a real blessing, especially on long watches like we were having. It frees you up to keep watch for other traffic and reduces the fatigue of constantly correcting course to keep on track.

We'd been snacking on crackers and a bit of chocolate and some cookies during the day, but as the sun went down and I was on watch, Tom went below and cooked up some stew and we had that for dinner. It was starting to get colder by then, into the upper 40's and with the wind from behind, so the warm meal was welcome. After that was over, I kept watch for another bit while Tom rested in cockpit and snoozed a bit.

Then he took the watch and I went below to see if I could get warm and sleep. I'd been dressing in my coveralls, a good suggestion he had made to bring them, and a vest and fleece, and it was too much work to get back out of them so I just crashed in my bunk, coveralls and all.

It was hard to sleep, I may have gotten a few winks here and there. I was being tossed around a fair bit by the boats motion for one thing.

I got up after a couple of hours and went back topside to spell Tom.

He tried to nap in the cockpit for a couple of hours, that way he'd be available to ask questions of or help out other ways. But it was pretty cold and when you're not active, even in the coveralls it's hard to stay warm. He had a blanket up with him but was getting cold and shivering under it. I sent him below  to get some sleep in the relative warmth of the cabin. He went down and just crashed out on the settee in the main salon, down in the warm, but with a board out of the hatchway so I could call him if needed. I spent several hours up there by myself, contemplating the ocean, watching the shore drift by, considering the single points of failure in a diesel engine, and having a birthday arrive on a brisk clear night under the stars.

We were booking along, and I was watching the shoreline when after a bit, everything went dark. I looked up. Got stars. Looked at the shore

- no shore lights. Looked for the lit buoys, no lights. Got out the flashlight and shined it out in the the darkness and there it was  - fog! Dang! I woke Tom and asked him "What now Kemosabe?" and the answer was basically stay the course, and listen *hard* for the sound of other boats. Kind of hard to do over the sound of the diesel. It also killed my ability to listen to the MP3 player to pass the time. 

I reduced speed a little to 5 knots to give us a little more reaction time in the fog and to reduce the sound of the engine to make it a little easier to hear. A couple of times in the night I thought I heard a fog horn, but I'd get up and slow down and listen hard and it didn't come back, so it was probably a boat noise or my imagination. 

For a while, the fog lifted and I could see shore again, but then as we got close to Cape May, about 3 miles out, it closed in again. When we got to within a mile of the end of our route, just off the entrance, I woke Tom again to work on the final approach and handle going in the entrance.

Good thing I did. It was hairy. We found the outer marker light with the GPS, but we were still mostly in darkness. It was pre-dawn, but with the fog, it wasn't very light yet. Tom took the helm, and I stood up to watch forward for the other markers. We had a heck of a time finding them. We finally found one, and then after a bit the other came in view marking the end of the entrance. We tried to line up to go in, but the boat was twisting around and hard to steer. Turns out we'd hit the entrance at the middle of the in-flowing tide, and we were getting messed up by the rush of the water coming in the entrance, essentially nearly matching our slow speed and killing our ability to steer.  With the fog, we couldn't see the next set of markers up ahead and we're losing our reference to the ones we'd crawled past and it was getting to be a question of whether we could hold the boat straight without a good visual reference. We needed to speed up to get steerage speed in the tidal flow, but needed to stay slow so as to not run into anything in the low visibility. Tom finally speeded up enough to get more control. The GPS was hard to follow for Tom, because the boat was swinging back and forth in the current, so we couldn't use the preferred course markings like he had done in the alligator river - the GPS was lagging, possibly from the wet conditions impacting the satellite reception, and the boat wasn't responding well to steering with the current so it was a handful. I ended up just trying to call out whether we were heading towards one shore or the other, which wasn't always visible, while Tom concentrated on steering the boat. At least he had a memory of what the channel was supposed to look like, I had no clue not having been here before nor had a good look at the chart.

Eventually, we found the second set of lights, and then around the bend to the left was a place where we could at least drop the anchor temporarily. I dropped the big anchor on Tom's command, but we drifted back so fast with the current that we put out about 80 feet of chain in no time. But the hook set and we were at anchor. Phew! We had made excellent time. We got to Cape May about a half hour before Tom's most favorable estimate, and that included going slow for a couple of hours in the fog. Tom said later that we averaged 5.6 knots, which is pretty darned good.

We sat at anchor for about 45 minutes and then Tom made a call to the marina and found we could get a slip and come over early if we could find our way there. That was non-trivial in the fog. The current had now started to abate, and we were up in the inside waterway with less flow anyway, but he didn't recall the route to the marina exactly and without being able to see more than about 100 yards, it was hard to get much in visual clues to remind him of it. We went to one marker where he thought the turn was, but as we started towards the supposed inlet it got shallow fast and we started to go aground, so we reversed motor and backed out of there and made a phone call to confirm the course and went further down the line to the right place. Then it was through a bridge we could hardly see at first, and then around a corner and up a narrow creek to the marina.

The marina is Miss Chris's, and is mostly a place for the whale watching boats and fishing boats to work out of. When we got there we were pooped, and the boat next to us had a bunch of stereotypical New Joisey types coming on board for their fishing trip. It looked like a crew out of a bad reality show. There was the surly looking gangsterish guy with the cigar, fussing with the rod and reel who seemed to in charge.  There was a scrabbly looking strung out guy who came into the shop waving his arms and asking "Have you seen two ugly looking mugs heah?" looking for the rest of the gang. I kept looking for Snookie to show up. Finally they got their stuff together and the boat backed away and took their high volume conversation with it.

Thank God! We wandered over to get some breakfast at the luncheonette at the Lobster House and then back to the boat for some much needed sleep. (with "Da Rolling Mills of New Joisey" running through my head)

We eventually roused and sat around web surfing courtesy of my DroidX and checking email and generally doing quiet stuff as we were still kind of wiped out. Tom decided to take me out for a nice dinner for my birthday, so we went to the lobster house. I think he snuck the head waiter a few bucks to get us a table with a good view, and I had lobster and fillet mignon which was quite tasty. I was so full, I couldn't eat all the dessert. Tom had some wonderful alcoholic concoction called a milkshake for his dessert. I think our course back to the boat was not as direct as it could have been...  We sat up and talked for quite a while, then Tom drifted off to bed and I web surfed for a bit and crashed out too.

Today we've been in maintenance and waiting for weather mode. Tom cleaned the boat, we got fueled up and topped off the water. Had breakfast again at the luncheonette - where the waitresses seem to be decidedly cool. Either that's just their nature, or they've seen enough transient sailors to have had their fill of them. We can barely get a word out of them. Which is unusual, Tom can usually get anyone talking. Not these gals.

Early afternoon we trucked over to the laundromat and did laundry and had a couple of slices of pizza, then came back to the store and talked to Bob after getting fuel. We swapped a bunch of stories with him and then I was petting his dockside cat and he mentioned that he was getting pretty old, and was a little miffed at the clutch of kittens he had in the back. What kittens? Turns out that a mama cat takes over the attic of the store most springs, and finds a partner and starts popping out kittens up there. This year, it started raining kittens through the ceiling insulation, with the little guys falling though between the rafters and plopping down into the store. He's been gathering them up, and trapped mama and got her spayed and he's acclimating the kittens to people by carrying them around in his sweatshirt where they sit warm against his body with him supporting them, so they are already pretty people friendly, at least the one gray one. He's introduced them to the local dog, getting each one snuffled without being panicked, and generally getting them ready to be adopted out in a few weeks. He says he'll probably keep the gray one, which was laying in his hand, perfectly content when he was showing him off. The two he captured last were huddled around each other, a bit unsure of all the doings, but terribly cute.

The storm front finally passed through late afternoon, with heavy rain, and some thunder and a lot of wind. It's still blowing now so our early departure for tomorrow is probably off at this point. We need to wait for the front to pass, and then for the water to settle some behind it. The wind is coming out of the east strongly, in fact it's rocking the boat while it's tied up, and we're in the sheltered marina between two big steel boats, and that will churn up the waves from the east over the long fetch of the ocean. We need to give it time to calm down after the winds have subsided before we head out or the waves will be too high to be comfortable. We were looking at a 4 am departure for the tide, but now will look at 8 am, the next window, or 5 pm, the window after that. We have about a 20 hour run to Sandy Hook, our next stop, with a couple of hidey holes along the way at about 40 mile spacing if the weather turns bad. We are supposed to get a clearing and high pressure system with the winds swinging around to favorable directions as this passes. We should be able to run through the night as needed and when we arrive at Sandy Hook, we don't need a marina, just go around the bend into the protected anchorage. If it's daylight and we aren't totally toasted, and the visibility is good, we'll continue on a couple of more hours into NY harbor as we need to be able to see to avoid the big freighters.

The plan once we hit NY is to go up the Hudson to Kingston where Deb will come get us and bring us back home. If we get weathered out on the way, we might have to extend the trip a day or so, or possibly park the boat someplace short of Kingston for Tom to come back to later with Deb. The main goal will be to get it into the Hudson someplace so Deb can join him for the rest of the trip back.

Whenever we take off, I'll turn the APRS tracker back on. It seems to be working fairly well. There are obviously sections out along the coast where no signal was getting through. And some of the location points are obviously wrong - we did not sail across solid ground. But it seems to be working about as well as the amateur radio version did, with perhaps generally more coverage than we get on 2 meters.  I found you can get the track by googling " google maps wb2ems-8" and it will take you to the aprs.fi site.

HF radio continues to be fun. I worked some more stations in Arizona yesterday afternoon on 15 meters and listened to some in Venezuela, South Africa, and other places.  I ran my lithium battery down and discovered that Tom's system voltage isn't very high, not 14 volts like I need, but only just barely 13. That's hard to charge the battery with. When I first plugged it in, it started charging the boat! I finally found his jumper pack with it's charger and the voltage on that is high enough to get some current into my battery.

Speaking of charging my battery, I need to charge mine more. I've not been drinking nearly enough coffee, and between that and the whacked out schedule while sailing, my sleeping hasn't been good and I've had a bad case of manana. I had this problem the first time I sailed with Lee, and we didn't figure it out until well into the trip and got me more caffeinated. I've been wondering why I haven't been doing much reading and stuff, and kind of slow at getting some writing done, and have concluded it's a caffeine deficit.

Ok, I've finally got this written and caught up. I'll go grab the photos and label them and send it in two emails.

Next update at next landfall, probably sometime Thursday.



What bridge.

 Kevin

4/10/11 Kevin's 5-6 day on Packet Inn

Thursday night we anchored off Buck Island north of Albermarle sound a little ways. We dragged anchor and had to put out the big anchor eventually and then settled down to a nice evening, including a nice look over by a V22 Osprey.

Friday we started up and headed on into Coinjock, which is supposed to be an Indian name for the mulberry bush it turns out. Stopped at the marina there and fueled up and had a nice lunch, then got under way again headed north up the Virginia cut.

There were some interesting zigs and zags around various places and under some bridges and some of the area was very pretty. But some of those zigs and zags had Tom working pretty hard to stay in the channel. I took all the straight parts. :-)  As the afternoon wore on, we were working to make several different bridge openings and did what we wanted to which was to get as far as Great Bridge. We passed through the bridge at it's last opening of the day and tied up at a free dock between the bridge and the lock.

At the swing bridge before that, we were passing by a naval air station off to one side of the canal, and were treated to the sight of a jet coming in and then coming to a hover, and descending behind the trees. It was apparently shooting landings or doing some sort of test because it kept coming back every 10 minutes or so, sometimes hovering again and going out of sight, and sometimes speeding back up and zooming away like some sort of missed approach. I think it might have been the new F35, but it looked to me a lot like an F18. I did see on some of the pictures a panel behind the cockpit opened up for the air intake.

After tying up at Great Bridge, we hiked a little south to a nice Italian restaurant and had a good dinner and a glass of wine. Deb woke the place up when she rang my phone to ask about the APRS tracking . I had set my phone with the loudest ring I could so I could hear it on the boat over the engine, or when I had it on the charger and not in my pocket. Every head in the place turned when it went off! I turned it to vibrate only after that (and missed a call from Connie today when it was on the charger because I didn't hear it. I can't win).

As we tied up at Great Bridge, everything finally snapped into focus.

I had thought this was the route Lee and Kevin and I had trekked going south, but it didn't look all that familiar. But the bridge was unique and I immediately recognized it, and then the town around it. This was the same place we stopped for lunch one day going down, except we tied up at the yacht basin below and got fuel and walked out a block below where we were tied up last night.

It got pretty cool overnight, and we slept in a bit to charge our batteries since Saturday was going to be a slow day with an early morning. Today all we really did was walk further into town to get a decent breakfast, buy some supplies at the local stores and then head north for Norfolk about 10 miles away. We had to pass another couple of timed bridges, but did those in good order and made our way to Tidewater Marina where we're tied up till midnight.

Tom got some maps and more local knowledge and checked the weather and tide tables. They gave him a heavy roll of paper maps some other boater abandoned at the shop (100 foot boat, gone electronic charts).

We haven't opened them up to see what goodies are contained, but Tom gave me the overview of our path for the next day or so in more detail so I have a clue.

The weather is supposed to clear and the tides will be going out starting around midnight. We need to leave then to have a favorable current with them. It will take us about 4 hours to get out on the Atlantic and turn north for Cape May. Then we will have about 30 hours of travel to our next planned anchorage. The winds are supposed to swing around to the south and southwest and push us along with 10-20kt winds and waves up to 3 feet or so. We'll see. It's pretty chilly now, and will be worse at midnight. Coveralls again.

We went out for a walk to a recommended pizza joint and got good pizza and bad mexican music rather  too loud. We did see the lightship Portsmouth as we walked back and also a paddle wheeler that does tours around the harbor. It was obviously a fake paddle wheel though, just spinning for show.

Tom's had on some good music to clear his musical palate after the restaurant music, and I'm web surfing while we have the net and getting ready to go shower and shave. Then we're going to nap for 4 hours and get up and leave on the tide as they say.

If we're not too far off shore, I hope to have some sort of internet for the next 30 hours, but it may be spotty. If that doesn't work out, the next report will be from Cape May sometime mid day Monday if all goes as planned. Haven't downloaded any pics yet from the days so I won't send them till later.

If you are interested in tracking our progress, I'm running an Automatic Position Reporting System program on my droidx. It's based on my radio callsign, wb2ems-8. If you just google that or google map that it should take you to this page http://aprs.fi/?call=a%2FWB2EMS-8 which should show our recent progress and current location. I'm asking it to drop a breadcrumb on the map every 10 minutes, but depending on cell coverage at that moment, it may or may not make it into the system. I've done this with ham radio gear in the past, this time I'm trying it with the cell system. We'll see how it compares.

Till later

Kevin

4/9/2011 Kevin Feeney crews on Packet Inn

Day 1 and 2 were pretty uneventful. After arriving at New Bern on Sunday, I took a taxi out to Oriental and met Tom at the Marina where he'd taken a slip for a couple of days.  We weren't at the town docks (towndock.net), so we couldn't be seen on the webcam, but just a bit to the left of them (east side of the inlet) at the Marina. Tom had a nice table at the Toucan grill waiting for me when I arrived and I got a great burger there, which was needed after a half a day of air travel and no airline food.

Tom  had lost his head stay the previous week and had to make repairs by replacing the furler. Unfortunately the new furler didn't fit his main head sail, the big Genoa. He called ahead and made arrangements to drop it off Sunday in Oriental and it was done mid day Monday. We got it mounted, but then had to wait out Tuesday because of a big front coming through and the storms associated with it. By Monday night it was blowing over 25 mph, and that continued well into Tuesday with rain and some thunderstorm activity.

Monday was spent with a walk up to the Marine consignment store, where you can buy all kinds of cool used boating goodies, and then over to West Marine, for new marine goodies. At the consignment shop, we found a very lightweight (12 lb) outboard motor for Tom's dinghy that was purported to have some issues that are likely easily solved. Tom also found a nice orange mustang survival suit - a well thought out pair of warm coveralls with flotation gear built in. He had been wanting some warmer clothes all trip, and these were a screaming deal and in good shape. I found a safety harness with lanyard to wear under a life vest.

We went up to West Marine and I checked out inflatable life vests with harnesses, but decided to go with the passive vest and harness till I see a better deal. We did stop by the grocery store between the two and load up two backpacks of food to take back to the boat. I think I got all the cans in my backpack. :-)

In the morning, we had started the day at The Bean, the gathering spot for townspeople and boaters. It's directly across the street from the town dock and marina and a natural spot for everyone with any nautical interest to gather. Tom was in and out making phone calls about the sail and others stuff, and at one point most of the seats were taken and a nice gentleman named Bert who turned out to be a really interesting character. He was a veteran, and involved with the honor flight group and doing some political organizing around getting a message to Washington that folks have had about enough.

  His idea is that folks should take an empty plastic milk or water jug and write a message on it and mail it to themselves via general delivery in Washington DC, with a return address of back home. That way it's your property and they can't just toss it easy. He's talked to the post office about it, and even did a test mailing of 3000 jugs, on his nickle!  He was very interesting to talk to and we spent about

3 hours with him. I think he said he was 81 years old, and was clearly known by everyone in town and everyone was coming up and saying hi. A few other folks came and sat with us because of him and we got to meet several more folks that way and have a nice chat. It was *very* welcoming and pleasant.

I awoke Tuesday to Tom racing onto the boat in the storm, grabbing his foulies, and saying there's a woman in trouble at the next marina.

Took me a minute to find some clothes and get running so I got there a bit after the most of the excitement but Victoria on Malia was in a berth and with the water having done down in the storm (the wind blows the water out the mouth of the sound and it drops nearly a foot) he boat had settled and slid under the dock and was being beaten against the underside of it by the wave action in the storm. Tom had already horsed the boat clear before I found them, but I got to help a bit with getting the ropes rearranged so that the boat was more securely held in place and couldn't get in trouble again. Victoria invited us in out of the rain for coffee and turned out to be a fascinating person. Professor, sailor, writer, etc who has sailed to and lived in Hawaii, sailed to New Zealand, and up and down the east coast and Caribbean, We enjoyed talking to her for about an hour. Her boat was a Cape Dory 36 and very nice inside and fixed up very practically. She had a nice little black and white cat who was very friendly and took to Tom right away sitting in his lap while we both petted her.

After  leaving Victoria, we headed back to the boat to do mundane things to get ready for the next days leaving, like laundry. I spent some more time at The Bean, drinking coffee, resisting the ice cream, web surfing, and people watching .

That evening, we decided to wander around and find a different restaurant to eat dinner at, but ended up at M&M's where we'd had lunch. We did invite Victoria to eat with us and had a nice time talking to her about sailing and the pacific, writing and how to market it (she's got several books written but not published yet)  and then she and Tom finished up with a discussion on refrigeration with Tom recommending a water cooled system as being more reliable than the two air cooled systems she's been through in the last 6 years.  We had a great meal and talked till the place closed.

Wednesday we got up and set sail out of Oriental east into Palmlico sound. We had to go pretty far east, then bend around north and west to stay in deep enough water. It's amazing how large many of the bodies of water are, but without enough depth to let a 4 foot draft boat pass. We probably added 3-4 miles to our route to stay in 10 foot water. Weather was good, fairly sunny but a little chill at 40 and windy. Later on in the day it got somewhat better, but then chilled down again as we approached sunset.

I brought along my Icom 703 (Ham Radio) and some antenna bits and a battery and set them up on the stern rail and tuned around. All the bands including ten meters were open and ten was hot! I worked a station in Oklahoma that was jealous of our boating, then a station in Munich, and one in Costa Rica. Later in the day I worked another in Texas, and he asked me to reduce power to 5 watts (from 10). I did and he still had us at s6, so I reduced it to 1 watt and were were still s3. In the evening I used the whole coil on the buddistick and 75 meters tuned in fine and I heard K1KBW, and W2DTC 40 over and fell asleep listening to them.

As sunset approached, we had left the sound and were north bound in the alligator river. It's a pretty desolate area, sort of like parts of the erie canal, but with less population around. Most of it looks like no one has been there in a long time, because the area on either side of the canal is mostly swamp land. Every once in a while you see a nice big dock and a house or compound with lots of lawn and open space, but I bet we saw only a half dozen the whole length of the place.

In the sound, the red and green buoys were red on right, green on left. Someplace up the river, they apparently switched, but with no notice and we couldn't figure out why. All we saw was after no buoys for several miles, the next green one we saw was waaaay over on the right. There was just enough room on the right for a couple of boats to pass, but it looked really funky. It didn't show on the chartplotter which has all our navigation information.  It wasn't clear if the markers had flipped sides, or if we were supposed to squeeze through on the right side near the bank. The Erie canal has a couple of places where you do squeeze through like that, so we could go either way. I was driving and slowed way down and pointed right at the buoy so we could go either way, and Tom went forward to read the water. He decided at the last moment to point me to the right, so that's the way I went. We immediately ran aground! Fortunately it was fairly soft mud, and we were going slow, so we were able to back off and go around on the left side of the buoy without incident. Not even a whole day and I'd already run us aground once, albeit at Tom's direction.

We tried to anchor just as the sun went down at a spot the guidebook recommended by a bridge, but it turned into a minor disaster. First we nosed into the canal they recommended, but it was too tight and too shallow. As we backed out and drifted a bit downstream, the prop started hitting something and thumping terribly. I tried to put it in neutral right away, but for whatever reason,  that didn't seem to work. I ended up shutting off the engine after a moment, leaving us dead in the water and drifting near the shore. Tom took over and got us free, but now it was rapidly starting to get darker and we still needed to anchor. We tried several more places, both sides of the river. We got a tree stuck on the anchor on one trial that took both of us to get up and free, and kept running into soft bottom on other attempts. We finally gave up and decided to continue motoring down the river in the dark, following the chart plotter, until something better presented itself. We ended up motoring on for two more hours all down the length of the river until we came to the opening into the Albermarle sound and found anchoring there in a recommended location.

Tom was steering the boat, glued to the chart plotter display following the purple line, while I sat in the bow with a powerful flashlight, looking for snags and trying to keep my night vision well enough to see where we were in the canal. Fortunately it was a beautiful night, a setting crescent moon, and lots of stars and once my night vision got adjusted and we turned some lights off ,I was able to keep track of our position in case the chart plotter didn't run us exactly where needed. It was tiring, but we made it. We anchored behind a channel marker as suggested, and saw a white LED light that looked to be an obstruction marker of some kind. In the morning, we couldn't see anything around that would be holding up a light like that. We now think it was another boat anchored in the same area and was it's anchor light.  We went to bed around 11 pm and were both asleep shortly.

Today we got up at a bit before 8 and got underway. We had some fun in the early part of the day when we were under the flight path of a variety of jet fighters going east to play tag with each other. They kept circling around and making passes over and near us as we transited the area. I'm sure they have fun doing that. One made an afterburner pass almost directly overhead and then pulled up and did a loop as he got out over the edge of the sound, and his buddy followed suit minus the AB on the next pass. Fun! Made me wistful though, wishing I could be up there. But being down here was good too.

We went up one part of the sound to the alligator river bridge, a turning bridge and passed through there just a bit after noon.

Unfortunately, north of that, the chart plotter led us astray and aground. The preferred channel shown on the plot that Tom was following didn't correspond very well with our current reality and we drove into a sandbar at 6 kts and got well and truly hung up. You know you are in trouble when you can feel the boat going up and down over a couple of humps. before it slides to a stop. We tried rocking and moving weight and putting up sails but to no avail. Fortunately there was cell service on Tom's phone and he called Tow Boat. They were two hours away and had just gotten back to the barn after pulling another sailboat boat out of the same area an hour before. Several other boats called on the radio to check on us and comiiserated about their groundings nearby recently as well. Apparently this area is subject to a lot of shifting shoals, and in fact a jet drive USGS survey boat was mapping the shoal and channel to the west of us, talking to us on the radio and making mutliple passes back and forth and turning around as they hit the mud (said they could 4 wheel drive with the best of them with the tunnel drive). It was interesting to watch while waiting for tow boat. Also much activity in the air with various helicopters flying about.

They came out and gave us a slow and careful tow. Instead of having two big outboards on the back as the one on our lake does, they had a small boat that I think had a jet drive. They spoke of washing away the sand and mud and as they took us under tow, it was clear that there was a lot of stuff being blown up in the water as the gently blasted a path for us and led us to deeper water. It only took about a half hour for them to free us. All in all we lost about 2.5 hours to the grounding, but don't seem to have suffered any damage, except to our pride.

We continued on across the open part of the Albermarle sound towards

the Virginia cut   Tom came down the dismal swamp route southbound and

wanted to see the other route and it's a bit shorter and the tow boat folks said it was less hazardous for shallows and such as well and recommended it as the better way to Norfolk. So instead of heading to Elizabeth city, we headed more northerly. As we got to the far side, we encountered a tug and barge and did circles while he passed by so we wouldn't hold him up in the narrow channel to Coinjock. He was very appreciative and gave us a number of good pointers about nearby anchorages, and we took his advice instead of heading into Coinjock and are now anchored off buck island just outside the channel. It's pretty quiet and pleasant but we can hear the fighter jets zooming by and a little earlier we had a visit from a V22 Osprey that came out in the dark, circled around us, and then went back the way it came. It was interesting trying to figure out what it was. It was wide and had lights, but was coming very slowly and didn't have the usual helicopter whop whop whop sound.  As it got closer I got a better look at it, and guessed what it was. Then took a look with the binoculars as it passed by and was able to get a better view of it from behind.

Very cool!

It's 9 pm and we're both beat. It's April 7 and I have a sunburn! I suspect I'll be asleep in a half hour. We have cell service and can uplink this tonight but sometime after noon tomorrow will be heading into the trackless swampland and will probably be out of touch for two days.

Well, now it's 9:42 and we've had 3 anchor alarms and drug anchor to within a 100 feet of the island as the wind swung about and piped up.

Just went through the exercise of pulling in the smaller 'lunch hook'

anchor, and "dropping the big one". :-)  Hopefully that will be the end of the days excitement.