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