The disappearing house

There are definitely some advantages of living on the land versus on a boat. One of the more important ones is that you generally expect to see your house when you return from a short errand. Well, what if you didn't? What if your house was simply gone from where you last saw it? Imagine if you came back from the store and all you could see was an empty lot of grass where your house once solidly stood. You know you're in the right place and the house should be there in front of you, but it isn't. After a blank, puzzled look, you start thinking about the implications and where exactly is your house right now?

Ummm, Something isn't Right

Now you know how I felt when I drove over a bridge in Norfolk and idly looked for our boat in the anchorage where we had left it a couple hours earlier when we drove Beth to the airport for her trip on Sunday. 

The morning started early and windy. We woke up at 5AM and were in the dinghy by 6AM. We nervously eyed the cold dancing waters and wondered how wet we might get. Luckily, the wind was behind us and we powered up and got ahead of the rolling chop. We made it to our landing place without getting wet and we were feeling pretty lucky. We climbed in our rental car and dropped off Beth at the airport. Then, J and I went to a cafe for breakfast because the wind had picked up and we didn't want to brave the waters headed against the waves. 

After breakfast, the wind had moderated a bit so we decided to head back to the boat. As I crossed the bridge leading to Portsmouth, it came as a shock not to see our boat amongst the other boats. I couldn't believe it at first. It just wasn't possible. We'd already suffered the winds and waves without any problems for five days. We seemed safe when we left the boat. 

As the realization began to dawn on me that our house had definitely gone missing, I scanned for signs of the boat in the brief glimpses I could make out from the car. I think I saw our boat alongside a bulkhead - definitely not where it should be.

Not knowing what shape the boat was in or how it moved, Jeanette and I ran from the car to the dinghy and went as fast as we could to the boat. It was alongside an entrance-way leading into a marina. It wasn't anywhere a boat was supposed to be, but it looked like someone had tied a rope to it and put a fender in-between the boat and the rough timbers of the bulkhead. I figured it had to be the marina people, so I called them and asked what had happened. It turns out someone on another boat watched as we slowly drifted from the anchorage to land in this surprisingly safe place. I was shocked when the guy told me the boat had found its way to the location - it wasn't someone driving it. 

He also told me that it gotten beat up pretty bad from the exposed bolts on the bulkhead. I went and looked and sure enough, our smooth recently-waxed hull had indeed taken a beating. There were long gashes and gouges where the bolt heads had beat up the side as the boat slowly bounced along the bulkhead. Luckily, there wasn't any structural damage and it was all cosmetic. 

I used the windlass to pull in our anchor - which luckily came to the boat without overloading our windlass. It would have been a big problem for our anchor to have set - preventing me from motoring away from the bulkhead where the wind had me pinned. The anchor HAD to come up if I was to get off that spot. It did, so that removed one complication. As gently as I could, I motored off the bulkhead trying to rotate the boat into the wind as I moved forwards. It mostly worked and then I was off.

Dodging Disaster

It felt very demoralizing to have almost lost our boat this early in our trip. if the wind had shifted direction much, we would have been swept into the deep water channel with lots of hazards much worse than bolts on a bulkhead. The worst case is that we would have hit something sharp enough to put a hole in the boat and let water in. So many things could have happened that would have really messed up our plans.

I wanted to just go back to the marina in a safe and secure slip, but I decided that I simply needed to feel that I could properly anchor the boat and not have it drift away on us. So, Jeanette and I went back to the anchorage to drop our hook - her first time helping us do this, but she's watched her mom many times. We got the hook down and then made certain that we weren't going anywhere by putting the engines in reverse and giving them full throttle. We also put out more chain than we did previously.

I think we made several mistakes when we had previously anchored. We didn't really set the hook hard and we didn't really put out enough chain. The weather had been mild, so we hadn't really tested the anchor. It was just bad luck that the wind peaked while we were off the boat. If we were on the boat, it is very likely we would have noticed the problem.

Not a pretty sight. My R&R was just cancelled...

I've decided to attempt to repair the damage myself. It's the sort of thing that the worst I can do is make an ugly fix that some highly paid professional will simply grind away and redo. I can't make the problem any worse and as I have time on my hands, it will be yet one more new skill to learn.

Panic still echoes within me as I think about the situation. It definitely has shaken my confidence and taught me a lesson that I simply must hold dear lest much greater consequences occur. Welcome to the cruising life...

Girls Weekend

On Friday, Ken flew off to California for our niece Annika’s wedding.  While Jeanette and I were sorry to be left behind, we made the most of it by renting a car and exploring the area.  After four days of torrential rains, we were eager to be outside, even though it meant squishing across sodden ground through the unrelenting drizzle.  Our first stop was the Norfolk Botanical Gardens with its myriad of themed gardens – a Japanese garden, a colonial garden, a healing garden, a children’s garden, a rose garden, a Renaissance garden, a statuary garden – easily 40 or more discrete spaces with special landscaping.  

While autumn is setting in and the gardens are nowhere near their full-bloom glory, the many hues of those hardy flowers remaining were rich and vibrant in the gray mist.

Saturday dawned rainy and breezy – again.  Umbrellas in hand, we set off to historic Portsmouth and the Farmer’s Market, just a few blocks away from the marina.  We picked up a nice selection of fresh vegetables from just across the North Carolina border.  We had planned to spend the afternoon at the nearby Children’s Museum but when we walked in the door and were greeted with a long line of crying, fussy children, Jeanette, thankfully, nixed the idea.  On Sunday, we visited the Hermitage Museum and Gardens, an arts and crafts house that was the former home of Florence Sloane, collector of antiquities and avid supporter of women in the arts.  The house itself was fascinating, with odd touches like kitchen witches carved into each side of the fireplaces and secret passageways crisscrossing the compound.  Her collections leaned toward Asian art with some beautiful seated Buddha’s and a bronze temple bell.  The gardens featured a rose garden, a formal garden, and a wetlands garden.  The very high tides flooded some of the walkways but Jeanette had enough space to burn some energy and we both soaked up the beauty and tranquility of the setting. 

We woke Monday to rain, in defiance of the forecast that promised sun.  Sigh.  No matter, we drove out to Virginia Beach and the Aquarium and Marine Science Center located there.  The aquarium was fantastic, not for its collections, specifically, but for the interactive exhibits that provided opportunities for learning about salinity and conductivity, density of sand/silt and water clarity, echolocation  and sonar, chart interpretation, and the prehistoric origins of Virginia.  I’ve inserted many of these topics into Jeanette’s lessons to take advantage of our Chesapeake Bay location and was happy to have them reinforced in such a fun way!  The sun peeked out long enough for us to enjoy an extended nature walk along the salt marsh before heading back to the marina. 

 With Ken home Monday night, we decided to dash out to Virginia Beach Tuesday morning before dropping the car off at noon.  Nothing looks quite so forlorn and melancholy as a beach town buttoned up for the winter.  Add to that a gray, blustery day and it almost looks forbidding.  The waves were crashing along the pier and seagulls wheeled overhead – a little too close for comfort, at times.  We cheered ourselves with mochas, steamed almond milk, and gluten-free goodies at Badass Coffee before turning for home, another successful foray under our belts.

Time Traveling

Last weekend, we spent three quiet days swinging at anchor on the York River.  We followed the fishing boats out of Irvington and had a relatively short hop down the bay to Yorktown.  The Atlantic influence of this part the Chesapeake is in evidence everywhere we turn, with pelicans and dolphins eager to feed on the plentiful baitfish shoaling near the surface.   We’ve had our fishing lines out and had a few bites, but other than a couple of smallish perch, we have yet to catch anything worth keeping. 

Virginia is steeped in history and Yorktown was a great place to establish a base for a few days.  Of course, we were a little behind on the news so it wasn’t until we started walking around the historic sites that we realized the full meaning of “government shutdown.”  Fortunately, many of the museums and exhibits in this area are administered by non-profit foundations and are still open.  We caught a shuttle to Williamsburg on Saturday and spent a few hours exploring colonial life through the many exhibits there.  It was a beastly hot day and we sympathized with the living history docents garbed in layers upon layers of clothing.  Strangely enough, the magazine was a big hit.  I now know more about colonial weapons and ordnance than I ever wanted to – an odd thing for a pacifist.  It was fascinating, though, and we experienced an entirely different presentation at the Yorktown Victory Museum the next day when Jeanette volunteered to be part of a gun crew and the demonstration of a brass, 8-pound light gun (what I would previously have called a cannon).  She also volunteered to remove a musket shot from the camp surgeon’s leg and had much to add to his discussion on the medical treatment of soldiers.   A budding herbalist, she definitely would have been on the wrong side of the heroic medicine practiced at that time.  Ken, in the meantime, became almost misty-eyed over the simple one-room, dirt-floor cabins.  Apparently, my beloved Pimentels were born in the wrong century. 

Sunday evening found us pulling into Hampton in anticipation of heading across the river to Portsmouth/Norfolk on Thursday where we had reservations at the Tidewater Marina.  We rented a car on Monday and spent the entire day at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.  One of the docents, upon learning that we had sailed down from CT, referred to us as Yankees.  That was when we remembered that Virginia was only the second state to secede from the Union after North Carolina.  While the Yorktown Victory Museum really focuses on the ideals and optimism of colonial America that inspired and fueled the war on independence, the Mariner’s Museum is primarily concerned with down and dirty military battles.  Who engaged what, where - from the Revolutionary War through current military actions.  An entire wing of the museum is devoted to the design, building, exploits, loss, discovery, excavation, and recovery of The Monitor, which foundered in a storm off Cape Hatteras after a very short career in the Civil War.  The unique spinning gun turret is still housed underwater during conservation efforts but is visible from a viewing room.  The information and artifacts contained within that museum are vast and, in one day, we barely scratched the surface.  One of the more disturbing, if memorable, exhibits was on survival at sea.  Not shipwrecks per se, but the diaries and accounts of shipwrecked sailors as they clung to life rafts, jury-rigged solar stills and fishing spears, and prayed for deliverance.  I had my doubts about taking Jeanette through it, but it was a connector to the other part of the museum so in we went.  She was a little unnerved at first, but it was the video of the Queen’s Birthday Storm and the rescue of the crew on a catamaran that put her over the edge.  I quickly ushered her through the rest of the exhibit and I’m not sure which one of us was the most relieved to put it behind us.  It was all a little too close to home. 

With the weather deteriorating rapidly, we decided to cross over to Portsmouth early and checked into the marina yesterday morning.  We’ve had torrential rains all day and, even in the middle of the marina, the gusts are well over 30 kts.  Inside, we are warm and snug, huddled together on the settee, glad for this time that we have with each other.

Three weeks later

We're now pleasantly anchored in the York River just a fast dinghy ride to Yorktown. While munching on French fries at a waterfront diner, I realized it has been three weeks since we set off on this adventure - and Milford/Stratford seems awfully far away in time and distance - much more than just 3 weeks and 400 miles. 

In our three weeks, we've visited or overnighted at the following communities:

1) Northport, NY

2) Port Washington, NY

3) Barnegut Inlet, NJ

4) Atlantic City, NJ

5) Chesapeake City, MD

6) Rock Creek, MD

7) Baltimore, MD

8) Annapolis, MD

9) St. Michaels, MD

10) Solomon Island, MD

11) Tangier Island, VA

12) Irvington, VA

13) Yorktown, VA

Stay clear! Bombing and strafing practice area in the middle of the Chesapeake

The girls "shower" on the back of the boat. Clothing became optional later...

Twilight in Tangier (Island)

Early morning wake-up call. Crabbing/oyster boats head out at dawn in Irvington.

Some of these were brief nibbles and others were more satisfying fare. We have bypassed hundreds if not thousands of other places just here in the Chesapeake. The fractal shores of this bay hide an ever-changing panoply of waterside communities. The extensive list actually makes it harder for us to figure out what we're going to do next - how do we decide? We have to research a dozen to find "the one best". I guess it is a good problem to have.

Given we've already created a long list of places and memories in just 3 weeks, it makes me wonder what the next 3 months will bring. Our pace will slow down in the next month as we settle in one place or the other for days at a time - something we haven't really done except in Annapolis. I'm looking forward to that and hopefully more sailing instead of motoring.

Today, as we were coming over to Yorktown (motoring), we saw our first pod of dolphins. About a dozen, and a few swam over to us to play in our bow wave. The moment didn't last long, but the brief contact with beings that seem to express such joy in their surroundings as they wander the watery world reminds us to do the same in our journey.

Our slippery cousins come play with us

Unfortunately, we reached Yorktown at the same time as our government reached a crisis and shut down the government. Of course, this impacts the historical places we were hoping to visit as national parks are closed. We're not sure exactly what we can still get into, but we'll figure that out tomorrow. 

Yorktown and a schooner from the past