To counteract the many photos from last week, I’m including very few this week. We covered a far amount of ground, but for some reason we didn’t record the events through the camera!
With my Dad aboard and a night’s rest at a slip at the Utsch’s Marina (a spot I can highly recommend) in Cape May, we embarked on our journey up the Delaware Bay on Monday. If you’ve ever looked at the Delaware Bay on a map, you’ll think that this would be a cake walk with the immense breadth of the bay and the likely anchorages along the way. The reality is that neither exist. It is best to make the 55 mile run up the Bay to the Chesapeake and Delaware (C&D) canal in one day. There’s a very skinny channel that runs up the Bay that oceangoing ships and tugs with barges use as they head to and from Philadelphia and Wilmington. The rest of the Bay is peppered with shoals that are sometimes 9-10 feet below the surface. With our 7 foot draft and 2-3 wave heights, you can understand our cautionary stance! At one point, we heard a large tanker calling “the sailboat off of Brandywine Shoal Light” on the radio. We were right near this spot and started to grab the mike to respond, but realized he was talking to a sailboat that was directly in the channel. This guy was trying to maneuver out of the way of the outbound tanker, but didn’t realize there was an inbound freighter right behind him too! The guy on the outbound ship pleaded with the sailboat to make sure he monitored channel 13, the ‘bridge-to-bridge’ channel, as, in his words, “all of the ships are on that channel”. We quickly setup our radio to scan both 16 and 13. Channel 13 was indeed full of traffic. These ships were talking back and forth like a bunch of airline pilots talking to the control tower. The conversation was swift and in a lingo that merited serious concentration! We quickly learned that statements like “I’ll see you on two whistles” or simply “I’ll see you on two” meant you were going to pass the other vessel on your starboard (right) side. This request was often heard on the radio still the customary way to meet and pass a ship was port to port, much like you would walking along a sidewalk, and if you wanted to deviate from this norm it was prudent to clarify your intentions over the radio. We had heard some of this kind of talk while transiting New York Harbor, but here in the Delaware, you got the hint of a southern accent… we were certainly no longer in our Yankee Northeast waters anymore!
The weather forecast for Monday was 15-20 knots of NW winds, directly in our path to the C&D canal. Taking advantage of a favorable flood current, this produced short, steep waves… not as severe as we had experienced in Long Island Sound, but enough to leave us all salt encrusted at the end of an arduous day of motoring. We settled into a small anchorage at Reedy Island, just short of the canal entrance. Darkness came immediately after we set the anchor, and the healthy progress of the day gave everyone reason to hit the sack early.
On Tuesday, we awoke to a clear blue day and still waters. The forecast was for a high of 80 degrees. This was going to be a great return to summer! Away went the long pants and fleeces, out came the shorts and t-shirts. Karen guided us into the C&D canal. This 20 mile long canal connects the upper part of the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. It is transited by both pleasure and commercial craft — at one point we met a medium sized oceangoing freighter whose wake rose high up on the nearby banks of the canal. We saw an increasing number of fast moving powerboats too, many of which were skippered by bare chested men, but alas, this was a weekday so they were either older, retired men or poor and out of work sport fishermen — either way, if Karen should glance their way, I had nothing to worry about!
As luck would have it, as we exited the canal and entered the Chesapeake, we had a light SW headwind. Not another full day of motoring, yikes! We pushed on for about 5 miles and then turned up into a bay to the west where we would fine the nice quiet town of Havre de Grace, MD. Here’s a picture of Dad guiding us through the narrow channel to the town.
It took some convincing to get Dad to trust that chartplotter mounted at the helm! I suppose if I grew up when he started sailing, I wouldn’t trust electronics either, preferring to follow from buoy to buoy. To get to Havre de Grace, you have to proceed just offshore of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. As you might know, this is where the US Army tests there latest and greatest weapons. They had a number of strange shaped buildings on shore and a continual stream of explosions, much like the crack of thunder. It took some adjustment, both to trust that it was indeed not thunder and also that the government knew what they were doing and wouldn’t use us as target practice! Hopefully they were being managed to the same level of proficiency as the National Park Service!
We settled into an anchorage just off the waterfront from Tidewater Marina at Havre de Grace. On Wednesday, the wind continued to come out of the SW, directly in the path that we would need to head to make our way down the Bay, so we settled in for another night at anchor. This was a good thing as we quickly had a series of mechanical breakdowns that needed immediate attention. Let me tell you all that owning a boat takes a lot of patience, and either a continual outlay of cash or constant befriending of the toolbox to keep the many systems in working order. I have been building a list of many projects I would like to get done on the boat. Some of these are ones I didn’t get to before the launch in June. Others are ones that you only discover by living on and using the boat daily. But what can get really annoying is the breakdown of things that are critical day-to-day systems and that therefore need immediate attention. If you had plans to go ashore or to set sail or to raise anchor, your plans would have to be postponed. The day before, I had just finished fixing the forward head. With my Dad aboard, I felt nervous about relying on just the aft head and it’s small holding tank. It is an electric head, and the motor ran fine, but it refused to pump out the bowl. Yes, I know, sounds like an ugly problem, and it was! I had to play Mr. Roto-rooter, but with my own set of tools, in this case, two wire hangers! Once I got it working again, it never worked so well! Yeah, got that one done! But, literally no more then a half day later, I noticed a slow leak of what looked like engine oil from the bottom of the outboard. It was leaving a very attractive stain of oil down the swim platform and over the side to the waterline from its perch on the stern pushpit. My Dad, our youngest and I brought the outboard into the cockpit so that we could work on it without fear of losing parts into the water. It looked like the oil was coming from around the propeller, so we pulled the propeller and bearing assembly off. Suddenly, we were awash with gear oil spilling onto the cockpit teak. Yikes again! I think we must have used up a whole paper towel roll. We discovered that not only were the bolts to the thrust bearing a little loose and likely allowing oil to get by, but there was a loose bolt in the exhaust channel that runs out through the propeller assembly. It looked like it was wedged in there since the engine was first assembled, as there was nothing else close to that bolt size in the area. Thank you Nissan! We removed the bolt, tighten the bearing down extra hard, refilled the lower unit with fresh gear oil, and we were back in the business of shuttling people ashore.
That evening, our third problem arose. The water pump that keeps the freshwater system pressurized was acting up. Every 15-30 minutes it would kick on and repressurize the system. We had had the exact problem in Northeast Harbor, ME and I installed a new pump the next day. I was shocked and frustrated that I was in need of another pump so soon. I disassembled some of the hoses into the pump to test it out, and I searched throughout the plumbing system to see if there were any leaks that would cause it to repressurize. I could find nothing except a somewhat dirty filter. In a very romantic move for our anniversary, Karen said all she would like was something simple and practical, like a decent filter for the water system. That’s my girl! We bought one of those big units you put on the inlet to a house and installed it before leaving Maine. It was apparently doing a good job, as it was becoming a bit dirty already. After replacing the filter, the pump has been acting up at times and at other times working just fine. I’ve resigned to take a patience pill on this problem! We’ll see what happens over the next week.
Our fourth boat problem of the week came yesterday. We left Havre de Grace and came across the Bay to the eastern shore and navigated up the Sassafras River to Georgetown, a spot that had been recommended by friends. This was a short 20 mile run, and we even got to sail for part of it! I was finally able to prove to my Dad that our boat could be propelled by wind. We even flew the spinnaker for an hour until what little wind there was died completely. While making our way up the Sassafras River, I heard an “Oh, S**t” from down in the cabin. Karen had been pulling open the hatch on the freezer. Both the refrigerator and freezer hatches were growing stiffer since we launched, owing to some rusty hinges that a previous owner had installed. On this day, Karen had to pull so hard, she lifted the pull ring right out of the hatch! It should now come as no surprise that she grew up in farm country in upstate New York! We now had no way to get into the freezer, where we had just recently stashed a large amount of frozen foods. So, today’s job was to remove and install new stainless steel hinges and screws. In a struck of good luck, the new hinges had the same hole positions as the old rusty ones, so there was very little power tool activity required. Our galley is back in full operational mode!
Today we decided to stay at anchor off Georgetown. I read the forecast for today and it was a grim statement that included a gale warning, gusts to 40 knots, 4-5 waves (that’s big for the Chesapeake) and rain all day. We moved to a more roomy spot where we could put out more anchor line and ensure that we didn’t drag. We folded up the bimini and secured it with extra line, and we removed the outboard from the dinghy. We were determined to not have a Castine re-enactment! I am writing this now on Friday night, and while we got a lot of school work done today, we saw nothing over 12 knots on the wind meter and most of the day was 3-5 knots of wind. What a let down! I suppose if we had not spent so much time getting prepared, we would have been slammed by high winds! Still, it was nice to have a day to just hang out and be all together in the cabin. We finished a full day’s worth of curriculum, played a board game and wrapped up the evening watching a movie.
We will soon make our way across the Bay to Baltimore so that my Dad can locate a train to Phillie and his return flight home.
Here’s a parting shot of the captain and first mate. Don’t laugh too hard at me… given the choice, wouldn’t you put aside a daily shower and shave for the cruising life??!
Have a good weekend, enjoy the fall foliage if you are so lucky, and we’ll keep the news coming your way!