November 22, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
I have been telling you how early we get up each day. Even on the ICW, with the exception of our first day, we are getting up at 5:30AM in order to cover a lot of territory before dark. Anchoring in the dark is no fun. We want to be ready to stop around 4PM in order to be set and comfortable before the sun goes down.
Sometimes this strategy actually works.
When we were cruising this summer, we managed to adhere to this strategy with one exception: Provincetown. An assortment of issues conspired to delay our departure from Boston until noon, resulting in an arrival time in Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod, around 8PM. We could see our destination as the sun began to set around 6PM that night, but it is a long trip around the little curl at the end of Cape Cod before you actually get into Provincetown Harbor. It was fully dark before we rounded the end of that curl. We crept into the harbor, almost running into the breakwater in the dark. We thought it would be an actual wall, but it appeared to be just a pile of rocks that stuck up a foot or two above the water. Provincetown is a very small town. There is very little light at 8PM down on the waterfront and no signs of life. The moon wasn’t much help as we anchored in deep darkness using flashlights, e-chart and grit. We didn’t do it because we love to prove ourselves; we did it because it was necessary.
We had to do the same thing in the Sassafrass River on our way back to Baltimore. We had run up Delaware Bay with the intention of transiting the C&D Canal before we stopped, because finding shelter along that monster bay is no simple task. We also were quite ready to get back home, and this was a good way to get there sooner. The result, of course, was that we entered the Sassafrass just after 2AM. Again, there was little moonlight, and again we felt our way to a successful anchorage.
We had planned to avoid such issues when in the ICW. In the first place, the ICW anchorages are almost all quite confined. There isn’t a lot of room for error, due to the constant challenge of shoals and stumps and snags. It would be easy to get in a mess if you try to anchor when you can’t see. Yet on Saturday (11/21) we found ourselves doing it again.
We had left Buck Island Harbor about 6:45AM. We got up early as always and were ready to leave as it got light. The run down the North River was uneventful. Crossing Albemarle Sound reminded me of cruising on the Chesapeake. We passed through the Alligator River Bridge and headed for the Alligator-Pungo River Canal.
It was about 1:30PM when we saw a couple of sailboats ahead of us pull out of the channel into a tiny little spot near shore where they appeared to be anchoring. We were near the entrance to the Alligator-Pungo Canal, and I asked Larry why they would be anchoring there. It isn’t a designated anchorage, and it was not long past noon. “Maybe they don’t think they can get to the end of the canal before dark,” he said.
That was a sobering thought that I had not considered. The canal is 25 miles long. It was 1:30PM. At best we were making about 6 knots. Sunset would be 4:55PM. Whoa! Maybe we would not get to the end of this canal before dark either, and there is NO place to stop in the canal.
The longer we were in this canal, the less I liked it. The scenery is quite picturesque, even a little spooky. I love swamp landscapes, and this one was lovely. However, twenty-five miles of it was almost more than I needed. The ambience was not improved when our 8-foot depth alarm went off in the middle of the channel, supposedly in 15 feet of water. There was a thump and a scraping sound, and then nothing. The depth went back to 15 feet and we went on. It was probably a log that washed into the channel during recent heavy rains.
At the end of the canal is a fixed bridge charted at 65 feet of clearance. I didn’t look, and we didn’t thud, and we soon exited that canal. Off to the right in the upper reaches of the Pungo River is a designated anchorage where we had considered stopping. However, we had also looked for a slightly better spot a couple of miles downriver, and that is a good thing. There were already eight boats in the designated anchorage. We could certainly have found a place there, but we don’t like crowded anchorages. Every time we see a crowd of boats anchored together, it calls up images of the anchorage at Newport, RI. We don’t like that kind of close communion.
We continued downriver to a spot where we could anchor in 8 feet of water in a more sheltered location. We were just about to finish our work when another sailboat came cruising in to be our neighbor. It isn’t that we don’t like friends and neighbors, but with all that water to choose from, why did this boat want to be right next to us? Oh well. We used our flashlight and our e-chart and our grit and we got the anchor set just the way we wanted it.
We were exhausted. We had arisen before it was day, and we cruised until it wasn’t day again. We ate a simple supper and went right to bed. Boy, am I glad we are retired and don’t have to work for a living any more, getting up at the crack of dawn and working until we keel over into bed at night. I bet everyone would like to be retired and on permanent vacation like we are!
Aboard No Boundaries
July 15, 2009
When we lived in Baltimore and cruised the Chesapeake Bay, we enjoyed quiet anchorages along the Chester River or other rivers that flow into the Bay. Chesapeake Bay is huge, but it is not deep as oceans go. In fact, there are large sections of the Bay that we could explore only by dinghy, because our boat needs seven feet of water to float. A boat with a deep keel is at a disadvantage in Chesapeake Bay. Some of the best-loved destinations have only five or six feet of water.
Another well-known feature of the Bay is that it has indifferent winds much of the time. A 12-knot breeze is much prized by sailors, because in the sailing season, it is not very common. Way too often people sit in fine sailboats with sails flapping for lack of sufficient wind.
Still, we loved the Bay. It was a wonderful home for us for many years. I came to expect that when we wanted to anchor, we would have nine or ten feet, maybe twelve at the outside. We became comfortable anchoring in ten feet of water with little or no wind.
Now that we have left the Bay anchoring is a different challenge. We discovered at Block Island that the anchorage had very little area with depths of ten feet, and those areas shoal rapidly to shallower depths. Most of the anchorage is twenty feet or more.
The first difference between anchoring in ten feet of water and anchoring in twenty feet is the amount of anchor rode required. The term “rode” refers to the chain or rope that attaches the anchor to the boat. We have 250 feet of chain and 200 feet of rope on our anchor, but in Chesapeake Bay, we never used much of it. The standard anchoring rule is to let out 7 feet of rode to 1 foot of depth. For a depth of 12 feet, we let out 84 feet of chain. That hardly stressed our capacity in any way.
However, the 7X1 rule in an anchorage at 25 feet of depth results in the deployment of 175 feet of chain. That changes a lot of things. In a big wind, the boat swings on a circle with a radius of 175 feet instead of a circle with a radius of 84 feet. In a crowded anchorage, it can be very interesting to observe if all the boats swing together or not. If everyone puts out rode according to the same calculation, theory suggests that they won’t collide. However, there are a lot of factors to consider. Some boats use chain, some use rope. Each boat’s profile and weight affect the way it swings. Collisions can occur, and then nobody is happy.
The second big difference is the wind. In Chesapeake Bay we were often challenged to figure out where the wind would be if there were any. As we cruise north, we are encountering much more wind all the time, and therefore more wind when we anchor. It makes a difference.
At Block Island, we were on a mooring for five days. We originally thought we might be there for a couple of days, but the days stretched on. By the end of the fifth day, we were almost ready to depart for Newport to get the remaining supplies we needed for our genoa repair. We decided to spend our last night at anchor instead of on the mooring. It would save a few dollars, and we like being at anchor. We chose a spot, the anchor stuck, and I settled down to sew.
The people in the catamaran nearby were not on their boat at the time we anchored. As they passed by our boat when returning in their dinghy, I could hear the woman complaining to her husband that we were too close to their boat. We had been there for several hours already. The wind was blowing about 15 knots, and we had swung back and forth, as is normal, several times. It was clear to us that our boat and their boat were swinging in synch. We were not going to collide. However, the woman on the catamaran did not see it that way.
At first, Larry and the other man talked about it, and Larry even offered to move, but the man said he thought it wasn’t necessary. The woman, however, did not accept that decision. She looked at our boat and screamed that we were coming closer and closer. There is a common word of wisdom that consultants learn early in the business: perception is reality. No matter what the truth of a matter is, the way someone perceives it becomes a personal reality, and everybody must deal with that reality. In this situation, the woman’s reality became an unbearable burden to everyone. The man finally got in his dinghy and came over to our boat to ask if we would go ahead and move. We agreed and soon found a different place that did not threaten this woman’s perceptions about our location. It was not a time for standing up for the truth; it was a time to make peace. We were slightly inconvenienced by the move, but here is the bigger truth: if we had not moved, neither that couple nor we would have had any peace all night.
The next morning we left Block Island and headed for Newport, a trip of about four hours duration. Once again, however, it was quite different from Chesapeake Bay. The anchorage in Newport is small and deep. We dropped our anchor in 25 feet of water again, and this time the wind was about 15 knots and gusting higher. The gusty wind complicated our process, because the boat needs to face into the wind when the anchor is dropped. The anchor does its work by digging in a direction that opposes the action of the wind. The wind makes it dig in more firmly, if the ground holds the anchor properly.
Gusty wind is a real problem, because once the boat is turned into the prevailing wind, a gust may be stronger and even from a different direction than the prevailing wind. It may push the boat away from the direction we planned. We may even go in a circle as we play out the anchor rode. That happened today as we set our anchor.
Still, we “stuck” on the first drop and that was a good thing. We were getting tired of going in circles trying to get in the right position.
Our new life as full-time cruisers has adventures and challenges. We learn a lot and we grow a lot in this life. Anchoring is only one of the many skills we are honing. Come back often to see what else we are up to.
June 9, 2009
All the wise planning in the world will not prevent the regular need to shop for groceries. I suppose we could live on survival rations and buy a year’s supply at a time, but where would be the fun, not to mention the flavor, in that? It is fairly easy to buy fresh meat and produce for about two weeks, but that is very close to the outer limit of both refrigerator space and the life of fresh produce. Meat can last quite a while if frozen, but our marine refrigerator does not reliably freeze things. We try to manage to keep it just at, but not past, the point where things would freeze, and that gives us two weeks or thereabouts with fresh meat.
Eventually the day comes that we have eaten everything in sight and it is time to go shopping. Yesterday was our first shopping day as cruisers. By the time it was over we discovered that we had planned pretty well, but we learned a few new tricks.
In strange places, the first challenge is to discover where the grocery stores are. Cruise guides often include notes that groceries are conveniently near one marina or another, but one still must flesh out that information. For our first go, however, we used information we already had, but for the first time we used it starting at anchor. We had gone into Baltimore on Sunday evening in order to use the Port Networks wifi, but that experiment proved to be a disaster. Nothing worked. However, we anchored in sight of a big Safeway store where we have shopped for years, and that was a good thing.
Come Monday morning, yesterday, we got ready to shop. We started by getting out our shore-shopping backpacks. Each of us has one, and each backpack is stuffed with two big tote bags. Not knowing with certainty how things would go, never having done this before, I dragged out another big tote bag to add to the supply. Into the backpack went my billfold, my shopping list, a pen and some extra index cards. My shopping list always represents some specific meal plans, but in case I find something more appealing than my plan, I use the index cards to record my revised meal plans.
This would be the first time to leave our boathome at anchor in a metropolitan area with nobody aboard. We were a little bit paranoid. We locked up everything, then remembered that we needed something, unlocked, rummaged, and locked up again. Finally, we were ready.
We let down the boarding ladder on the aft deck and pulled the dinghy around. We are still learning this drill, but each time we do it, it is easer. Larry got in first, I handed the bags down to him, and then I boarded. For the short jaunt to the dinghy dock, we didn’t bother with the motor. Larry rowed. He is getting to be pretty good at it!
If boarding the dinghy from the boat is a challenge, debarking from the dinghy at a strange dock is moreso. However, I eventually managed that trick. While I held the dinghy’s painter, Larry ran a cable through the dock structure and locked down the dinghy. Many is the dinghy, both with and without outboard motor, that has disappeared while cruisers shopped or dined out. We knew we could not swim back with our groceries, even though the boat was in clear view from the dock.
As I shopped, the grocery cart grew heavier and heavier. We looked the situation over and worried that we needed to buy more than we could carry back at one trip. We decided to stop without the meat or dairy items. We paid the bill and packed our bags. We were amazed that about $100 worth of produce and assorted other things fit easily into our prepared bags, with bags left over. We walked back to the dinghy dock, just across the street and down a little path.
The next challenge was to get the groceries back to the boat without losing anything in the water. We passed the bags carefully into the dinghy and rowed out to the boat. Holding that dinghy reasonably still and passing the bags up the ladder to the deck is not rocket science, but it does take coordination.
Of course, after lunch, we had to go back to the store and get the rest of our groceries. This time we were familiar with the drill, so it wasn’t such a big deal. It just takes patience and careful handling.
Along the way, we stopped at Starbucks for an iced coffee and a couple of internet hours. I barely got all my uploads and updates done in that amount of time. We probably should have gone there on Sunday night and returned on Monday for another two hours. After all these years of internet on demand 24 hours a day, I have a lot of things I want to do, and I didn’t get all of them done on this trip. This, too, is a learning experience.
Now we are provisioned for two weeks. We ate dinner on the aft deck and watched the sun go down. Tomorrow is a new adventure. What? Where? We will find it out when it happens.
People ask us frequently, “When you leave Chesapeake Bay, where will you go?”
The first problem with answering that question is that we have not yet left Chesapeake Bay, and we don’t know yet when that day will come. The departure date is important, because we will be sailing in a 45-foot blue-water sailboat, not an aircraft carrier or the QE II. Or the Titanic. We have some limitations inherent to our mode of transportation.
Limits? For starters, a sailboat needs wind. Oh, sure, we have a nice diesel engine for emergencies and for harbor navigation, but we want to sail. The sound of the engine not running is one of the best parts of sailing. We whiz over the water, the boat and the wind working together in happy concert, and there is no noise. The rigging sings and the wind roars, but there is no engine noise. Love it.
The consequence of actual sailing is that we do not speed toward our destination by most people’s standards. When the combination of wind and sail produces 12 knots or more of speed over water we feel that we are flying. To a land-based viewer, however, it is clear that we are not actually flying. Mathematically, a speed of 12 knots is equivalent to a speed of 13.8 miles per hour. Ooooh. From the deck of the boat, that speed feels good and looks good, but it is not rapid progress toward the destination.
So, the timing of our departure from Chesapeake Bay really does matter. Because there is another limitation we will face at some point. On the weather charts it is labeled “Ice Edge.” The “Ice Edge” moves northward in summer and southward in winter. Boats, which need to move in water, must always know when, where, and how the edge of the artic pack ice is moving. We might say that when we leave Chesapeake Bay we will go north, but we always know that we will not go farther than the edge of the ice, and in fact, we will likely avoid crowding that edge. No Boundaries is not an icebreaker.
For now, when we are asked this question, we can’t give a very good answer. We want to go north; we want to cruise in the islands off the coast of Maine. In fact, I would love to go to Newfoundland and see where the Vikings lived. However, the most honest answer is this: We will go north until it makes more sense to turn around and go south.
The beauty of cruising is that people do not need to have the kind of detailed advance plans that scheduled passenger vehicles require. If you carry passengers, they all want to know what time to arrive in order to board before departure and what time they will arrive at their destination. We, on the other hand, carry no passengers. We depart when wind, weather and our inclinations agree that it is time. We can make a sudden decision to “go over there” without notice.
Right now, we are cruising on an unannounced timeline to an unannounced destination. In fact, we are tidying up and putting away and trying to figure out if we need to throw away still more of the detritus of 8 years of marina living. One of these days we will absolutely depart our present location for some other.
Oh, we will actually be more responsible than that, because we don’t want anyone to worry. We will make sure somebody always has a fair idea of our plans. It is possible we will change any announced plans without a lot of advance notice, but we would hope we don’t make the people we love too nervous about us. Part of the purpose of this log is to let you know what we are up to. Most of the content will be a record of where we have been and what we were ruminating about along the way. We will also use this log and our website to give you some idea of where we might go next. We hope you will be interested enough to wonder, and we hope we will satisfy your curiosity in each successive post.