April 21 22 Charleston SC to Wrightsville Beach NC 155 7 Miles

We left at 10 as planned, but I screwed up reading the tide table so the tide was against us on the way out of Charleston, though weakly. We put up the main in the inner harbor and jibed it several times on the way out, past Fort Sumter where our Civil War began. Actually it began in SC, earlier, with the thinking of Calhoun, on the theory of states rights to "nullify" federal authority, a doctrine now becoming popular again among the lunatic right in this country.

We turned left as soon as we reached the first buoy after the end of the seawall and put up the genoa as well. This was before noon but the wind was too weak and too far behind us, to move the boat with  any speed, so we motor sailed, mostly motored, until about 1:30. I even had taken down the mainsail. I had not realized how much of the first 109 mile long part of this passage, was more easterly than northerly and so the projected five to ten knots of west wind was behind us. Then came wind, much stronger than projected and a gift to us. I was able to get up half the mainsail, with double reef in it, and continued with the genoa. The wind built behind us and we were screaming along at seven to eight knots with peaks at 8.9. And with the wind about 120 to 150 degrees from our bow, we rolled a lot from side to side, most unpleasant. Lene felt a bit nauseous though she did not lose her food. We had a delicious cold dinner -- no cooking with the rolling. It was warm and sunny by day and reasonably warm at night, with no rain. But during the night we got some slow speeds, less than four knots and even though I did not put up the genoa again until near daybreak, it was this night part, as well as the first few hours, where we lost time

After dinner, at 7:30, we replaced the genoa with the small jib, a safety measure for nightime sailing in big waves, and were still making over seven knots with just the small headsail and double reefed main. We had put on the preventer to prevent accidental jibe of the mainsail, and with the small jib sliding back and forth we took it in and sailed under just double reefed main. The preventer was a good thing because the wind had shifted from off our starboard quarter, to off the port quarter during Lenes watch. We were sailing "by the lee" -- the way you get that accidental jibe. When I got up at one (Lene let me sleep late) we jibed the main and continued on toward the turning point - off the tip of Frying Pan Shoals, which extend many miles out into the Atlantic from the Cape Fear River. We saw very little traffic: Two big freighters passed us at quite respectable distances -- closest point of approach being miles away -- and one sailboat overtook us, headed for Beaufort. I saw his lights and estimate he was 200 yards off our starboard side, moving a fraction of a knot faster than ILENE. Prior to the close passage I had a radio conversation with him to confirm what each of us was going to do.

Once around Frying Pan, at about 4 to 5 am, we turned north to Wrightsville (The Masonboro Inlet) and the wind came up from our port quarter to its beam and even forward of that. This second leg was only 32 miles and wind speed varied considerably during the leg, as, consequently, did boat speed.
It is hard to get good pictures of a night passage so at least I have the long awaited dawn.

Masonboro Inlet is easy, wide, well marked and flanked with seawalls. Once in, it is easy to get to the anchorage area and we dropped at 1:30, only 90 minutes "late" compared to our projected schedule that would have averaged 6.5 knots. Nice homes line the bay side of the barrier island.

We put out a lot of chain because there is lots of room and 20 knots were predicted for this evening. But by 4 pm it was howling at up to 40. We visited Wrightsville and made the reciprocal of this same ocean passage, to Charleston on our way south last fall and hence felt no need to lower and raise the dink to stretch our legs in Wrightsville. Tomorrow: Beaufort NC, about 80 miles and if the forecast comes true, a beam reach  or close reach from the port side, with five to fifteen knots.
I  tried to take a photo of the pod of dolphins playing under and around our bow, taking the Ipad up there, but they are way faster than ILENE at eight knots. I took maybe 50 shots and only one, a video of less than one second, caught a dolphin. These were not the slow graceful swimmers in the ICW but racers amidst the big ocean waves. I couldnt get the video into this post but it is on Facebook. I did manage to neither fall off the boat nor drop the camera.
Ilene is a true member of this crew and a solid citizen on overnight passages. She grumbles a bit and still relies on me, and I have to admit I like the  second part of that. She is even taking an interest in the charts, tides and weather. I couldnt make this trip without her, physically, mentally or emotionally. We have some chores that each of us do most of, but both of us do many of the chores. She said she liked our 25.5 hours together.
On our honeymoon on the old ILENE, in August 2002, we spent a pretty terrible 36 hours in a noreaster off the coast of Maine  The boat got beat up (torn sail, water inside through the dorades, compass light out) and we got beat up too. After a good nights sleep Lene asked, "Where do we go next?"  I replied "God, I married the right woman!"  And that has become truer with each passing year.

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April 20 Beaufort SC to Charleston SC 57 2 Miles

I forgot something that happened in Beaufort, probably because Id rather not remember. While we were in the theater we heard a loud storm going on outside. Some water came into the boat through the mast boot but that was easily picked up. I learned to dispose of a used American flag with respect. We had retired one at the beginning of this cruise which had been torn to tatters by the wind. But the wind tore our newish flag -- and its flagpole -- off from the boat. I will figure out a more secure way of attaching the next one.
Yes, I know I said we had decided to anchor in the Stono River, just short of Charleston, but our speed was so good today that we made the 3:30 opening of the Wappoo Creek Bridge and never had to deal with the fact that if you dont make the 4:00 opening, you have to wait until 6;30. It seems by dumb luck, we had favorable tide and the deep water of high tide most of the nine hours we were underway from 7 am to 4:00 pm. The favorable tide is proven by our average speed - 6.3 knots.
I have thought of several additional reasons why it is impossible for that hypothetical Ph.D. to figure out a tide algorithm. It depends on where in the river you sail: in the center the tidal flow is different from nearer the sides. It varies during the six plus tide cycle, slow at the beginning and end and fast in the middle. At bends in the river, one side flows faster than the other. And when you add in motor-sailing, as we did all day today, your speed will depend on the wind direction and speed which vary from minute to minute, relative to the boats course which was a near continuous curve, and on the diligence and skill of the trimmer. Today the wind was generally from near our stern and the small jib self jibed many times, as it is designed to do. I hope to never mention that crazy hypothetical algorithm again.
It was a cool but not cold day, warming up in the afternoon, with hazy sun poking amidst the light clouds. No rain.
We had two small problems near the end. I bumped into the throttle lever while walking past the binnacle, decellerating our RPMs and bringing back the "alignment" problem that we hoped we had fixed. The rattle was back and big time. But coming to neutral and building up the RPMs slowly -- the rattle was gone again. Something is still wrong and needs to be fixed. Shortly after this I think I caught a crab pot float on our rudder. The wheel became very heavy to turn and our speed was considerably slowed. I think that a crab pot was the cause of the problem but we dont really know. I turned the boat several times and slowed her and if it was a crab pot float, it fell off.
One of the crew at work, doing what he does second best (first is eating!)

Here is Charleston from our anchor on the Ashley River. On our two prior visits here we took a dock at an excellent marina on the Cooper River, on the north side of town, which was full tonight. But we had no plans for sight seeing this time and did not lower the dink.

We have also determined, subject to plans D, E and F, etc., tomorrows (and the next days) passage: to the Masonboro Inlet and the anchorage of  Wrightsville Beach. At 6.5 knots this will take 24 hours, anchor to anchor. We plan to leave about 10 A.M., with favorable tide flushing us out. Decent wind from the west is predicted.
We have also determined our planning deadline for arrival back in NYC -- June 7. Lenes niece, Barbi, and her son, Trevor who we hung with in Amsterdam last June, are visiting and will arrive on June 10. We would like to get home a few days earlier to get settled and unpacked, and those few days also serve a second purpose: as a buffer in case bad wind prevents the Atlantic overnight up the Jersey coast, as it did when I helped Jim bring his 26 foot "Aria" up in about 1996.

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April 12 14 Fernandina to Jekyll Islands Harbor Marina 23 9 Miles

Amazing! This is the 365th post to this blog since it began in October, 2010.

We were underway from 8:15 to 2:30.  We went very slowly up the west side and north side of Cumberland Island, across St. Andrews Sound and up Jekyll Creek, on the west side of Jekyll Island. A new stretch of the ICW for us. We went slow because we wanted to arrive when the tide was an hour before high. We passed the huge Kings Bay submarine base, but without sighting any of those killing machines. We passed Cumberland Landing,

on the north side of that island, where the packet boat used to land. We also passed the abandoned lighthouse and saw a buoy that has apparently detached from its mooring and washed ashore. The NY Times had a nice article about the men and women of the Coast Guard vessel that services the buoys in the NY area. In the ICW most "aids to navigation" are not buoys, but numbered red triangular and green square signs posted on pilings -- cheaper to maintain.

But this passage, with a few quite shallow patches, was deep water, 40 to 50 feet, deep enough for nuclear subs, so buoys are necessary.

This Marina is a well loved one, essentially a long dock along the east side of the creek to which all the transient boats are tied, this from its free postcard.

Here is ILENE under the live oak tree from the shower house, laundry and restaurant. Her mast, with its distinctive double forestay is in the center.

My first chore was to change ILENEs engine oil and filter. The marina takes waste oil for $2 per gallon, and I paid $2.50. We have a good pump that sucks waste oil out of the engine through the dip stick hole. You have to run the engine to get the oil hot before sucking it out but this was not a problem in that we had been running since early in the morning. But I realized that when you think you have gotten all the old oil out you have to wait to let more of it drip down to the bottom so you can suck out more of it. This time I pumped one pump to many and some oil gushed out from the bottom of the canister onto the cardboard box that I had set under it to catch spills. Im hoping I did not ruin this tool and will be able to fix it. I was also able to twist off the old oil filter without dropping it and spilling its dirty contents under the engine. Patience, and resting and drying hands just before it came off was the key. Lene helped out at the stage when you pour the dirty oil from the canister of the pump into the recently emptied oil cans for disposal. She steadied the receptacle and the funnel while I poured. No mess! Then, using a tiny bit of laundry detergent and a stiff brush, I got rid of 99% of the remaining one percent of the pelican poop from the blue canvas.
 The Marina is extremely friendly and provides good, movie watching quality, wifi; Lene has watched a lot of TV shows. They also have bicycles and a golf cart, which we used for the limit of 90 minutes per usage, for shopping at the IGA.

It is a very small store with limited selection and high prices on the east (Atlantic) side of the island, which is being developed with homes and hotels. The one drawback is insects, which bite, especially Lene. Rain has been predicted for the last week, including very high probability several of the days, but it did not come. During this passage the grey lowering skies suggested rain but it did not come until about an hour after our arrival, and lasted for about eight hours.
Because we were spending three nights and two days here, I asked the marina staff for the names of people who wash bottoms, change oil of outboards and align propeller shafts. Leo Ross, 912-266-1323, looked at the alignment, first. "Well", he said, "with the problem being intermittent and only at certain speeds, it might not be an alignment problem at all. Lets take a look."  I had cleared out the aft compartment so everything was ready for him. "Whats this? A motor mount bolt!" he quickly noted, picking it up from the bilge. It seems that the engine was held on its shock absorbing mounts by only three of the four bolts and those three were loose too. And the flange at the forward end of the propeller shaft, which is held in place on the propeller by two set screws, was also loose! After everything was nice and tight, I ran the engine at pretty high speeds in forward and reverse while tied to the dock and so far it looks good, very good indeed. But the acid test will be trying this while underway.
As to the outboard, it needed both its engine oil, which I had, and its lube oil, which I did not have, to be replaced after its 20 hour break in period. And the latter requires a special tool to force the new oil in from the bottom hole until it flows out of the top hole. I will get that tool for next time. Leo went to Westmarine on his break and bought the lube oil. He let me help him and taught me how to do this, including whacking the screwdriver with a hammer to shake lose the tight seal.

Leo looks like a refugee from that Dynasty Duck program but he is a set man, a good teacher, knowledgeable and charges a very fair amount A diver came and scrubbed the bottom and reported that my zincs have 75 to 80 percent left but that the wheel that, when not clogged by seaweed tells us how fast the boat is moving through the water (as compared to over the ground), is broken.
With all of the repair activities we did get time to use the pool and hot club, or do the sightseeing I would have liked. They have a free museum which also offers a $16 guided tour train ride through the historic old town district on the islands western side, which the Macys and Goodyears and other people of wealth set up in the 1890s. A reason to come back! Our last evening we did have a pretty good meal at the annex of the historic dowager but quite busy Jekyll Island Club Hotel, where the rich hob nobbed -- and still do. The Club sent over a van to pick us up and bring us back to the Marina.

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April 30 May 1 Two Lay Days in Portsmouth Zero Miles

Lenes finger, at the right, is pointing out our slip on F Dock at this Marina, a huge one. In 2012 and 2014 we stayed at a free dock by the Radisson hotel, a couple hundred yards to the upper left of the poster but this time we wanted repairs and might have had to haul the boat so a marina was needed.

Gaston showed up with his assistant promptly as scheduled. I had cleared out the aft cabin to give access to the area of concern. He laid a pencil on the shaft, so light that it would easily detect vibration. Nothing. It does not happen at the dock, even when, tied onto it tightly, we run the engine in gear up to 2500 rpms, trying to drag the dock. He dissembled the flexible coupling again, tested for alignment with feeler gauges, reassembled it and pronounced that it was within tolerance. So the problem is outside the boat, at or near the propeller end of the shaft. He suggested that we wait until the fall and when the boat is hauled, we check the cutlass bearing and remove the propeller and ship it to California for what will be an expensive reconditioning job. He said that we are not in danger from the current situation.
Then he lent us his truck and we visited the supermarket, the drugstore, and a law firm where I signed a document and got it notarized. I spent a few hours planning the places we could stop along the Potomac on the way up and down to Washington DC. It is slim pickins for anchorages and marinas with water deep enough for ILENEs 58" draft. I have asked the 6500 members of a "private group" on Facebook for more information.
Later Gaston came over and paid us a social visit. He was born in France, raised in Israel and is an excellent mechanic. He was affiliated with and sailed in the Caribbean 1500.

The weather has been rainy most of our two days here and so we did little. I had visited the nautical museum and lightship in 2012 and toured the historic district. It rained then too!
They also have a Childrens Museum and one honoring Virginia athletes. I took a pass on those. There is a small Jewish Museum and a historic 1812 house, both of which can be toured, but only in season, not now.
So we took showers, took on water, cleaned the boat, blogged, read, cooked, ate and watched the first two episodes of the PBS series Wolf Hall, based on a novel by Hillary Mantell, which my book group read a few summers ago, about Thomas Cromwell, an attorney in the time of Henry VIII.

We would have left the second of these two days but the forecast of rain and 25 knot wind in our faces deterred us and the forecast came true.

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April 4 Titusville to Rockhouse Creek New Smyrna 31 2 Miles

Well the good news is that apparently felines have short memories. So Witty is not a permanent victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but his old pesky self. It was Saturday, the day before Easter, and warm and sunny so EVERYONE was out on the water. We saw hundreds of boats from Stand Up Paddleboards, to kayaks and canoes,

to fishing boats of all sizes,

to what I call motorized rafts.

And people were wading and swimming in the ICW too.

I put out the genoa and later the small jib but the wind was too close to our bow much of the time and too erratic. Anchor to anchor from 9:30 to 3:00. Only two opening bridges, one on request and the other every twenty minutes, which we made easily. The tide helped us the last third of our passage, except the last mile, once we got to Ponce de Leon Inlet, and we turned down the engine to near idle speed to give the watermaker two hours to make water before we arrived. We passed some nice modest waterfront houses

and some waterfront trailer parks also known as fishing camps....I think.

Rockhouse Creek runs east-west, connecting two  N-S waterways. (It is the horizontal in an "H".) When we arrived it was very crowded with perhaps fifty small boats and a few large ones. Folks had gone to the beach. We can only enter from the ICW, western end because it gets too shallow for us at the other end, but many powerboat people think that circumnavigating the unnamed island that forms its south side is a nice trip. We heard five of them comment on ILENEs name as they passed us. We had dropped anchor and settled in and by six p.m. there were only three boats left (one other sail and a trawler)

and we were too close to the sailboat, especially because there was so much room everywhere else and strong winds from the east were expected. So we picked up and dropped 150 feet further away from that sailboat. Our other neighbors were a family of campers.

There was no one on the other side of us, where we would turn right and be back in the ICW.

Im having trouble with the new snubber hook, (as well as the underline function) specifically in getting it to stay hooked onto the anchor chain; it falls off and dangles uselessly under the boat instead of doing its job. I tried tying it on but this wasnt working well so I next tried wrapping one side of the hook with rubbery tape to narrow the slot into which the chain sits, but that fell off. 

Here in Rockhouse, I knew it had fallen off when the wind came up at night: the chain took the load instead of the snubber and when ILENE hunted from side to side, the anchor chain snaps over in the bow roller making a sound like the boat is being pounded by a sledge hammer.

I created a way to mount the red and green dinghy navigation light using a suction cup, a piece of scrap plexiglass, a nut, some washers and a piece of thin line.

We have been noticing that Florida has given nicknames to its geography much as in Manhattan, neighborhoods like SOHO and Tribeca that have no legal or governmental significance  are used to define neighborhoods. The southern part of Florida: Miami, Fort Lauderdale and maybe Boca is called the Gold Coast. Heading north, next comes the Treasure Coast including Palm Springs, Stuart and Fort Pierce, so named because Spanish treasure galleons sank off this part of Florida. Cocoa, Titusville and New Smyrna are called the Space Coast. I hadnt noticed this before.

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