Some challenges

[Hilde’s log]

It’s been a long time since I posted anything – apologies to those of you following our trail. The fact is, I just couldn’t get up any enthusiasm for writing. We were recently asked how life differed on a boat. I think it is that the highs are higher and the lows are lower. Peak experiences of nature and the divine are common and very vivid, but another equally prevalent reality is feeling really, really low. I have no idea why this is! Maybe because of the juxtaposition between beauty, space, and peace with man-made hurry and scurry and thoughtless consumption? Maybe feeling a bit useless – after all, we aren’t exactly contributing to world peace or anything. But then, we didn’t back on land either. I don’t know – all I know is that I have been in something of a trough but am back to the happy middle. Thank goodness!

So...where was I? Oh, yeah, at Lake Worth, zillion dollar everything and lots of it.

After a couple of days of rest while waiting for a front to blow by, suffice it to say we hustled up the east coast at a brisk trot. I'll let some photos take you on that trip:

"Little" Lake Worth, Florida

panorama of Little Lake Worth anchorage

Southern FL ICW near Lake Worth

Back at anchor in Marco Island in February, we worked out a sail plan to get us to Savannah in mid-April. Based on that plan, we booked a flight to Portland to see the World’s Cutest Grandson (and his parents), booked a B&B in Portland, and booked a month at Isle of Hope Marina, just outside Savannah. We built into the sail plan about three weeks of delays, due to weather and/or repairs. What we neglected to do was build in a few weeks of slack time so we could meander around, stay a few days just to look around and be tourists or just sit and rest. So… we have been traveling just about non-stop, sometimes pushing ourselves when we would really rather have sat still for awhile.

For example, we met friends Ann and Steve at Peck Lake, Florida. It was warm (out of the wind) and sunny, with a beautiful State Park on the Atlantic Beach. Another day or two at such a magical place would have suited me just fine.

panorama of Peck Lake State Park

Leaving Peck Lake, too soon. Just the right number of boats on the water, though.

 
Or Vero Beach, where we rafted up to Old Salt John and his first mate, Magdalena the Portugese water dog...

"Rafting up" which is when two or three boats share the same mooring ball. It's actually great, because you get to meet your neighbors and have instant buddies. Unfortunately, not too many places do this. Vero Beach is known as "velcro beach" to cruisers because it is just so nice here. AND it was WARM.

Another shot of Vero and its mangroves. It can get buggy.

Magdalena, checking us out.

 Instead, we kept going, through a lot of built up areas with a lot of traffic. Kind of like sailing on an interstate. Some of the traffic was a bit unusual...

...such as this floating "car" we saw at Jupiter, Florida...

...and this sea plane...

but mostly the traffic was boats, boats, and more boats.

 chugging along with Raven

As I have mentioned before, traveling by small boat is very physical. Even on the ICW, wind and water can conspire to lurch the boat this way and that, requiring that we hand steer. The east coast of Florida is a nightmare of boat traffic – imagine floating your way along a crowded interstate with all its attendant stress. We have an open cockpit, which means we are out in the weather, whatever that happens to be. I don’t know why they don’t have spring in this part of the world, but we’ve had very few balmy days up until about a week ago. Contending with cold, even mild cold, takes it out of me. We’ve had sloppy seas, high winds, cold and clammy weather, fog, and crowded and sometimes shallow waterways to contend with. Even with 30 minute watches, by the end of a seven hour day we’re both done in.

After two really rough days of cold, windy weather and moderate to high chop, scary, crowded passages under bridges that involved being muscled out of the channel by a huge sport fishing boat, and shallow canals and yet more boat traffic than anyone could ever put up with, we arrived at St. Augustine. My sole accomplishment that Saturday had been to run us aground, not once but twice. The first time, David kedged us off a sand bar (involving the dinghy, a spare anchor, lots of winching, and gunning the motor). The second time was in the St. Augustine mooring field, where we threw in the towel and called Boat US. Whatever.

We spent a cold and foggy Holy Saturday and Easter Day on a ball at St. Augustine. I was done in. I made a batch of brownies and sat on the settee eating them. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Stay tuned. It does get better!!

Shaken down and stirred

[Dual log - we kept saying "oh, don't forget to add..."]

I (Hilde) promised myself I wouldn’t write one more post until we had actually left the dock and gone somewhere. Yesterday we returned from our first short shakedown cruise, to Offatt’s Bayou, behind Moody Gardens in Galveston. The weather forecast promised high 80s and 10-15 winds, which we got the first day out. After that it was 90-95 degrees in the afternoon and not a wisp of wind. We enjoyed the mornings and the evenings and gasped miserably in the heat in the afternoon.

Shakedown cruises are basically time away from the dock to see what works, what doesn’t work, what breaks, and what needs to be tossed overboard at the first opportunity. We discovered that we didn’t remember all the myriad steps it takes to secure the boat, all the steps it takes to get her ready to sail, and all the steps it takes to keep a happy ship. We remembered most of them, but the devil is in the details.

What a mess! All this stuff had to be stowed - it's a safety hazard of the first order.

Amazingly, it got stowed. This is more like it.

We did manage to clear the decks. I did manage to make some food in advance. We did find the fiddle rails and secure them before we left. We did find all the bits and pieces we needed to leave, such as the polypropylene line to secure the dinghy. We figured out how to use our new life vests. We took on fuel the day before we left so there was no hurry as we left. I secured most of the stuff below. We remembered to put the lanyards on our glasses.

The chaos of the grocery store trip when you are stocking up for a few days.

Sweet potato salad, the one thing that did get made ahead of time.

I didn’t think to secure the gallon water bottles that live under the companionway steps – on the first tack they slid out from under the steps and on the second they rolled to a stop right in front of the steps, making it quite difficult to negotiate my way off the ladder.

I forgot how stuff shifts in a cabinet, and got clonked on the head by flying canned goods when I opened the door in search of snacks (the tack we were on heeled us 10 degrees or so, pushing all the cans against the cabinet door).

We found that the dangling mesh bags are a no-go: they wave wildly back and forth, slamming the onions into the table and wall.

I forgot to put all the loose objects in the head into the sink while we were underway, and my favorite water glass flew to the floor and broke, even though it was made of heavy plastic.

I thought flat-bottomed things on the sole of the cabin would be fine, but they slid everywhere, turned over where possible, and scattered this and that all over the place.

I forgot the hot water heater only works when we are plugged in, and it was so hot I couldn’t bear to heat water on the stove for washing up. Eew.

I forgot how long it takes to prepare food for a trip when you don’t want to cook and ran short because I ran out of time before we left and couldn’t bear to cook in 95 degrees.

Did I mention we trusted the weather forecast and left before our new cabin fans arrived? Never trust the forecast for more than a couple of days. It was supposed to be cool.

I decided to dump my heavy plastic “wine” glasses that I have bumped my head on for a decade and never used. Decision made when I bumped my head for the 439^th time in 95 degrees and 80% humidity. I have no sense of humor when I feel like a boiled turnip.

We had some exci tement trying to furl the jib with its halyard very loose. My bad...I am supposed to check these things before we push off, but, again, I forgot.

David wrestled with the windlass, which acted up because one of the electrical wires running to it was loose (here we have our first genuine shakedown fix!) and the resulting short blacked out our instruments. Fortunately, we were pulling up the anchor in an empty, and completely flat, anchorage with no other boats and no breeze.

The second shakedown fix became obvious when we noticed that the bilge pump ran about every fifteen minutes instead of once a day. This was bad because it added unnecessarily to battery load - and water was coming in where it shouldn't. The run down the Houston Ship Channel in lumpy seas had loosened the stuffing around the rudder post. It is designed to be adjusted, so it was an easy fix, once David loosened the bronze nuts. Once again, he enjoyed the new locking access panel in the cockpit floor. There was room enough for him to sit down under the cockpit floor with the rudder post to fix it, instead of crawling into dark spaces through too-small lazarettes.

I had a miserable time reading the charts on our new B&G chart plotter. The color scheme, etc. is different and the controls are different as well.

I discovered that I absolutely have to have some project to work on when we are at anchor because after one day of reading nonstop I had nothing else to do but clean the boat and sweat and swear under my breath.

Shakedowns are not all bad news. The new high-pressure pump that feeds the washdown hose on the foredeck easily cleaned the gooey black ooze that passes for "mud" here in Texas from the anchor chain and anchor. Clean chain in the anchor locker lasts longer and doesn't stink up the vee berth.

Also, the new solar panels kept our house batteries topped up without our having to run the engine while at anchor. What blissful silence that was! More practically, it saves wear on the engine and saves fuel - as well as minimizing pollution.

In other words, it was a highly successful trip!

We did have many lovely things to enjoy:

We were able to sail a bit on the way down, and enjoyed the motoring trip back up from Galveston because we finally had a (motor-generated) breeze. The wind to and from Galveston is always on the nose; there is no explanation for this phenomenon, but you can count on it. We had lots of fun motoring back up the channel admiring all the working boats – barges, tankers, container ships, ferries, a science boat from Texas A&M, pilot boats, a tug boat, etc., as well as a few other pleasure craft. It was a busy day on the channel. We used AIS several times to identify and call barges by name, just so we all knew who was going where. The wind was such that we had a lovely breeze the whole way, which makes all the difference. Also a bag of chips, which helps morale a whole lot. Cold leftovers, chips, yogurt, and cold seltzer water kept the wolf at bay.

For the videos below, left click on the text and then on the link location that appears below it. When the box with the video appears, click the arrow in the upper right hand corner to play the entire thing. None is longer than 90 seconds.

Trail ride along Pelican Cut behind a couple of barges. On the left, "The Colonel" is coming toward us. It's a faux paddle wheeler that is usually docked at Offatt's Bayou.


Barge "race"; they aren't really racing, just trying to pass one another safely, as they are going different speeds.

Our first night on the hook, when the moon loomed over the horizon. David's photo, at the beginning of the blog, does it better justice. It looks really small in this video, but it was enormous.

The mornings were glorious! It was cool and the anchorage is so big we felt spacious and free.

We saw three flamingos fly by! Either that or three great egrets that had been washed with a red shirt. I have no idea where they came from or where they were going.

The harvest moon was full and glorious our first night at anchor and shone brightly the whole time we were gone.

I managed to get most of the green tape goo off the deck using acetone (Wear neoprene gloves! That stuff is nasty.) although a few stains remain. It looks so much better!

We had a lovely breeze come down the forward hatch, which made sleeping possible and even comfortable, despite the high humidity which left the sheets pretty soggy.

When we came back in, we got set up with A/C in record time, now that I know how to clean the filter. It’s a good thing, too, because below decks after six hours of motoring it was 98 degrees and 80% humidity and I thought I would die before we plugged in. Autumn, my foot.