November 1, 2008

Steve Applegate arrived at Gibson Island right on time on Thurs. We got everything ready, I hope, and left there on Fri morning. Other than being very cold we had a really nice sail down the Chesapeake to Galesville, MD. Fred, the operator of the Gibson Harbor Island Yacht Yard now owns a boatyard there and we stopped there to see it. It's a nice place with an indoor Boatel (Where they put boats into slots with a fork lift for storage.), shops and nice showers. After a good meal at the local restaurant and a good night's sleep, we headed south for Mill Creek off the Patuxent River. It was a little warmer but with very light wind. What wind there was came out of the south so we had to motor all day. There was only one other boat there so it was a nice quiet night. We anchored there for the night and since the dinghy was still folded up on deck, we were forced to eat my cooking. A big batch of Jambalaya hit the spot and we both fell asleep early. Today we left there shortly after eight and headed further south stopping at Mill Creek off the Great Wicomico River. As you can see it was a difficult day at the helm but we managed and got to Mill Cr about 4:30. The little orange thing in the picture is my SPOT Personal Locator unit dutifully sending out my location. Again there was only one other boat there when we came in although one other one came in later. This is one of my favorite anchorages on the Chesapeake and tonight was almost a dead calm.

November 2, 2008

Today we sailed down to Cape Charles, VA. It's on the eastern shore of VA about 25 miles north of Norfolk. The wind was gusty most of the day and but up to over 20 knots by the time we got here. We are in a well protected marina and just finished a good meal ashore. We'll head out in the morning for Norfolk and then Steve flies out on Tues. I just checked the weather and there are gales predicted for Tues night and Wed so I may hang around Norfolk for an extra day or two. I added a new page to the main menu that has a link to the SPOT web site that tracks my position if anyone wants to find me.

November 13, 2008

We sailed into Norfolk on Monday, fueled up and got into a slip. Steve got a rental car so we could do some running around and get stuff I needed for the rest of the trip. Thanks Steve. One thing I had been thinking about getting was a receiver for the Automatic Identification System, AIS. This is a system that all large commercial shipping is required to carry and uses a part of the VHF radio band to transmit data about the ship. Data that is normally sent is the boat name, IMO ID number, location, speed, bearing, rate of turn and some other stuff. From all this data, the receiver calculates the Closest Point of Approach (CPA) and the time of the CPA. So if a boat is going to hit me, at least I know it up to an hour or so ahead of time. The transceiver they use is pretty expensive but you can buy just the receiver for a few hundred dollars. That lets me listen to them but not to transmit data on my boat. Of course it also needs an antenna and the cabling to hook it all up. I got one and after several stops had all the stuff I needed to install it. Installing something like this on a boat is a major pain. You need to remove the interior panels to run the wires and then the wire chases are usually full so trying to cram in one more wire is difficult. After two days, I had it installed and working. Sitting at the dock, it found about 25 ships including one that it said was a danger to me. I think it was anchored across the harbor. I do feel more comfortable now that I have it onboard and functional. It can be difficult to radio a ship that you think is getting a little close and you want to make sure he sees you. This should help.

One other thing that has always been somewhat of a problem was my SSB radio. This is similar to a HAM radio but uses different frequencies and doesn't require a special license to use. Mine usually worked but it was sometimes difficult to get weather reports while at sea because it was so difficult to tune. The antenna needs to be tuned to the radio for each frequency and on the old one I had to do this manually. It was a guessing game with three different controls and interactions between the controls. I finally decided to buy a new unit and bought an ICOM 700PRO radio and an AT130 automatic tuner. Installing it was even more of a problem than the AIS unit. I thought that since the ICOM was newer it would be smaller and I would lots of space to install it as I wanted. It turns out that both the radio and the tuner are considerably larger so I basically had a whole new installation to do. It took about three days to do but it is in and working. I was talking to the woman across the dock on a Cape Dory 36 and she said she had bought a new SSB radio system but had not gotten it installed because she couldn't find an installer she trusted. I was not impressed with the performance of my new radio when I tried it out. Sitting in Norfolk I could not get either of the two weather routers I listen to, one in Florida and one in Canada. I redid all the antenna connections and the ground connections and it helped a little but was certainly not much better than the old one although the automatic tuner is much easier to use. I decided to wait until I got offshore before trying anymore.

I left Norfolk on Monday, Nov. 10, about noon. I motorsailed out past the Chesapeake Bridge-Tunnel and then on past the convergence of the shipping lanes. By then I was pretty much out of the majority of the traffic. Although I did have Warship 13 following me well into the night. They were doing helicopter exercises and had no navigation lights on. They would hail any approaching traffic and request that they stay at least three miles away. Watching on radar, it looked like all but one ship complied but one went a little closer than three miles. He didn't seem real happy that the warship was out there with no lights on.

After I got past the shipping lanes, I shut off the engine and had a nice sail for a while. I was using the autopilot and it uses so much power that I soon had to run the engine again to charge the batteries. While motorsailing with the autopilot I started getting the Aries windvane ready to steer. It was pretty obvious immediately that it had a problem. Mine is one of the later Aries built and it has a feature that allows the unit to pivot up for service. It works well normally but the two large bolts that are supposed to hold it down appear to be stripped and won't hold the unit down anymore. I should able to fix it once I get to civilization but I needed a quick fix so I can use it. The autopilot is undersized for this boat and it can't handle the steering when the wind and waves start to build. If I couldn't fix the Aries, I would have to hand steer a good portion of the trip. NOT fun. I tried tying it in place a couple of different ways and they worked for a while but would loosen up after a while. Today I tried the third way and it seems to be OK. The seas have been calm most of the time so hanging off the back of the boat trying to fix it wasn't too bad. The winds and seas are supposed to build today and will be high for the next two or three days so I need it to work.

The radio is working much better now that I am away from all the interference around Norfolk. The AIS is a really good addition. For the large commercial ships it is better than radar because it shows the ship and the direction it is going right on your chart plotter. Putting the cursor on the ship shows the name and clicking on it brings up one or two pages of data. It certainly reduces the tension when a ship is approaching. I did see one on radar that did not show up on the AIS although I never saw the ship visually so I couldn't tell what it was. It appears that Navy ships do not use AIS so it could have been one of them and or it may have been a navigation marker and not a ship at all. There are a few little quirks with the system like the one boat that it said was doing 12 knots while anchored.

Right now I am about 300 miles NW of Bermuda and a couple of fronts are moving into the area tomorrow. It sounds like the next few days will be a bit rough but then it is supposed to calm down for the leg from Bermuda to the Virgin Islands. The Aries is working now so I hope I got that problem fixed.

November 28, 2008

The winds and seas did build up considerably as I neared Bermuda. I don't think it was quite a gale but it was close. As the front approached, several pre-frontal squalls came through. The weather guy said the winds in the squalls would not be much higher than the normal winds so I left the Genoa and the Main up. The winds got much too high for that much sail so I swapped the headsail out for a storm jib and took the third reef in the mainsail. While swapping the headsail, one of the sheets for the storm jib slipped overboard and managed to get wrapped around the prop shaft. It was packed in so tight that it actually pulled the engine back about and inch and broke all 4 of the motor mounts. I tried to free it by turning the shaft backwards and pulling off the sheet and that worked for the first couple of feet but then it was too tight for me to pull it off. By that time, we were in a fairly strong storm and the Aries was having problems again. I had to stop using it and went back to hand steering. With the smaller sails the boat was much better balanced and the steering was nice and light. I tried the autopilot but it could not keep up with the course corrections needed because of the large waves. I was on a beat then and I noticed that if I held the tiller somewhat to the leeward side, the boat would find a stable point and stay nicely pointed into the wind. I tried using the autopilot ram to hold it there but it wasn't stiff enough to hold it in position so I finally just tied the tiller in position and let it be. That worked for about three days. It took me quite a ways off my intended course but I was able to stay below and read and sleep. When I got up north of Bermuda, another front passed and the winds clocked about 90 degrees. The tiller was still tied and we just followed the wind around and made a nice turn without having to do anything. After the front passed the winds dropped and I was able to use the autopilot with occasional hand steering required.

I decided to try once more with the Aries and see if I could get it to work. I turned around to look at it and it was gone! It wasn't actually gone but it had come off the mounting bracket and was in the water held on by the steering lines I was able to remove the vane and the servo oar and then drag the rest aboard. I think I got everything and should still able to get it to work but not till I get ashore and have a chance to work on it. As I headed down the east side of Bermuda I was able to get Bermuda radio on the VHF and get weather and local information. They said that two sail boats, one a 57 footer from Annapolis and the other a 40 foot ketch, had been abandoned during the storm. One was close to where I had just come through and the other was about 80 miles south of Bermuda, very close to where I was going. Both were still afloat but had no lights on them and there current positions were not real well known. By this time I had no engine, my large headsail had ripped out and was not usable, my Aries was not usable and then I looked up and saw that the mainsail had ripped all the way from luff to leach. I dropped it but couldn't do much with it until daylight and hopefully calmer seas. At that point I was sailing along with only the storm jib up, the smallest sail I have. The wind had clocked around some more and was coming from the aft quarter and was still strong so the storm jib was still pulling me at 3-4 knots.

The next morning I took the mainsail off and dragged it inside to try and fix it. It had started to rip out along one of the seams and then continued along the stitch line for the seam. I had restitched most of the sail but had not done that one. Big mistake. I was able to patch the sail, re-attach one of the batten pockets that was coming loose and reattach the top slide after it wore through the webbing holding it on. It took most of the day but I finally had it back on and working. The winds had dropped some by then so I was able to do a little better with the main and the storm jib. I wanted some more sail area so I raised the mizzen and was actually doing OK until the mizzen sheet anchor on the boom ripped out. It tore out the aluminum track that the sheet anchor was clamped to so the mizzen was out of commission also although later I was able to rig a temporary repair to the boom so I could use it again.

I seemed to be following a high pressure trough south as I headed from Bermuda to the Virgin Islands and could not seem to get through it. To the north of the trough the winds were from the north and on the south side the winds were stronger and from the east so the sailing would be much easier. The seas finally calmed some so I dropped all my sails and stopped to remove the line from the prop shaft. I got my snorkeling gear out and after a careful search for shark fins, got into the water. I was expecting it to be cold but it was actually pretty warm and in a few minutes I had the line out. After getting dried off and putting stuff away I tried the engine. It seemed to be OK with no unusual noises or vibrations. I still had the broken mounts so I kept the speed low but was able to motor sail in the light winds. It was still slow with daily averages around 90 NM instead of the 120 NM I planned on. After that I had the genoa, main and mizzen up and had a pretty nice sail for a while. The winds dropped a couple of days ago so I had to motorsail until I got so low on fuel that I had to stop the engine. I wanted to make sure I had enough fuel to get through the BVI and into Lameshur so I had a couple of slow days.

At about 8:45 yesterday I sighted Virgin Gorda from about 35 miles away. Shortly after that I could see Tortola and began to feel like I might actually get there. I still had about 12 hours to go down through the British Virgin Islands. There was not much traffic going though the BVI at night and I had a nice sail down the Sir Francis Drake Channel. I arrived here at Lameshur Bay on St John last night about 9:30. It was really dark with no moon at all so I decided to wait until morning to come in for a mooring. I hove to right outside the bay but the winds were so light that didn't work well so I dropped all the sails and let it drift. By daybreak I had drifted about 2.5 NM south from where I started. I motored in this morning and got a mooring with no problem. It sure is nice to be still after 2.5 weeks at sea.