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Position
Bluewater is now in Charleston, SC, where we expect to have her until spring 2012. Charleston is one of our favorite cities, and we plan to visit Bluewater frequently over the winter.
Once we start moving again, click here for our latest location.
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Charleston, SC
Nov. 14, 2011
Bluewater arrived in Charleston, SC, today after being "on the road" from Southwest Harbor, ME, since Sept. 7. We had a long and meandering but very enjoyable two-month trip south: first from Maine's incomparable Penobscot Bay to to Portland, a favorite city of ours, then across the Gulf of Maine, through the Cape Cod Canal, and on to Britol, RI, where we joined old friends from the Nordhavn Atlantic Rally, Bob and Jan Rothman (N57 Emeritus) and Scott and Mary Flanders (N46 Egret). Scott and Mary had recently completed their circumnavigation, the first powerboat to do so via the five great southern capes (including Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope), so there was much to talk about.
From Rhode Island, we traveled offshore to Cape May, then up Delaware Bay and into the Chesapeake. In Baltimore we connected with several Nordhavn owners, including David Sidbury (N68 Grace of Tides), Pete and Joanne Powers (N55 Journey), and Ron Rubin and his admiral, Dr. Wendy Shore, (N40 Alcyone). Our Seattle friends Don and Sharry Stabbert (Northern Marine 75 Starr), who had just brought their own boat on its own bottom from Japan to Hawaii, joined us aboard Bluewater for a club cruise from Annapolis to some of the iconic venues of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, then we were off for Norfolk, where Judy and I both grew up, to visit with friends and family.
From Norfolk we began our first long trip down the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) in almost a decade. With her six-foot draft, it's easy to argue that Bluewater is not an ideal ICW cruising boat, but we decided it was time for an ICW trip nonetheless, so we headed south from Norfolk Oct. 22. It's turned out to be our best-ever trip down the ICW . . . we've truly had a delightful time covering close to 500 (statute) miles wending out way down to Charleston. Perhaps the difference this time was we took time to smell the roses--and to wait for weather. For example, we got off the beaten path with stops in New Bern and Oriental along North Carolina's Neuse River, both places we've long wanted to visit by boat.
Fall weather along the eastern seaboard can boisterous, and boisterous it was for part of our trip. We waited out one round of wind and rain in Beaufort, NC, a charming seaside town we've been visiting by boat since 1983. Our enforced stay put us into play with the crews of two large Nordhavns, and we got to know Bradley Rosenberg and his wife Kathy Clark and their Kiwi partners John Lovatt and Leanne Woon (N72 Shear Madness) and David and Debbie Sidbury (N68 Grace of Tides). Both Shear Madness and Grace of Tides had been struck (separately) by lighning a few weeks earlier, and both were undergoing repairs at the big Jarrett Bay boatyard near Beaufort. The two crews are taking it with a "glass half full" attitude.
During a few days of good weather we moved on to Southport, NC, and a two days later a full gale blew offshore along much of the eastern seaboard including waters not far from us. Although we never saw more than 25-30 knots of wind, NOAA's forecasts for offshore winds off Cape Hatteras and Cape Fear were in the mid-50s and seas up to 30 feet. Playing chicken of the sea, we held position at Southport, NC, just south of the Cape Fear River and came to really like the town--a place where a very friendly local resident insisted--and I mean INSISTED--that he take his pickup to the grocery store a couple of miles away to do our shopping.
I have to admit that we were especially pleased with our decision to stay put in Southport when we got this e-mail from a friend with a boat almost identical to ours:
We left Beaufort early Thursday and passed Frying Pan with a smooth 3-4 ft swell from NE. About 20 miles on the wind suddenly picked up out of the south and within 30 min we had 4-5 ft on the port bow mixing with the NE swell. My smart spouse says, Hey this wasn't in the forecast what else did they miss? Let's head for Southport. A good call but a miserable washing machine all the way. The interesting part was when we got to the entrance the outflowing tide was opposed to the 6 footers following setting up the largest standing waves I've ever seen. Making 3.5 kts looking straight ahead from my chair with tops at eye level. There was a real opportunity for disaster if I let the boat broach. No way to turn around either. I knew there would be some rage conditions but wasn't prepared for this and couldn't see them in the dark until I was among them. Many, many lessons here. Thanks for listening to my confession.
When the weather abated we pressed on south down the waterway with stops at Mile Hammock Bay near Camp Lejeune, Myrtle Beach (including an elegant five-star dinner at a great restaurant, Waterscapes [see below]), a desolate but lovely anchorage up Bull Creek on South Carolina's Waccamaw River, then on to Georgetown, and Isle of Palms, where David Sidbury snapped a fine picture of Bluewater as we passed by his dock on the ICW.
As I end this, we're at the southern terminus of this trip and we're truly sorry to see it end. But end it must, and we'll soon be back home in Fort Lauderdale for a few months--with firm plans to spend a week every month aboard Bluewater in Charleston over the winter!
A few notes of interest:
One immensely helpful tool we've used to great advantage this summer and fall is the ActiveCaptain website which bills itself as an interactive cruising guidebook. Started in 2007 by svvy tech entrepreneurs Jeff and Karen Siegel, it's grown like topsy. It's clearly hit critical mass, with thousands of reports from cruisers like us--marina ratings, fuel prices, information on bridge openings and restrictions, navigation hazards such as shoals, and much more. If you're a cruising yachtie, or want to be, don't miss this terrific resource: https://www.activecaptain.com
I should also offer the website for Dysart's Great Harbor Marina in Southwest Harbor, ME. It's where we stay when we're in SW Harbor, and we have lots of friends who enjoy it every bit as much as we do. Owners Ed and Mary Dysart and the Dockmaster/Office Manager team, Micah and Jane Peabody are absolutely the best: http://www.dysartsmarina.com
And if you're in search of a truly memorable five-star meal in Myrtle Beach, SC, don't overlook Waterscapes: http://www.grandedunes.com/amenities/dining_waterscapes.aspx
Here are websites for some of the folks we've run into along the way:
N46 Egret's Voyage of Egret: http://www.nordhavn.com/egret/index.php4
N72 Shear Madness: http://shearmadness72.com/
Northern Marine 75 Starr: http://starr.talkspotblogs.com/aspx/m/62968
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Rockland, ME
July 24, 2010
Since my last blog entry well over a month ago I've learned that I just don't have the discipline to be a blogger--too much time cruising and not enough time blogging about it. So I've given up my aspirations to blog about our travels and travails aboard Bluewater and have changed the headline for this section to
Position.
Judy, Katy and I are having a terrific summer. Bluewater is behaving herself and all systems are go.
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Fort Lauderdale to Norfolk
June 1-5, 2010
Bluewater departed Marina Bay June 1st, the morning after Memorial Day. As usual, the trip down the curvy New River, nearly an hour to the sea buoy, was crowded and busy—you never know what you’re going to meet around the next curve. I don’t know how many times we have been up and down the New River—maybe 300 in our 25 years of owning a boat based in Fort Lauderdale—but it’s always an adventure. On departure I made a radio security call on departure as we approached the high I-95 bridge and learned immediately that three large vessels were headed upriver just ahead: the big ol’ Jungle Queen tourboat plus a 60-foot yacht and a 90-foot yacht. Graciously, all three held in place for us at a wide spot in the river so we could ease through a narrow passage outboard of Lauderdale Marine Center. The big boats are operated by professionals and are usually most courteous!
After an hour’s penance of tight quarters maneuvering down the river, I felt relief to reach the sea buoy and set the autopilot to take us to our first offshore waypoint well out in the Gulf Stream. Buoyweather.com is my new go-to source for offshore weather information, and before leaving I downloaded charts showing the Gulf Stream’s predicted location all the way up to Cape Hatteras. Heading out, I took advantage of our mobile Internet service for a final download, a colorful “Hycom Ocean Model” showing Gulf Stream currents. Using this chart, it’s a simple matter to add in waypoints where the Gulf Stream speeds are greatest going north, and I laid out our route.
The Gulf Stream chart used to pick Bluewater's wayoints
For Judy, Katy and me the first day of a passage is all about getting our sea legs and making sure we and the boat are ready for the trip ahead. The forecast from “Weather Bob” Jones at Ocean Marine Navigation Inc., our weather router, looked terrific: mostly light winds and flat seas from aft of the beam. That’s what we call storybook cruising weather because in our experience conditions like that are found more often in storybooks and magazine articles than in the real cruising world. But with summer having taken hold along the Eastern Seaboard, all indications were that our 800-mile trip to Norfolk would bring us pleasant weather.
Bruce Kessler says the best passages are the boring ones, but our first night at sea was not destined to be boring. I was asleep at about 10:30 pm with Judy on watch when a sudden change awakened me with a start. The comforting sound of our main engine wasn’t there, and, with the stabilizers not powered by the engine, we had begun to roll in the light offshore swell. I rushed to the pilothouse and Judy reported that the engine had simply died—a first in nearly 25,000 miles and 3,500 engine hours we’ve been shipmates with this reliable Lugger diesel engine.
If you’re not a motor-head and have no interest in mechanics, feel free to skip the next four paragraphs.
Adrenaline kicked in and I shook myself awake, quickly taking stock of the situation. First, I tried restarting the main engine. No joy and no surprise. When I tried the backup wing engine, it came alive immediately, and I gave myself a pat on the back for having test-run it for an hour earlier in the day. “The wing,” as we call it, pushes Bluewater along at about 4 knots in light conditions; and with an assist from the Gulf Stream, we were actually moving toward Norfolk at about 6.5 knots. Seas were from astern and very light, so our lack of stabilization was no problem.
“Engine stoppage is almost always about fuel,” I reminded myself as I entered the 105-degree engine room. Step one: check the primary fuel filter. I opened up the main Racor fuel filter we’d been using, removed the pleated paper element and examined it—light tan indicates no problem there. Even so, I replaced it with a new spare and topped off the filter with fresh fuel. When I checked back with Judy in the pilothouse, I discovered that the generator had just shut down. Aha, a smoking gun! While the wing engine has its own separate fuel tank, all fuel feeding the main engine and generators aboard Bluewater comes from our 70-gallon day tank. I opened the day tank’s sight gauge valves and immediately found my culprit: the tank was empty! I had run the day tank right down to zero—OF COURSE THE ENGINE AND GENERATOR HAD QUIT!
We typically run Bluewater with one of our two main fuel tanks open, giving the day tank a steady diet of clean fuel, and the valve from the other main tank remains close closed. My mistake was closing off the starboard tank just before departure without checking to make sure the port tank was open and feeding the day tank—and of course, it wasn’t. That was compounded by my failure to check the fuel level in the day tank during one of my many engine room checks after leaving. One mistake compounded by a second, and no one to blame but myself.
Getting the main engine going again was a simple matter of refilling the day tank, an easy job since the diesel fuel gravity-feeds from the main tanks to the day tank. Then it was time bleed the engine’s fuel system to get rid of the air introduced into the fuel line by sucking on an empty tank. Although I’ve bled many diesel engines, I’ve never before had to bleed the main engine aboard this boat. Still, it’s a straightforward procedure and it went quickly and easily, though I have to admit I heaved a big sigh of relief when the Lugger roared back to life. We had it back on line and were up to speed again less than 30 minutes after I had awakened.
On my midwatch (0000-0300) the first night out, we passed through a big series of squalls. The heavy rain was easy to see on the radar, appearing as large, solid, orange blobs. We didn’t need radar to see the rain: brilliant flashes of lightning illuminated sky and ocean all around. Lightning at sea always makes me uneasy. I’ve come to believe that while you take your best shot when it comes to lightning protection—and our Nordhavn has what appears to be an excellent system—lightning is completely capricious and does what it damned well pleases, all preparations be damned. When Judy relieved me for her 0300-0600 watch, the rain and lightning were behind us and I went off to bed a much happier captain.
I love it when we get a free push from the Gulf Stream. Here the push is 4.3 knots above our usual 7 knots!
The first 36 hours of Bluewater’s trip took us almost due north up the “hump” of the Gulf Stream, the axis of maximum current. At times the GPS showed us traveling at 12 knots over the bottom, and Judy saw 12.5 knots once or twice. With our 7-knot usual speed, that meant Bluewater was getting a free 5-knot push from the Stream! Being right in the middle of the Stream, we expected to see a lot of northbound shipping traffic but we actually saw little. Our AIS (automatic information system) transceiver picks up large ships at 20 miles out, sometimes more, yet most of the time the AIS screen was empty of ships and the few we saw were never a threat. The AIS also transmits our own position, making it easy for ships to (a) know where we are and (b) avoid us; we consider it a great investment for offshore yachts like ours.
Of course, on a passage like this we always have the radar on too. While large ships and many large yachts carry AIS, most smaller vessels don’t. At one point our second night out we had a small sailing yacht plus two brightly lighted commercial fishing vessels within five miles ahead. In our experience, offshore fishing vessels are generally wild cards—their running lights are nearly impossible to see amidst their bright deck lights and their skippers are far more focused on their fishing and their gear than on other vessels. We try to be respectful, but sometimes it’s hard. We called and made contact with the more distant of the two to negotiate a safe pass, but the closer one never responded to repeated calls. What to do? We did what we usually do: take a guess at his intentions, then turn and go around him. Bluewater passed ½ mile off his stern in the dark, and all the while we were hoping that his fishing gear wasn’t that far out astern.
Fair winds and following seas in the Gulf Stream . . . it doesn't get much better that this.
By noon Thursday Bluewater was riding the deep blue Gulf Stream in fair weather: 2-3 foot seas from astern and light winds blowing over the transom. We were 80 miles due east of North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. In her first two days at sea Bluewater had covered 495 miles at an average speed of just over10 knots. Looking back through our log, it appears that’s a record two-day run for Bluewater!
At dawn on Friday we were on soundings near Cape Hatteras. The sparkling royal blue of the Gulf Stream had given way to the flat greenish color of North Carolina coastal waters, and a light shallow water chop replaced the easy, rolling offshore swell. Four miles out from our Cape Hatteras waypoint we spotted our first inshore traffic, a sportfishing yacht with lines out in the brilliant morning sun. The push from the Gulf Stream continued, though diminished, right on around Hatteras, propelling us toward Cape Henry at the entrance to Hampton Roads at 8 to 9 knots. By noon we’d covered 695 miles in three days, an average of 9.4 knots. Yahoo!
The beard. Bad experiment . . . after trying it for a couple of weeks I shaved it off before we made landfall at Norfolk.
It was becoming clear that we would round Cape Henry just before midnight. That would mean making our way through Hampton Roads, usually chock-a-block with big ships and tugs moving everywhere. That’s enough to strike fear into the hearts of small boat operators like me, but the channels of Hampton Roads are well marked and there’s plenty of water for our six-foot draft just outside the channels where the big ships cannot go. We decided to have both of us on watch in the pilot house for the three-plus hours from Cape Henry into Norfolk’s Lafayette River, a river where Judy taught me to sail when we were teenagers.
Much to our surprise, shipping traffic was minimal in Hampton Roads—there is something to be said for entering at midnight Friday. Although we saw a handful of small boats, we were passed by only one tug and one large collier on our way in. The channels are well marked, and by following the detailed route I laid out on our Nobeltec navigation program days ago, one eye on the radar, one on the electronic chart, and another on the AIS (yeah, I know, that’s three eyes!) we made easy work of it.
Approach to Norfolk Yacht and Country Club.
The hairiest part of the trip from Fort Lauderdale was the final two miles rounding Tanner Point, then picking up the dogleg channel into the Lafayette River, up to Norfolk Yacht and Country Club. I turned Bluewater to port out of the Norfolk Reach channel, eased into the river as the depth fell away. We picked up the red flasher at the entrance to the river channel, one of three lighted navigation markers marking the narrow channel. It was imperative that we stay in the channel; just a few feet outside the channel was water only 2-4 feet deep! With Judy on the foredeck spotlight-in-hand, Bluewater slowly crept up the channel. Judy expertly wielded the 2 million candlepower spotlight, picking out unlighted markers allowing me to keep Bluewater right in mid-channel. We made a 90-degree right turn at the last green flasher and a few hundred yards farther, voila!, we were off the club, where we dropped our big Rocna anchor and put away the boat. It was 3:30 am, 89 hours 15 minutes, and 807.3 nautical miles since our departure from Marina Bay in Fort Lauderdale.
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Box Score
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Departure
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10:15 am 6-1-2010
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Port
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Fort Lauderdale, FL
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Arrival
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3:30 am 6-5-2010
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Port
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Norfolk, VA
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Nautical miles
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807.3
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Hours
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89.25
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Average speed in knots
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9.0
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Norfolk Yacht and Country Club.
Waiting for us at Norfolk
Yacht and Country Club were our good friends from Fort Lauderdale, Malcolm and Penny Farrel aboard their pristine Grand Alaskan 60, First Light. More important to Katy, our five-year-old Schipperke, was that Breezy, the Farrels’ five-year-old Havanese was also waiting. Katy and Breezy were born within a few weeks of one another and they’ve been raised together. We tell everyone they’re sisters, which gets us some strange looks, but as far as the dogs are concerned they are indeed siblings. So close is the relationship that Penny is Katy’s “other mother,” while Judy is Breezy’s “other mother.” Each couple often dog-sits for the other, and the dogs are equally comfortable on either boat. Breezy and Katy were, of course, delighted to be together again.
Katy (L) and Breezy aboard First Light in Norfolk.
After a few hours sleep we moved Bluewater to a slip at Norfolk Yacht and Country Club, one of America’s great yacht clubs—but, admittedly, I'm prejudiced because it's one we have a history with. The club was founded in 1896 and today bears little resemblance to the club I grew up with in the 1950s and 60s. Norfolk Yacht, as it’s known locally, now boasts over 1,000 family memberships, a terrific 50,000 square foot clubhouse, a separate 25,000 square foot fitness center with an indoor pool, and a busy marina with floating docks to accommodate 160 yachts. It’s an active and friendly club.
As a kid growing up in Norfolk, the piers at NYCC were my go-to place. I spent many hours there after school, on weekends, in the summertime. In her teenage years Judy was a champion tennis player at NYCC. My grandparents and parents were members of the club as were Judy’s parents, and when Judy and I were married in 1962 (!) our wedding reception was at this club. Of course, we became members after we married, a membership given up when it seemed clear we’d never move back to Norfolk.
Judy and Katy at NYCC.
It’s good to have Bluewater on the move again, and we’re looking forward to our trip up the Chesapeake Bay, and then moving on up the Eastern Seaboard to Maine for the summer.
6-7-2010
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