Dena Hankins's Blog, page 12

Sometimes…

…the weirdest shit happens!

Rockland at night…

Like that time in Rockland (just a few months ago in July ’22) when the four drunk dudes in a plastic-destroyer rowed up on us in the middle of the night, blowing my eyes out with a bright-assed strobe light, telling me to give them some gasoline…instead I (James) grabbed a large blunt object and told them to fuck off.

WTAF in Southwest Harbor?!

…or that time in Southwest Harbor when we got hit by a drifting lobster boat with me on the fender and Dena on the “What the actual fuck, dude!?”

The weirdest shit just happens sometimes on the water.

When the ship goes down you betta get ready.

Last night for example. Here we are in Lake Sylvia, anchored at about 6:1 in tight quarters, completely surrounded by giant Catamorons…oh, my favorite. We had gales headed our way but enough protection that we didn’t expect rough water. I (Dena) would always want to be on at least 10:1 scope for high winds, but anchorages are sparse in Fort Lauderdale and this one is hella popular.

No worries yet

We were all settled in for the night and it was taking me (James) way too long to cook up those baby-bellas when all of the sudden we heard the tell-tale sound of people yelling at each other.

…great.

I went out on deck to discover a sailboat had dragged her anchor into the bulkhead of a very expensive McMansion and somehow managed to fend off before destroying too much of the local high-end property. They were underway, in the dark, with one running light out and starting to yell at each other.

From our boat I could tell they were a young binary couple. The woman was at the helm and the man was on the bow. They tried four…maybe five times to anchor to no avail when they were joined by a Captains Courageous in the dinghy from one of the anchored multi-million dollar Catamorons. He was dedicated to telling them where to go, meaning as far away from his boat as possible. In other words, he guided them directly on top of our anchor.

The wind hadn’t really come up yet so we knew their anchoring technique was faulty. Somewhat contentious conversation followed, with us explaining how much chain we had out and then recommending that they go to the local mooring field for a safe and quiet night.

They moved off and the Meddling Captain dinghied back to his Catamoron. James ate his burrito while I made mine and then…fuck. The kids were back and circling again!

James made an unexpected but good move and offered to let them raft with us. Better to have them secured to us than blowing down on us in the night! I put the last quarter of my burrito down on the plate and prepared to handle their lines. We had no idea what we were in for.

We put all our fenders out and told them to do the same, plus said they’d need to set up lines on the bow and stern. They circled some more and came in nice and slow only for us to discover they didn’t have any dock-lines set up. We let them go again so they could circle once more to set up dock lines. The young man (early 30’s maybe) didn’t seem to know what dock lines were. We instructed them upon their next approach and they ultimately got things arranged, or so we thought. She (Bow) did a good job on the helm and got them alongside, not too fast. We cleated their lines and added a midships line, considered and rejected multiple springs options, and slowly over the course of the conversation realized that they really did not know what they were doing.

I (James) mean,…nothing. They did not speak a word of salty nomenclature… The guy didn’t know what a cleat was so he made his bowline off on his life line! Now this was a 34ft Hunter sailboat with a full wind power and solar rig so we made the mistake of assuming way too much about these people. They knew not what they were in for when they bought that boat.

We got all settled aboard S/V S.N. Cetacea and congratulated one another on pulling off that tough maneuver in strong winds in the dark. Then they genuinely and very nicely revealed how absolutely clueless they were when it came to anchoring their vessel.

So we did the only thing we could…we gave them a crash course in anchoring. Now, this is no small feat when you really don’t have a language in common. I mean, they both spoke a network-version of English well enough but they had no idea what we were talking about. Dena did a great job drawing an anchoring process out for them–the physics of catenary and scope in plain English–and they were both bright and attentive but we really had no idea what they grasped from our impassioned descriptions of over twenty years of doing it right every single time. If only we’d had a Chapman’s aboard, we would have gifted it to them on the spot.

So we all went to sleep, Cetacea holding the two boats firmly on her CQR with 100 feet of scope and S/V Zola made fast alongside. The wind built throughout the night and James awoke at about 5 a.m. in a state of concern. Whatever it was he’d picked up on, he was right. We’d dragged the anchor about 50′ because of the extra strain of the second boat. First choice is to put out more chain, but that got us uncomfortably close to the catamoron behind us which was dangerously close to the bulkhead.

While we were paying out and then taking back in the chain, the young’uns woke and joined us on deck. The guy in the catamoron behind was up as well and urgently wanted to pull up his anchor and reset it…as soon as we got out of the way. Another couple of boats showed signs of life around the little anchorage area as folks checked their lay or reset like we needed to.

We had to kick them off. It was still pitch dark with nearly another hour before the pre-dawn light would make life a little easier, but the wind was going to have built too much by then. We could have waited, but the catamoron behind us couldn’t. I (Dena) talked over their options with them. 1) Pick up a mooring less than a mile away without needing to have any bridges opened or if those were all full 2) pass through the Las Olas bridge at night! in the dark! and check for room in the anchorage beyond.

Knowing that they didn’t have either the gear or the experience for a successful anchoring, I was hopeful they could just pick up a mooring…and then they revealed that they didn’t know what that was either or how to tie up to it! It was agonizing, giving them every bit of information we could throw at them and pointing out where they needed to go on a chart app and then just tossing their lines away and giving them a good shove.

Bow drove off briskly into the night and we have absolutely no idea what happened to them after that. We don’t really know their names and there’s no information about their boat online.

James hauled the anchor and we reset it farther toward the boats ahead of us. As we shortened scope, so did the catamoron behind us and we both reanchored. Us with our customary cool even though we still didn’t have room for the scope we prefer and them with the most vicious, hateful yelling display I’ve ever heard at what was now about 6 a.m.

Trying to go back to sleep was fruitless and when we gave up and made coffee, we realized that we had gotten behind a little buoy that’s meant to mark the edge of the official anchorage. It was tangling in our snubber, so James hauled that fucking anchor again and I adjusted the drop location to keep us farther away from the buoy.

What a night! Coffee gone, we celebrated our return to gale-wind-normalcy with, of course, tomato and mushroom eggs bennies.

On down the ditch…

Jupiter was a two week exploration in patience, a concept I (James) am not very good at. Never have been. I get it. I’ve been telling everyone I know that I’m not cold so I’m not in a hurry. But when the only thing standing between us and the Bahamas is a broken bridge and a treacherous bar-crossing I start to feel a little caged in.

The night sky was incredible in Jupiter

Caged I may have been but unmotivated we were not.

We rebuilt the ground system for the wind generator.

…Well, he didn’t.

We primed and painted the hand rails!

Work it, work it! The perfectionist

We dove on the bottom.

What a mess!

We ordered UberEats.

We added a coat of burgundy to the outer bulwarks and a coat of black to the cap-rails and watched a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch.

…I know, it kind of looks phallic ‘eh?

We dove on the bottom again and called the bridge tender by cell phone every single day, but what we didn’t do was go to the Bahamas via that broken-ass’d Donald Ross bridge.

The closest all-weather inlet north of us was Fort Pierce, a 33 mile backtrack to a 45 mile offshore trip south against the Gulf Stream. Fuck that shit! Okay, second best is St Lucie Inlet, only 15 miles north and then south again the same distance before coming even with the anchorage we were becoming overly sensitized to.

I mean, what’s up with the two halogen spotlights aiming from the McMansion down the empty dock to light up our forepeak while we’re trying to sleep?

And the pleasing-to-the-eye stretch of palm and mangrove that was bounded on each end by some kind of villa-revival houses of ridiculous proportion.

The non-stop procession of Stinkleys, Mainshits, and rental jet skis tossing us about in a no-wake zone were less entertaining than the tiki-boats (aka bars on the water) that eased on by while playing non-stop Contractor Rock…turn it up!

We manage to enjoy each other, at least!

What really soured the place for us was that, for two whole weeks, for the first time since entering Florida, we didn’t see a single dolphin. Time to move on.

But.

The best case scenario was going out Jupiter Inlet, a few miles south (meaning in the right direction), but it’s notorious for being impassible in rough seas and shallow even in calms.

We talked to a very cool local dude in a modern Hawaiian style out-rigger canoe who practically begged us not to go out Jupiter Inlet that first day of us considering whether we could make it. He’d been attracted (as so many are) by our hailing port and knew our starting water well. It was fun talking to someone with so much excitement about Port Townsend.

The weather was from the north for most of the two weeks that we were anchored in Jupiter meaning contrary to the Gulf Stream meaning the surf was full on cara-mother-fucking-bunga dude! The surfers were tearing it up just outside Jupiter Inlet but there was no way we were going through that inlet in that kind of nightmare shallow water.

The prudent sailor survives to eat another poke-bowl. And we waited for the forecast to say 1-2 foot waves, got up hella early, and aimed for high tide at Jupiter Inlet.

The 707 Bridge tender gave us a kind heads-up that we wouldn’t be able to pass the Donald Ross Bridge (which we knew because we’d been calling every fucking day) and I (Dena) had the pleasure of explaining that we were taking the flat water out Jupiter Inlet. He didn’t call us dumb, but he didn’t encourage us either.

Caution? No shit, Sherlock.

Once we were outside the breakwaters and the eager fishers had waked us to their satisfaction, we eased on by the shoal areas and saw only a glimpse of 9.6 feet…mostly well over 10 foot depths.

And then we went sailing.

We put all the laundry up and she was glorious. Cetacea heeled to her job and bore down on…2.2 fucking knots?! Welcome to the Gulf Stream, sucka’s! We were close hauled on a fair ocean breeze clipping along going absolutely nowhere…aesthetically! Well almost nowhere.

We were both like (Q) what-the-fuck-else are we going to do today? (A) Nothing, we’re sailing the boat about twelve nautical miles in a fair wind on a foul current. That’s what we’re doing.

We ended up putting 20.6 nautical miles under the keel on what would have been a 16 mile trip if we hadn’t been tacking. Our usual rate of travel would have made that a 4-hour trip but we spent about 6-and-a-half getting from the anchorage we’d left once already (only to turn back…oh, we skipped that part of the story! Arrived on a Friday, tried to leave on a Monday but got the USCG Securite about the broken bridge only about 5 minutes into motoring towards it, turned back and anchored where we’d just come from. Early morning irritation ensued and almost two weeks passed) to the Lake Worth Inlet and a safe anchorage near the Palm Beach Sailing Club where we would…

Mwah!

Enjoy being at home!

Shagging a Beach

After a hectic and expensive laundry-jaunt ashore, we dinghied into the sailing club and retrieved our new and fabulous Fatty Knees 8 from our good friend Benjamin.

Gentle readers, please meet Tursiops!

She’s an excellent row boat with a complete sailing rig and a two-inch hole all the way through the bow. We never could have afforded one of these otherwise – they’re always either eye-poppingly expensive or sold in two seconds flat. We’ll do the repair work and keep you updated. Tune in for the sprucing up of Tursiops, T/T Cetacea!

Dog Damn the IC(Fucking)W!

We passed statute mile 1000 this morning just after my (James’s) second watch…just after my first visible-light watch, about two hours after we kedged off the bottom in the southern Indian River…the Indian River not in India,

Way back up in there…

…the one in Florida.

Okay, let us catch y’all up.

I (Dena) was at the helm, hedging to James about whether or not to spend $20 per day for a mooring with dinghy dock and shower access because I had just realized that this is still their prime season and they…well, they triple-load their moorings. No joke – three boats per mooring is their standard. Compared to that, a three-foot-wide finger pier creates a real privacy gap in a marina. We anchor partly for the distance from other boaters and…

All the way down their (nightmarishly long and soon to be elongated) mooring field, we reiterated that there was no value rafting with a strange boat on a mooring when we could pass their territory, anchor, and then pay the daily fee only when we actually wanted to use the dinghy dock and showers (as I’d read was possible). Having passed at least 150 boats two or three to a mooring, we went hook-down right smack in the middle of the Indian river off Vero Beach, Florida.

Off Isla Fritz

It was stunningly picturesque on both sides of the aesthetic spectrum. From the glorious sunsets…

…to the sad realities of expensive dreams.

Within an hour of anchoring, a hunter-green 14′ aluminum Jon boat with a 9.9 Merc ambled on up for a confab. We’ve been approached by plenty of dinghies in our day, most of which don’t hold people of all that much interest but there’s no telling, not knowing, so…I (Dena) engaged.

A meandering ten minutes later, he’d warned me that the harbormaster may tell us we were too close to the moorings and I’d informed him that our radar returns assured us that we weren’t. It was a soft battle between a local guy who’d moved his boat for a storm but wanted to come back and the travelers who knew that we were actually fine where we were. He tried to say that the required distance was in yards…it’s in feet. I said that we were going to stay until it looked like a good weather window was opening up for leaving from Lake Worth for the Bahamas and he just sighed.

We did some painting and some exploring…

Happy New Year everyone!

Ate some good food and watched the weather. Took the free bus to the shopping area and managed conversations with a Canadian couple and a family of three! Two conversations with a total of five people! Come on, folks, this is really good for us. It helped that the Canadian lady-type had lived for 10 years in Halifax and the family of three included a pubescent girl with real excitement for how they’d dealt with being anchored off Green Turtle Key when the Covid lockdowns came.

The local in the Jon boat did visit again to double-check our plans, but he put his boat north of the others when he realized we couldn’t be intimidated.

We came to Vero Beach in 2022 and we left in ’23…on a Wednesday… after a good breakfast.

I (James) went out to pump the little boat and this dude in a ridiculously outfitted inflatable (25hp motor and enough stainless steel to make a mod jealous) rolls up on me before I got a chance to drown him out by starting the outboard.

In a very short span of time, I knew about his entire meaningless life from submarines to elk hunting to retirement on a dumb powerboat cruising the Florida ICW and the “invention” of “his ICW bridge app”. He was a fucking asshole who saw a man working and thought he’d want his life story. He was wrong…about a lot of things.

We are the people he finds so scary about Seattle that he can never go back again. He mistakenly believed we were his people, but we would have been supporters of the Seattle CHOP from our sub-basement apartment on Boylston between Pike and Pine where we hosted our own pirate radio station. He left Seattle because he was terrified of us and I left Vero Beach because it was time.

Welcome to Southern (fucking) Florida.

Anyway, we weighed anchor and got the actual-fuck out of there minutes later.

The ICW equivalent to a cheap motel is a nice wide curve of depth before the shallows and I (Dena) had read about one. Turns out the water was skinny so we anchored a decent but not long distance off the ICW. No prob.

When we left the next morning, all was well until…

…Oh yeah the fucking engine.

Just after setting the Yankee and hooking her into 5.6 knots I got an alarm…no, not the bilge alarm…this was different. This was ENGINE…overheating! Dena couldn’t hear this one from below-decks so I yelled and ramped down the RPM’s. Of course! The Infernal Cumbustion Engine…again!

“The descension of events”…shut her down, go broad to the wind, desperately look for a safe anchorage…Hey Dean, kind of sounds like a what?

…an “Out Landing”?!

Exactly. Only on the IC (Fucking)W.

Dena looked into the engine compartment and made the correct diagnosis – the alternator belt was gone. This meant that the raw water for cooling the engine wasn’t being sent through the coolant chamber.

Dena took the helm and I went to the bow to deploy the anchor under Yankee alone. Dena luffed up and told me (James) to drop the anchor.

Hook down, no sweat…except that somehow we didn’t have that belt. We tore up compartment after compartment and still couldn’t find that belt. When it shows itself, we’ll be so mad. And so glad.

Internet access has become very important to us over time. Enough so that we’re considering buying in on the Skylink thing. Because there we were, miles from anything visibly helpful…

A search brought up the nearest marina where they did no parts sales and wouldn’t let us land the dinghy in order to taxi to the nearest auto parts store. A public launch ramp was, yep, 3NM away and we acknowledged that yes we would be doing the second farthest dinghy ride of this cruising year in order to buy an absolutely necessary part. Least said, soonest mended.

We enjoyed an artistic sunset.

0355 we started to pound…the bottom…of the Indian River…the one not in India.

Florida, fucking Florida. Full moon, 180-degree wind-shift Florida.

Dena got up and started shoring up on chain only to discover we were absolutely hard aground, in irons, on the motherfucking bottom. Fuuuuuuuuuck!

I (James) then got up and got to run through all the options of sailing a boat off the shallows in the ICW. Yeah, after a day like yesterday, (you know) I was (fucking) thrilled. I set the Yankee… Fuuuuuuuuck…. I set the staysail… yeah, not enough heeling to bring the keel off the bottom…fuuuuuck I got in the little boat and dragged that CQR to starboard as far as I possibly could while Dena fed me chain and…

Dog be praised, Dena kedged us off without leaving me behind. Actually, I got back aboard (in the dark, mind you) took the helm and totally drove away!

Heavy sigh. The dinghy motor. Yes, it’s a thing.

Lots of folks tow their dinghies with the motor screwed onto the transom but we don’t. The transom is built to take pushing, not pulling, forces and the additional weight lends an awkwardness to the way the dinghy tracks behind the boat. It’s just sloppy.

So we quick-anchored right on/nearly-off the channel long enough to load the second of our least favorite motors onto its aft rail mount. Our third anchorage in 24 hours. In the dark. While still buzzing from the excitement of getting off the bottom.

And then we moved on. ICW in the dark, shadowy piling to shadowy piling with a brightly-lighted bridge ahead giving me (Dena, by this point) the general idea of where I need to be over the longer term. A winter’s sunrise even this far south doesn’t happen until after 7am, but after a couple o’dark-thirty shifts, the full moon arced toward the western horizon while the eastern sky showed signs of solar activity. The moon set into suburban opulence and the sun rose over the protected Jupiter Island greenery.

Hook down, safe and sound, just south of Conch Bar. About 200′ off the IC-fucking-W. Ah, fucking Florida.

Life in Florida

New Smyrna was about as adventurous as its name. The (walk to) laundromat was extraordinarily bad, the food was…ew! The accommodations were what’ev’s, and the anchorage was a complete disaster!

I (James) won’t bore you with most of the specifics from above but I just absolutely have to dis the anchorage.

We fucking hooked a wreck…of course!

…not this one! That’s our boat in the background.

…but one just like it (but not visible) that took us a powerful amount of alternate tenacity to weigh off of!

Fuck!!! And yet we prevailed without having to hire a diver. And yet we left.

We’ve seen more wrecked boats down the ICW that I (Dena) dreamed possible, even after what we thought was the dead-boat-fest of North and South Carolina the year we poisoned ourselves with a cracked water tank and petroleum-fouled drinking/cooking/cleaning water. The docks that aren’t in tatters are freshly replaced or have busybusybarges attached to them, bringing them back to level. It’s a clear lesson on how precarious things are here in the hurricane belt.

…And yet there is life. So much mostly un-photographable tenacious life!

The prop-injured dolphin, the pelicans, the manatee, the sharks, the gators, the white ibis, always with the fucking cormorant, the osprey, the ubiquitous egret…

And as we celebrated having gotten free of New Smyrna, the dolphin played around us and I (Dena) got breath-spray on my sunglasses in an unexpected benediction.

We motored on down to the Space Coast and saw what was the first live launch for each of us.

The next day, we raised the anchor again (so many anchor-aweighs this year!) and headed toward the Haulover Canal.

In the canal I (James) saw this with my own eyes, I shit you not, I saw a Pelican jump on the back of a dolphin because he/she had just eaten the pelican’s catch…the dolphin just laughed (okay, cackled) and swam away.

After a less-than-welcoming feeling in Titusville (lot of talk about how people who anchor take advantage), we did an extra hour or so of motoring and got an even clearer view of our second launch.

And then moved on to Cocoa, where we’d be able to supply up again. And also? Yeah, life.

…Life, that tenacious life in Florida, wow!

The Moon and Mars

Another night where it never got dark!

Hold on there, brushfire, we got some story tell’n to do!

So we rolled on down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway meaning, we trudged along on the dead bodies of the vegetation of the dinos…or whatever. Our mother-fucking diesel engine, okay?! I (James) fucking hate that thing!

Anyway, the water was so foul off Blount Island, Florida, that we didn’t dare make R.O. water into the tanks. So we had to go ashore for fresh water. We went ashore at Clapboard Creek Fish Camp to load water from their fish-cleaning station. I know, that sounds totally gross and believe me it turned out to be worse than expected. That water had absolutely the foulest sulfur-dioxide smell we have ever experienced in either of our lives. It was…shit, is! I mean I almost gagged now just thinking about it…the worst water we have ever tried to drink. They, “the interwebs”, say that it’s very common in well water in Florida and that it can be treated with bleach but I say it’s unhealthy to drink a beer-fart.

…where the locals hit golf balls at the dolphin, not kidding!

We dumped that shit overboard, pulled up the hook and went on over to the Sisters Creek free dock to fill the tanks.

Sisters Creek Free Dock, loaded with Canadians!

The dock filled up quick and an all-Canadian party ensued. We’re not kid people so we quickly disappeared below decks for a nice quiet night on a very busy dock.

Sunrise at Sisters Creek

The skies in Florida are a constant lesson in contrasting dramatic extremes.

And so are the currents. We waited for all the bigger boats to leave the dock the next morning before pushing off, which turned out to be kind of a bad idea. Dena was at the helm this time and we had a strong pushing current from the aft port-quarter as well as one from directly astern. I (still James here) let go the bow line and the spring and the boat didn’t seem to move at all which is very strange with two powerful pushing currents. Dena put the boat in gear and I let the stern line go from the dock and the boat went nowhere. She tried reversing against the stern line with just a little response from the bow but we could both tell the prop was spinning and the engine was working. The current was now raging in what I thought was the right direction and the boat wasn’t going anywhere. Dena tried reverse than back to forward with a little more guts and she started to move. I jumped on and looked back and we were heading right for a piling collision with the starboard solar panel…that’s when I did the worst thing I could have possibly done…I jumped off the boat and back on the dock to manually reticulate the starboard solar panel down before the piling ripped it off the boat.

And Dena sailed away from the dock without me in a foul five knot current.

Meanwhile, I (Dena) had a different perspective. When I took the helm and turned the wheel back and forth (a habit that lets me know whether or not I have it centered up), it turned out to be hard to starboard and fighting me on any steering whatsoever. The current we had was putting real pressure on the rudder and I figured I’d have to steer hard to get us off that dock. When the back-and-forthing demonstrated that we could tip the bow away from the dock, even a little, I hit it hard in forward hoping to get enough momentum to avoid scraping Lovebot down the dock as we veered away.

Still, lo these many months in (umm…6 months?), we haven’t gotten in the habit of lowering the solar panels when we approach a dock or pier. We should…we will!…but we haven’t. So when James reacted to save a piece of gear he had his eye on, I was revved to the max and slowly making just enough distance between Cetacea and…James.

The idea of docking again (whaaaaa?!?) and undocking again (whaaaaa?!?) in order to pick James up was one order of magnitude less unthinkable than the idea of…not picking James up? Yeah, no. I briefly considered anchoring Cetacea solo and coming back for him in the dinghy…which was on deck…yeah, no.

I came at that dock trying to spin the boat in place and raked their dock’s lovely fender material with our bobstay. James pushed and I backed down hard and James somehow…ended up back on the boat!

I (James) watched her sail away! Oh shit, I already said that…Don’t leave me…please!

She rocked the boat back into reverse and hit her hard astern as I caught ahold of the bowspirit with both hands pushing aft. The momentum of our 15,000lb boat kind of scooped me up and dropped me between the Yankee and the Staysail as Dena motored away from the dock full-steam-astern. No damage. How in the fuck does that even happen?

At that point, about 0800, we’d had pretty much a full day. Time to anchor the boat and call it a day!

…about 200ft from where we were the night before.

Sisters Creek Bridge

The next day was going to be a much better day for offshore travel, we rationalized, so…we’re not cold… we’re not in a hurry. Chill the fuck out!

What? It’s all good.

Oh yeah, didn’t we start this off with an Ocean passage?

The next day we took the fair current out of the Jacksonville bar and of course got to navigate in tight quarters with a thousand-foot ship. Yay.

We set the main and the Asym, killed that fat fucking infernal-cumbustion-destroyer-of all-things and sailed off into the sunset.

Small swells at slow intervals gave us very little hassle. The winds were so light that we had to give Lovebot the occasional assist in steering, but nothing stressful. It was a pleasure to interact with the boat and the world.

When the sun went down on one side of the planet, the moon rose opposite and Mars started the chase.

Full-moon nights feel safer…are safer! A long, slow show like Mars approaching and then passing just under the lower limb of the moon is meditative entertainment.

When the wind shifted and shifted, and shifted and shifted, nudging us uncomfortably close to the shore, we tried to tack and…then the wind died. I (Dena) got to douse and reset the asym in the “dark”, which is another level of gaining comfort with it, but poor James got called on deck twice on his first off shift.

…I (James) can’t help it. I gotta bring up the rib again. FUCK!

I (Dena) know very…VERY…well what it is to be called up on deck during one of the two three-hour windows we have for uninterrupted sleep. Just fell asleep or just feeling hopeful that this next exhale is the one I’ll go unconscious on…but as the person on watch, I don’t get to cringe my way out of disrupting James’ rest. We have agreements on what kinds of things we’ll do independently in what kinds of situations. It’s like…don’t try to tack the boat with a sail we haven’t tacked more than two times and which requires a lot of time on the foredeck but won’t allow us to clip in the whole time because there are too many things to be led around other things…

Oh yeah… that’s kind of a big one learned way back on the Oregon coast!

So yeah. I let it go just a little too long in one way. In another, it was never going to be a night of smooth sailing. Poor James was the one who got woken for me to try tacking away from the hard stuff (never get too close to the hard stuff, even when it’s just sand) and then disturbed again, not quite alseep, for the moment when the big old chute had to come down and the awful noisemaker took over.

Ohhhhhhhh, the engineagain.

And then we motored on a glass ocean forever. Three hour night watches into one hour day watches. We had the discussion, you know the one, the one where we know we have enough power stored in our battery banks to run an electric motor just enough to balance the forces of nature in our favor. We can do that…but we couldn’t do it then because that tech is just a little out of our reach. Sigh. A little meaning, we can build it, we can apply it and we can use (the fuck out of) it but we’re still working out how to afford it…here now.

So we motored, we fucking motored all the way to and into the Ponce de Leon Inlet under an all but depleted (on this Earth) power. We used that antiquated tech right on down the Sheephead Cut to New Smyrna and anchored across from the B&B our friend Jil would be staying in when she visited. Shutting that motor off put us back in chill mode. It’s warm, the weather’s not trying to torture us…it’s all good.

We’re not cold…there’s no hurry.

Thank you all for reading this entire post.

The five to four ratio

Remember the cracked rib thing a couple of blogs back?

Well as it turned out, a four day offshore adventure a couple of weeks after doing that is taxing…to say the least.

I (James) needed some peaceful anchorage time after the sail from Beaufort to Fernandina Beach. So, even though Fernandina Beach sports the ugliest anchorage we’ve been in on the East Coast of the US, we stayed for five whole days and nights.

This must be post-apocalyptic, right?!

It’s not like we sat on our asses and stared-at-shit the whole week, sure there was plenty of that, but we had provisioning to do. We ran the primary propane tank out offshore so refilling that tank was job one, requiring a two-and-a-half mile walk to the propane-getting-place. Then we went grocery shopping and packed an oob back to the marina with a ton of shit…then into the parking lot…then onto the dock…then into the dink…then through a totally packed anchorage back to the boat…on to the boat and into the lockers. A totally normal day, over…Dranks!

Once you’re in the little town of Fernandina Beach it pretty much looks like every small town on the Florida coast. Lots of Pink, yellow and orange stucco, sand, and palm trees, you know the “American Dream”. There was a visiting replica-tallship, the Nao Trinadad, that was really cool to pull up to in the dink but really that was about it.

A visiting Tall Ship Nao Trinidad

If you remember from last time we took a four day nor’easter down the coast from North Carolina, so when we showed up in Florida it was on the heels of a pretty chilly cold front. That weather system was the first big winter storm for the eastern seaboard this year and kicked the asses of pretty much everyone north of us. In northern-most Florida, it just made it nice and cool for a few days after we got there.

Once again, Dena was spot on about our offshore passage timing.

After loading up the boat, we prodged and cleaned with the long slow movements of ocean sailors for days. The nights were wet with dew so I cleaned and wiped our Cetacea from stem to stern as the sun rose the last couple of days. This is when I realized I was really on the mend. Not being cold has completely taken the rush out of our Southing. And boy does it feel good.

Thanksgiving at anchor with the Dolphins and Pelicans

Our next Windy “promised” offshore weather window of course went to shit so we opted for a few short days of travel down the ICW on the inside.

By the time we’d left Beaufort, NC, we were all three feeling completely done with motoring on the ICW. Not only is the engine a complete drag to listen to, it’s painfully slow about half the time with the currents being against you. We always plan for as much fair current as possible but, with all the inlets from offshore to the inland passage, it’s kind of impossible to plan even a short trip on an all-fair current. But we gave it our best shot.

Beluga Greyfinger has issues with the infernal-cumbustion-engine

First day out of Fernandina Beach was a nice fast fair current ride to a beautiful anchorage about thirteen nautical miles down that winding grassy ditch. With hundreds of yards of water to each side most of the way, it’s frustrating to have to watch the depth sounder and chartplotter so carefully. The deep-enough channel is narrow and constantly shoaling along its edges, though, so it’s not the most relaxing travel day. Add that focus to the noise and we do short days when we go inside.

Serious focus…

We pulled in to the Nassau Sound Cutoff and buried the hook in about ten feet of clean sand with a hundred feet of scope out with a six foot tide. Oh yeah, we slept like babies that night in that perfectly quiet anchorage off the Timucuan Nature Preserve.

Timucuan Nature Preserve

When we woke the next morning, the tide was low and we blinked at the bank of birds standing on sand not far off our starboard beam. It’s one thing to know that shoals exist – it’s another thing to be looking at one from so close.

Our (way too) close neighbors!

Raising the anchor (wonderfully clean) was only slightly nervous because of a cross wind and the dying of the ebb current that had kept us oriented away from the shoal. Then we poked our ways through the shallows and back on track.

Rather than a marginal anchorage in the middle of nowhere, we chose to enjoy my (Dena’s) “Small Craft Advisory” forty-seventh birthday in the greater protection of the St John River. Only a couple hours got us to an anchorage across from Blount Island and the “fish camp” was a good spot to leave the dinghy. A movie and a meal for celebrating and then back on the boat…my favorite spot to be!

Birthdays are fucking awesome!

The weather forecast hinted at and then solidified its (lies?) story about there being a couple of good days for taking the offshore route. We’re going to head out the St John Inlet tomorrow (Sunday) and go about a hundred nautical miles south to the Ponce de Leon Inlet near New Smyrna. If the winds are light and we sail slowly, that’s okay. We have a day and a half to do what will probably take a day. This inlet isn’t maintained for cargo ships, so we really don’t want to head through in the dark. It’s good to have the extra fair wind time.

So hold on to your ribs we’re heading back to the Ocean! Hopefully I (James) won’t need another five days to recuperate from this one!

Four days offshore, Beaufort to Fernandina Beach

Beaufort was a terribly tight anchorage, which is what we’d heard and why we’d chosen the dubious charms of Morehead City each and every other time we’ve come through the area. We watched the weather carefully and, along with a whole bunch of other cruisers, decided that the weather looked good for leaving on Wednesday, November 16. We were going to aim at Florida and, by sticking close to the coast, have multiple options for inlets once the weather started getting ugly or we just felt like stopping. Unlike most of the others, we waited for the seas to lay down a bit and took the beginning of the afternoon ebb instead of the last of the morning one.

We finished the engine exiting the bar from Beaufort and the boat rose to the occasion. We were full sail for most of that night but as we approached the northern reaches of a cape called Fear we started shedding sail area like it was female laundry in rebooted Star Trek movie.

That was probably for the best, since we still had uncomfortably choppy seas…steep, quick, no fun…as we approached the southern end of the Frying Pan Shoals off Cape Fear. It was demoralizing so early in the trip and had us remembering our original plan, which was to go inside at Wrightsville Beach and take the ICW to Cape Fear’s south side. Oh well! We were sailing and the boat was driving herself. We could take a bit of a beating as long as we didn’t have to start that fucking engine…and we didn’t.

Things got better on the lee side of the shoals, but we were spooked enough that we didn’t take the straight-line course to the Florida coast. We swooped toward the South Carolina coastline, coming within ten miles of Hilton Head before swinging farther south. That put us in some dead calm waters with gusts of just a couple knots keeping us moving enough to be safe and feel that we could enjoy the ease of it all.

It’s hard to pick apart the experience of spending days at sea. I (Dena) started making notes in an app on my phone but the notes disappeared and I was discouraged enough that I didn’t try again. I know that we reefed and shook reefs, were full sail some but mostly had the yankee but not the staysail out because of how far downwind we were. We nibbled on easy food when it was rough and did hot food anytime it was safe. We made coffee each morning, except the first one when it was so damn choppy.

But we sailed the entire time. We’ve been biting down hard on this electric motor thing for a good six months now and this cruise confirmed a lot of data for us both. A) We can sail this boat in almost any weather and…B) We’ll do almost anything not to have to put the cat through another 17 hour diesel-engine shocker.

Man does he hate that engine!

We kept the first reef in for the last three of the four days, giving us a really nice downwind angle even on the bright and gusty third day’s seas of sloppy nausea.

That night we entered the waters off the Coastal Empire of Georgia. There is a SuperMax ships anchorage about 15 miles offshore between Savannah and St. Simon, Georgia. A SuperMax is a ship designed to go through the “new locks” of the Panama Canal. The “old Locks” could only handle ships up to 1000 ft in length. Those ships were called PanMax ships. The new size limit for the Panama Canal is 1202 feet in length and there are 36 of them anchored off the Georian coast right this minute.

We sailed, well, it was my (James’) watch, so I sailed our home and family right through the middle of that semi-dormant monster fleet of container ships…in the rain. And it took almost exactly three hours. The exact length of my dog-watch.

Shift Kiss!

Lovebot, the Monitor windvane, was engaged the entire time. On occasion in the lightest of winds, a restraining hand on the wheel kept it from bearing off too far in a lull, but overall we did our job and Lovebot did its.

Our on-watch jobs were analyzing the wind patterns and currents, choosing when to reef or shake one, aiming us farther up or down course by adjusting Lovebot, and making sure no one would come out of the empty ocean and hit us. The on-watch pleasures included watching Atlantic spotted dolphin (Stenella frontalis) and short-snouted spinner (Stenella clymene) play with Cetacea’s bow wave. The spotted dolphin were a lot more interested in engaging with us weirdos aboard, but they were also just taking a break from some kind of large-group fishing activity and left us once we’d passed the rest of their pod. Watching the spinners leap was humbling and exciting.

The off-watch jobs were sleeping, eating, and cuddling with Beluga Greyfinger. He really came into his own as a sailor on this trip. He didn’t hide but didn’t go out on deck either. He played with us and rolled around on the floor. He enjoyed a couple of brushings, ate, drank, and used the litter box. The only sign that he wasn’t quite the same as when we’re at anchor was how firmly he demanded to be on our laps or curled somewhere on our sleeping bodies. Again, it’s a two-sided comforting, especially during the taxing times when we come off watch worn out by bracing against the motion of the boat.

We approached St Marys Inlet after dark and decided that we could manage the well-buoyed big-ship entrance even so. Bowling along downwind masks the true strength of the wind but we knew quite well that turning 90 degrees to starboard would come along with full wind and broadside wave action…we knew it intellectually, at least. We started the engine to let it warm up but left it disengaged. (No need to warm up an electric motor…another efficiency argument.) Once actually driving in those strong winds and waves, it became an endurance game. We were so damn close.

And then we were well within the jetties and the water laid down. At the point where the channel splits north into Georgia or south in Florida, we turned up-wind and dropped the main. The wind behind us negated the ebbing current and we slipped down along the industrial brightness ashore. Once past the commercial boat turning basin, boats were anchored everywhere and we slowed to pick a safe route between them. A turn west and another north got us in the mouth of Bell Creek where we dropped the anchor and dropped into bed.

ICWooWoo

The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway is a bizarre lesson in the surreal.

WTAFO?!

…The (all too) real…

Abaft on glass S/VS.N. Cetacea…home at Great Bridge?

…And the, “I’m totally done with this shit!”

S/V Tranquilla heading into the Great Bridge

If you’ve been with us you know we like to anchor our boat…

and the more remote the anchorage the better.

Sometimes in the ICW we’ve anchored in the packed…

And sometimes we got it all to ourselves without a single boat in sight.

The McMansions that dominate the view to one side of the compass…

…are simply forgotten on the other.

Because we prefer a safe, secure, but empty anchorage, we end up stopping in some strange places. Sometimes, though, the ICW and weather constraints put us in queue with other southerly travelers.

James captained us through the Alligator River Bridge

A combination of the forecasted storms and our desire to avoid repeating parts we’ve done too many times already sent us the Alligator and Pungo River route, rather than around to Manteo in Croatan Sound. We still lost most of the traffic by being so damn slow, and only two other boats chose to stop before the Ditch portion of the river.

Our anchor held securely and we watched the Full Beaver Moon total eclipse very early the next morning…then went back to bed.

By the time we took off, things were looking pretty good up in the river.

JeBus Beams on the Alligator River

And even a sail-assist doesn’t make us fast.

…but it does make us pretty!

The part of this journey that feels interminable, the motoring-sailing through ditch part, is almost over. We’ll be heading offshore from Beaufort Inlet and both our pace and our mileage should improve greatly!

The boat and her systems are performing beautifully and our heading is a preferable South. On and on we go, like life itself, with the wind and the change.

…And where are you now?

Here…Now…

My (James’) mother died in the early morning hours of the 7th of November 2022. Goodby Mom.

She was an amazing woman. If you know me you have heard a thing of two about her. If you don’t, well, you’ll probably just feel sorry for me because that’s what we do as humans… if we can’t empathize we sympathize.

Thank you in advance. Today is a day without my mother in the world. Tomorrow will be another. The image above (Shot by Dena Hankins) is most likely the last photograph she ever saw.

Goodby mom. I will miss you.

…at 0330 Dena and I woke to watch the Beaver Moon go into full Lunar eclipse.

Goodby my mother, I will miss you.

NY-VA Days 2 & 3: go, no-go

I (James) was sailing at night on a black sea of choppy gremlins sneaking across my bow illuminated by the insane but receding Atlantic City. From the time I popped my rib until it was impossible to stop, from there on out it was about being as relaxed as I possibly could. As awake as I possibly could be. As hands-off as I could be while not fucking up. Cetacea (and Dena’s trim) performed to perfection. The boat sailed a straight line south down a stereotypically sloppy Jersey Shore and it’s almost as if Cetacea just begged me off of trimming any sail and fucking us up all night long. Have I mentioned that I fucking love this boat? I know that I’ve mentioned loving Dena and her trim!

The multitudinous stars were alive that night and I can’t remember seeing a single satellite…not a single one. How weird is that, Elon?

When I (Dena) went below after my 0300-0600 shift, we were at the decision point.

6:54 am

It was the last possible moment for a comfortable and safe ride into Cape May, and James declined. He took his first short watch and I came back up at 0700 in a grey-light world that soon grew a sun.

The second go-no-go point was for heading up the Delaware, but James had found a comfortable mix of cat, anti-inflammatory and painkilling pills and he wanted to keep going. He was mildly bewildered by what looked like a bunch of boats rendezvousing right next to the ship channel going up the Delaware, but I took the next watch before they revealed their purpose.

In weirdly modern fashion, I watched a group of AIS signatures hover at the edge of the channel, as shown on the chart, until a ship went by. Then I watched those signatures bolt across like ducklings across a busy road and take up a staggered course heading, along with us, down the Delmarva peninsula.

We started to catch their radio chatter and realized that yes…it was a rally or educational trip of some sort and that no…they weren’t at all our type of folk. I mean, who chooses to be within several hundred yards of another boat when you already have the wide grandeur of the world’s ocean around you?

11:15 am

The wind began to ease, which meant that we had to bring it more abeam in order to get force and stability from it in the still-sloppy swells. We weren’t able to go as far downwind and so we planned out how we would head out to sea and then gybe back toward shore. It was a good day of sailing, but definitely that kind where you’re never quite pointing the boat at the place you want to end up.

We did the half-shifts in the noon hour so that we’d swap night watches, but that didn’t work out quite so well as usual for James because he ended up getting neither sunset watch. We’d come south enough that the sunset actually happened 8 minutes LATER than the day before so I (Dena) got the show all four times. In autumn, that is not something most people experience. What a visceral message about how much we’d changed our position in the world!

Then it was my (James’) turn to conquer the flattened waters of the southern Delmarva Peninsula from Assawoman down.

9:14 pm

The same group of ducklings hovered to shoreward as we (like we do) went just a little slower than the greater waterlines before us. And fuck a bunch a that shit.

Day 2: 112.9 NM, average speed 4.67 knots, max 8.55 knots (down one of those sloppy-ass’d waves).

7:32 am

The sun rose on another day and we entered the Chesapeake Bay from another way. A way we’d never entered before.

Driving over the heads of the drivers in the tunnel

Going in through the out door of the Chesapeake motherfucking Bay we were still about six hours through Hampton Roads to our destination for the day. We’ve been to this place…so..many…times…before! We’ve even called this place home. We have a greater local knowledge of this place and this time it felt different somehow. To me (James) it felt like war and I’m too old for this, I got a broken-fucking-rib.

There were two smaller war-ships heading out as we entered the pinch of the bridge-tunnel between Norfolk and Hampton and one huge Japanese ONE cargo ship. We ducked in behind the big pink ONE and Dena took the helm for the approach to Willoughby Bay, that aforementioned past home.

We entered what we think of as a wide open and empty space to find a tri-moron and the 6-strong Cylon fleet of catamorons along with a handful of regular monohull cruisers fleeing winter. Still, it’s a big space and we found a good place for the anchor, which James discovered to be as foul as I’d guiltily warned him it would be…perhaps muddier than he’d expected.

Day 3: 13 hours, 72.8 NM, average speed 5.65 knots, max 8.03

Anchoring took a toll on his rib and so we’re spending a few quiet days being buzzed by the ubiquitous helicopters, the crew transport vessels and sundry tug-pushed barges moving concrete. We’ll get some groceries and showers, then get back underway.

Trip totals: 61 hours, 307.4 NM, average speed 5.04 knots, max 9.76