Foggy Groundings, Dolphins and Bridge Delays

It was raining lightly on Thursday morning. We had been woken up in the night by huge bright lights lighting up the whole inside of the boat - we weren't sure what was happening at first, but then realized that the lights belonged to shrimp boats passing by on an early morning run out to sea. The rain stopped once we had gotten up, and the sky was clearing. Everything looked fine so we headed out. Not long after leaving Swan Point the boat we were following disappeared into a thick bank of fog that appeared out of nowhere. Ruth went below to watch our course on the chart plotter while Geoff was trying to feel his way from marker to marker. Then Geoff saw something else - the sailboat Isolde II was aground in the fog almost dead ahead of us!

We slowly motored up to Skip (the owner and solo sailor) on Isolde II. He had probed around his boat with a lead line to figure out the water depths, and he told us from which direction we could approach his boat without risking running aground ourselves. We threw a line to him and, after some maneuvering, managed to tow him off the sandbank. In the middle of all this, some dolphins showed up between our boats just as we were getting the lines hooked up in the dense fog. When we finished pulling Skip off the shoal, the fog was beginning to clear and we were able to see how narrow the channel was - it wasn't too surprising he went aground (single-handing in the fog isn't easy!). As a matter of fact, we realized that we probably came close to running aground ourselves on the opposite side of the channel as we were towing him by going in reverse across the channel.

Later that day we came across the most unexpected wildlife in the water as a deer crossed the ICW right in front of us on the Alligator River (see photos below). To continue an eventful day, we ran into some unexpected construction on a bridge crossing the ICW. We ended up waiting for close to three (!) hours for the bridge to open. We actually anchored in mid-channel in front of the bridge for the last hour or so as we were getting tired of the engine running while drifting and waiting.

Deer Crossing


Deer Crossing


More things you see on the water


String of boats after the bridge finally opened

Shoals, Groundings and Engine Failures

After staying the night in the middle of the subdivision, we left on a beautiful morning expecting a good day. This day, however, turned out to be a rough one. After Morehead City the ICW is quite windy with cuts out to the ocean that provide for constantly changing current. We would be going 8 knots before a cut, and then 5 after without changing the engine RPM (i.e. not giving any less "gas"). The currents in the inlets also cause shoals or sandbanks to build into the channel. These shoals can be very shallow, and they are usually only marked with a buoy when they have become really bad. Most are not a concern for a shallow-draft boat like ours, but they do get the heart racing as the depth suddenly starts to decrease dramatically on the depth sounder. So we were already a bit on edge on this day. To add to this, we had just come across a sailboat that had run aground in an area that was very confusing in terms of the buoys that were there. A power boat had gone the wrong way, and then the sailboat had followed and gone aground.

We had planned on anchoring for the night, however, the anchorage we had picked didn't look great and we were shaken up by the day so we decided to stop at the Swan Point Marina. We drove past the marina to take a look, then turned around to head into their harbour just off the ICW. Just as we were headed in, Geoff reversed the engine to slow down a bit and "BANG!" the outdrive kicked up and the outdrive line wrapped itself around the propeller. (The outdrive on Geru is built such that when you are sailing you can pull the propeller out of the water to reduce drag. This is done with a set of lines, which normally are fine except when the locking mechanism fails and the prop is allowed to move backwards and up into these lines). After some very stressful moments, dropping the anchor in mid-channel to help slow us down and then raising it again to stop the boat from spinning around, running about and shouting to shore, we were able to drift the boat to the marina's fuel dock in what turned out to be one of the best docking maneuvers yet (no kidding)! We had some help from a fellow boater on shore and a marina attendant who came running to soften the landing, but we placed her starboard side perfectly onto the dock.

This past spring Geoff had modified the locking mechanism that holds the outdrive down when the engine is put in reverse as we had problems with this before. It turns out that the modification worked just fine. We think that the engine kicked up this time because we bumped the control mechanism in the cockpit so that the outdrive was no longer locked down.

Shortly after we settled down at the fuel dock (and Ruth's knees stopped shaking), the sailboat that had run aground earlier showed up and docked as well - the skipper had decided that he'd had enough for the day, too.


A heron on the dock piling


Things you don't expect to see on the ICW...


Travelling in company


Our first palm trees (planted)


Sandbanks along the ICW


Untangling our outdrive by marina staff

Fog, Groundings and Dolphins

On our way to Oriental, North Carolina, on Monday we encountered quite a bit of fog. At first this fog was just light, but, as we got closer to Oriental, it formed a thick line along the coast. Once again we were happy to have our GPS telling us exactly where we were. We did worry about other boats in the fog, but there wasn't much traffic, and we could see well enough at a shorter distance to stay safe.

We stayed at a marina in Oriental overnight after almost running aground on an unmarked shoal in the harbour (it's bad when we in our shallow-draft catamaran almost hit bottom!). Oriental is a small old coastal town with friendly people.

Just after leaving Oriental on Tuesday we came across a sailboat that had not followed the buoys leading it to stray from the channel and then to run aground. Having a much shallower draft, we tried to pull the boat off - we were successful in doing so, however, it very shortly afterwards ran aground again! After checking with the skipper left we left him this time as it was clear he needed more help than we could provide (he ended up calling Towboat US).

Later on that day we had a momentous moment as we saw our first dolphins of the trip in Beaufort harbour - a few dorsal fins appeared and quickly disappeared again in a smooth rounded motion just as Ruth was negotiating strong currents underneath a set of two bridges. She yelled "Dolphins!" and became teary-eyed as she had been looking forward to encountering these wonderful animals since we started talking about this trip. Our evening was spent anchored in an affluent subdivision of Morehead City. Beautiful large homes were backing onto the creek we were anchored in. It felt like we were living on land again because of the morning rush-hour traffic noise, which was a sound we hadn't heard for a while, especially not on the boat.

Spooner's Creek Anchorage (Morehead City)


The things you see on the water....

First Nights at Anchor

On Saturday we left Coinjock at the cold hour of 7 am and headed out to the Pamlico Sound. The crossing was very uneventful with the exception of seeing a tug pulling the longest load we've seen yet - he had at least 5 barges in tow, like a marine version of a train.

We had not tried anchoring yet so far on our trip, in part because the nights had been very cold, and we only had an electrical heater until we were finally able to find and buy a propane one in Annapolis (anchoring = no dock = no electrical connection from the dock to the boat). We were now finally ready to try anchoring, and the anchorage on the Alligator River looked promising. So we tried to anchor around 2:30pm; however, after numerous attempts we were not successful, which was very frustrating. We decided to continue on to the next marina. This was a difficult decision, because we now had to travel in the dark for a few hours. On getting to the head of the next canal we realized we did not want to go through that canal in the dark - it was unlit, narrow, and going through swampland with tree stumps along the shore. Luckily, there were two other boats that had caught up to us and were anchoring in a bay just beside the entrance to the canal, so we decided to try anchoring one more time near those boats. The first time we were once again not able to get the anchor to set (the anchor was not holding). So we called one of the other boats, which did not appear to have any problems anchoring, on the VHF radio and asked what they had done. It turns out that they used a different type of anchor than we were. Our spare anchor is of that type, so we switched anchors and had success the first time! What a great relief. For the sailors: our Fortress did not hold in soft muddy ground - even after a dozen tries or so, but, much to our surprise, our CQR held immediately.

Sunday was a cold, grey, drizzly day. We motored for about seven hours to the next anchorage we had picked. No problems anchoring this time. We spent our second night at anchor sitting in a field of small, colourful crab pot buoys, so we needed to be careful using our engine when we arrived and again when we left so we didn't snag a line with our propeller. The anchorage was beautiful, though - a marshy shoreline with trees in the background and (outside of the crab pot buoys and a couple of navigational markers) no signs of civilization.

On the offical ICW

Tuesday we started on the official ICW (Intra-Coastal Waterway) with mile marker zero in Norfolk/Portsmouth. It was a bit foggy in the morning, but luckily most of the fog was behind us out on the Chesapeake and not on the canals we were travelling on. We soon met up with other boats heading south as we all had to wait for numerous bridges to open. Some of the bridges would open when you arrived (on request), however, one of the bridges (Steel Bridge) only opens once an hour. We just missed an opening, so we waited with three other boats drifting back and forth for an hour.

We ended the day at Pungo Ferry Marina, which is a little store and and a dock on the side of the canal - the store clerk was very friendly and talked up a storm. We had a great sunset to accompany our wine bought at the store that evening.

Wednesday was an uneventful travel day which took us to Coinjock. We spent a few days there. Coinjock is a town which has two marinas with long docks along the ICW. The marinas are one of the last stops for a while to provision. The marina we stayed at didn't have much in the way of groceries, so we dropped by the marina office to ask about getting to a grocery store. The owner asked us to wait a minute while he cleaned out his truck. When he came back he told us the truck was out back and the keys were in it... so after checking that he was actually lending us his truck (rather than just giving us a drive), off we headed to the grocery store with another cruiser. What a luxury it was to have a vehicle to do groceries - we did a BIG shop that should keep us going for a while! We put our groceries into the back of the truck, where they shared space with a number of duck decoys - there is a lot of duck hunting in the area. We saw several small motorboats painted in camouflage colours for hunting.

In company down the ICW


We saw many jets as we passed a naval airbase


Pungo Ferry Sunset


Coinjock Sunset

Crab Pots, Company and Waves

We stayed in Annapolis for a few days waiting out some bad weather, resting and reprovisioning. Geoff rode his bike for the first time since his injury and he had no problems - a good thing as the grocery store was four miles away. We also met up with Ruth's friend Chris and had a great dinner out in downtown Annapolis.

Saturday we left Annapolis for Solomons Island. It was a cold but uneventful trip on the Chesapeake. When we left the Solomons Island inlet on Sunday, we had the company of six other sailboats! We are finally joining the stragglers that are heading south. The weather was good and we were making good progress, so we ended up making it to Deltaville that evening.

On Monday morning we left for Norfolk/Portsmouth, and we saw our first pelicans flying a low circle around our boat on the way out of the harbour. There was a small craft advisory in effect and it was quite windy. This was the roughest day on the water we had seen yet in terms of waves. At one point we hit 12 knots of speed as we surfed down a wave! This was the first of what will likely be many days of training of the crew to deal with rougher weather - Geru did fine, but Geoff and Ruth were shaken up. The waves felt huge but in reality were probably about 5 feet high. Surfing or running with the waves was bad enough, but when we had to cross them at an angle to get into Norfolk it became somewhat scary. As we said, the crew needs to get used to it...

Entering Norfolk, we passed a portion of the US naval fleet, which is quite impressive when seen from waterlevel. We stayed the night at a familiar marina where we had Geru surveyed last summer before we bought her.

Annapolis Harbour


US Navy in Norfolk


US Navy in Norfolk

Chesapeake Bay Day 1

We left Chesapeake City early Tuesday morning with light rain, which seemed not to be a problem until we got out into the C&D Canal. From the time we left the dock until we got into the channel the rain had picked up and the visibility was reduced. The problem only got worse as we left the canal and entered Chesapeake Bay where we could only see the next buoy ahead of us. We were very happy that we have an electronic chart plotter which tells us our current position based on GPS data no matter what the visibility is like.

Around lunchtime the rain stopped and the visibility returned to something close to normal. I say "close to normal" because the sky was surreal with bands of purple and pink on the hazy horizon while the water was an oily calm. Everything on the water looked like a mirage (even the video camera had a hard time focusing!)

The final stretch into Annapolis was rather stressful as we were motoring with the sun directly in front of us causing lots of glare off the water. We had a hard time seeing the sea of crab pot buoys in the water all around us, which would have created havoc on our propeller had we ran one down. Luckily, we managed to get through without incident. We arrived in Annapolis Landing Marina just as the sun was setting, both of us very exhausted and happy to be at a dock.

C&D Canal


Our laptop chart plotter view


An old ship appeared out of the fog


A large freighter also appeared out of the fog




The Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Stripers and the Delaware

We spent three days in Cape May at Utsch's Marina, where we stocked up with food and did laundry while we waited out some strong winds. Cape May is a pretty seaside town with a surprising number of people there for this time of year. It has many neat Victorian-style homes, a beach promenade and many little gift shops. The marinas were filled with fleets of fishing boats, both charter and private - we were one of the few sailboats.

While wandering around the marina one day we saw a gentleman cleaning two large fish that he'd caught. Wanting to know more about the fishing, we wandered over and started talking to him and learned a few things that we're hoping to apply once we get farther south and try some fishing of our own. At the end of the conversation, he offered us two fillets from one of the Striped Sea Bass he'd caught - it made a great dinner that night !

We left Cape May at 6:30am on November 12th accompanied by a stream of fishing boats heading through the Cape May Canal. This was the busiest water we have been on yet - the fishing boats were lining up behind us as we were slower than them.

Delaware Bay is famous for getting rough in strong winds. Our crossing started out quite rough and bouncy (see Video looking forward and Video looking backward from the cockpit), but the wind died down and it was quite calm when we neared the top of the Bay. All in all the Delaware was nice to us. Another boat had left two days before us and, from what we heard, they had quite a rough trip on the Bay.

At the top of the Delaware Bay we entered the C&D Canal (Chesapeake and Delaware Canal) which was described in our cruising guide as being very busy, so we expected lots of commercial traffic. During our trip to Chesapeake City at the end of the canal we didn't see a single boat. Once we stopped for the night, we did see two freighters go through... still not that busy!

We spend a nice quiet night at the town dock in Chesapeake City. We arrived late and left early so we didn't go into town, but it seemed to be a quaint sleepy little place.





Utsch's Marina

Striper Dinner (Striped Sea Bass)

Cape May Canal

Cape May


C&D Canal

The Atlantic

On Sunday, November 4th, we dropped Al off at the dock of the 79th Street Marina and pointed our bows towards the Atlantic Ocean. We had expected a fair bit of traffic on the water as we passed through the main New York harbour, but, because it was Sunday, there were only a few ferries, freighters and pleasure boats. The only excitement we had leaving the harbour was under the Narrows Bridge where we had a police escort while multiple helicopters flew overhead. Traffic also seemed to be stopped on the bridge; we assume this was all due to the New York Marathon which was on that day, but we're not sure.

As we passed through the Lower Bay towards Sandy Hook we encountered very choppy wavy water and even saw some breakers over a shallow shoal. Surprisingly, as we rounded Sandy Hook and were officially out in the Atlantic, the waves calmed down quite a bit and we had a comfortable trip down the shore to Manasquan Inlet. The shoreline consists of one long beach and only has a few inlets connecting into inland waters. We actually saw some surfers in wetsuits riding the cold Atlantic waves on the beach in Manasquan.

Manasquan is a small quaint town. We stayed there for three days waiting out yet another storm. We were awakened one night by a loud banging noise on deck only to discover in the morning that a sea gull had used our boat as a chopping board to dismantle a crab! There were bits of crab shell all over the deck. Another gull tried to do the same thing another day with a starfish.

We left Manasquan on Wednesday and motored to Atlantic City. We saw the glittering casinos from afar, but we wanted to get farther south so we left early the next morning (while we still had good weather) and made it to Cape May.


New York



Leaving New York behind


Some of the traffic we saw in New York Harbour



Our Police Escort under the Narrows Bridge



Ruth on our first beach at Manasquan Inlet



Atlantic City casinos at night (view from the boat)



It was a cold trip to Cape May!

Photos and Videos

It's been a while since we've posted... some posts are on their way, but in the meantime we have posted some photos over at Flickr and videos at Vimeo.

We are currently in New York City taking in the sights.

Halloween and Movie Stars

We spent six days in New York at the cheapest "hotel" New York had to offer (30$ a night), although it was a bit bouncy due to the boat wakes and current. It did include free showers and laundry if you didn't mind a wet dinghy ride in. It was a two-block walk to Broadway and the subway, which we took downtown several times during our stay.

We had intended to spend three days in New York, however the remnants of hurricane Noel kept us in town (not a bad place to wait out a hurricane). The effects we felt were strong winds and associated bigger waves, but no rain.

On our first day in New York we took a trip to the local West Marine store (on 37th Street) to pick up some of the items we have found we needed for the boat - although it was a fun trip, the store had very little of what we wanted due to the fact that New York is not really a sailing city. What made the trip more interesting was the sighting of Kim Cattrall (Samantha) from "Sex and the City" who was busy shooting a scene for "Sex and the City: The Movie" (Click here for a picture of the scene we saw).

Day two in New York was October 31, Halloween. The harbour master at the marina suggested that we might want to go to the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. Everything in New York is big and the parade certainly followed this rule - we stood in a huge crowd for two and a half hours watching all manner of costume and floats go by. (see flikr for photos and Vimeo for videos).

After a day of resting and cleaning ourselves and the boat up a bit, we headed over to Liberty Landing by water taxi on day four to check out the marina there. It was the biggest marina any of us had ever seen - over 500 boats! On the way back from downtown we stopped by a grocery store not far from the marina. It was an amazing grocery store - jammed packed. It was a smaller store than a "superstore" in Ottawa and it had no big isles, but it had better selection and more variety than anything we've ever seen. The evening came with strong winds and yet more waves as hurricane Noel passed by New York.

On day five, Al was going to leave early in the morning, but it was still too wavy and windy to get him and his suitcases to shore safely with the dinghy, so we spent the morning hanging out on the boat. In the afternoon we walked quite a way up Broadway (it's a nice neighbourhood around Broadway around 79th - the upper West side).

We left New York on day six (Sunday, November 4th) - Al back to Ottawa, and us South. Thank you, Al, for your invaluable help in getting us this far.




79th Street Marina












Dinghy Ride back to the Boat














Dinghy Dock (and our boat)









Halloween in Greenwich Village













World Trade Center Site (now under major rebuilding)











Shopping with Al









New York Subway