Down the shoah

We are underway northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, bound for Raritan Bay. Our two-week marina booking was up two days ago, but we did not have suitable weather out here on the ocean, particularly with only one stabilizer fin operational, until today. We dropped lines right at slack, which was not until 11am, so we will be arriving right at dinner time.

Vector in her berth at Hoffman's Marina. We were lucky to be next to the fuel dock, which let us offload the scooters.

I've been pretty much working non-stop since we arrived to Brielle, and so there is not much to say here in the way of our travelogue. Apart from going to dinner every evening, and three nights of fireworks that we could see right from our deck, we did not spend any time seeing the sights. They gave us wristbands for the pool, which would have been very pleasing when we arrived in 100° weather, but I never even got the chance to walk over and take a dip. And while this is quintessentially the Jersey shore, with all that implies, we never made it to a boardwalk, an amusement ride, or a saltwater taffy stand.

The heat dome our first couple of days trapped this haze. That's the sun center-frame.

We did enjoy the local eateries as much as we could. We had several nights of rain where we eschewed a scooter ride in favor of walking, and thus we ate at the marina's own restaurant, Waypoint 622, more than anyplace else. Fortunately, it was decent, and the marina gave us a couple of discount coupons. Wednesday is prime rib night and we did that twice. We also ate right next door at the more casual Pig & Parrot a couple of times, and just a little further away the Shipwreck Grill, a white tablecloth joint which could not squeeze us in on our first attempt; even the bar was packed.

Ah, that's better. Sunset over Brielle on a clearer day.

One night it was raining too hard even to walk, and we ordered from nearby Vinnie's Pan Pizza via Doordash. It was OK but not really the kind of crust we like, so even though it was walking distance we never went. The other place we were able to walk to was the Brielle House Bar & Grill, where we literally dined alone. It was OK but not worth a return visit, even though they had the best draft beer choice for me of all the places we tried. One morning we rode over to Brielle Bagels for breakfast, also not worth a return.

Squan Tavern has been here a long time. They added Italian food in 1964 and expanded next door sometime after that.

Our favorite of the lot was the Squan Tavern, a short scooter ride out to downtown Manasquan. When I hear "tavern" I think pub food, but this is NJ, and it turns out to be a very nice red-sauce Italian joint. They have a nice selection of drafts and decent house wines. A close second would be Lubrano's, which is conveniently in the same plaza as the ShopRite grocery store. It's a BYOB place but there is a discount bottle shop right next door and we split a $9 bottle of wine on both visits. Our second time the wait for a table was two hours and we instead ordered "to go" and ate on one of the few café tables they have out front.

We ate at the bar at Squan Tavern. I had the Sunday sauce, a taste from my childhood. Louise got seafood.

We made two dinner trips across the river to Point Pleasant. They have a very nice downtown, which I only saw passing through on the scooter, but noted for some future visit. We ate instead at The Ark Pub & Eatery (actual pub food this time) and Fratello's. You may sense a generally Italian theme here, and whatever else I might say about New Jersey, it has a lot of Italian restaurants and most are pretty good. I am, ultimately, a product of this cuisine.

This window made of old bottles adorns The Ark.

On the maintenance front, the big project, which is to make further progress on diagnosing and repairing the problem with the starboard stabilizer fin, had to be deferred. I just never had the block of time I needed to do the work (and this is despite a couple of "rain days"), and moreover I did not want to risk un-pinning the fin, not getting it working, and then being unable to re-pin it in the heavy current at the marina.

The river was crazy busy most days. This was one of the quieter times.

I did make time to tighten up the bolts on the anchor roller, which sometimes work loose over time. That task was non-negotiable, as our next stop will be an anchorage and the bolts had nearly worked all the way out. And while we had easy shipping access with the scooters, I cleaned up, photographed, listed, sold, and shipped the retired Juki sewing machine that Louise replaced with a newer version.

A workhorse. I changed the motor twice, the speed sensor once, and aligned it a couple of times. The Juki people told Louise she puts too many hours on it for a consumer machine and she should upgrade to the professional model. The new owner should be very happy.

The other non-negotiable project cropped up while we were here. Louise came running upstairs from her quilt studio to report she smelled something burning, and no sooner had we made it to the engine room to have a look than the smoke alarms went off all over the boat. The engine room was filling with acrid white smoke, and it smelled like Ricky Racer doing a burnout. Short of a hole in the hull, the most dangerous thing aboard a boat is fire, and suffice it to say we both had plenty of adrenaline in our systems at this point.

Well, there's your problem.

A different view.

The trouble was easy to find and not really a mystery, as Louise had quilts in the washing machine. The heavy load proved too much for the old drive belt, and the motor pulley had burned right through it. I spent an hour getting the remnants out, cleaning up the machine and all the belt pulleys, and putting on an old belt we keep as a spare so that the machine could finish its cycle. We had a new belt a couple of days later and all is normal now. We did have to air the boat out for the rest of the day, and scramble around getting the wirelessly-linked smoke detectors to shut up.

Video of the event, starting from when the smoke becomes visible and ending with me headed to the back of the ER to open the hatch and clear out the smoke.

I would be remiss if I did not report here on the marina, where we have stopped exactly once before, a full dozen years ago. It's pretty much the only transient marina that can accommodate us, and thus we have no choice but to pay the vigorish, and this is the reason we always bypass the Manasquan Inlet. The rate here is $5 per foot, plus another $30 per night for electricity (we use about $2-$3 of electricity per day). For our non-boating readers that is more than double the average price of a marina stay; at $290 per night you can get a nice hotel with housekeeping and a pool.

Breille has a nice recycling center a short distance from the marina. I made several trips. I did not have need, but it's nice to know they take old electronics.

We have paid this much or even a little more in the past, but usually that's in a resort area (for example Atlantis in the Bahamas) with resort amenities, or to be right downtown in an expensive city like Chicago or Miami or New York. Brielle and this marina are none of those things — a small pool does not a resort make — and it does not even have the facilities of a mid-range marina elsewhere like floating docks (the tide swing here is over 4') or breakwalls for the current. The staff is very pleasant, accommodating, and helpful, but I can say that about a lot of places we've been at half the price.

Among my dad's things I found this photo, I think from a Crystal cruise in the early 2000's. That would have been semi-formal night; I also brought the tux.

If you are wondering what would motivate us to pay that kind of money to be on the Jersey shore for a couple of weeks, well, that brings me to the reason for our visit and why I have been so busy here. My aging parents live just ten minutes from the dock here, which was really the reason for our only other visit over a decade ago, when they came out to the marina to see the boat. I've seen them on other NJ passes as well, but usually in a more cost effective way. We can anchor in Atlantic City, Barnegat Light, Shark River, or Atlantic Highlands and rent a nice car for less than a quarter of what it cost us to stay in this marina, and I've even driven or taken the train down from the boatyard in Mamaroneck when we have work done.

I combed the house looking for something comforting, familiar, and soft that I could leave with my dad. I found this bulldog from my high school.

Visiting for a day or two is one thing, but this time around I needed to be here a couple of weeks. My dad, who is 98, moved into a memory care facility a couple of months ago, and my mom, 94, is now trying to manage a life alone in a place not well-suited to it. This has been the reason for my last few trips here by rail or air, but I have been deferring the heavy lifting to a time when we could spend a couple of weeks right here in the boat, where it's a short scooter ride away.

In my dad's medicine cabinet. This might date to my childhood. I left it for another time; it's HazMat.

To be clear, I called a lot of other places to see if we could get a better deal. I looked at marinas in Forked River and along the Navesink from Atlantic Highlands to Red Bank. I even got on the waiting list at the state marina in Atlantic City, which would have necessitated a rental car but would still have been far less. But every place that could physically accommodate us (not many — we are longer or deeper draft than the vast majority of marinas can take) was sold out. Not surprising in an area where marinas have to make their nut for the whole year in the span of a four-month boating season.

Both Mom and Dad chipped in at this restaurant, long gone, owned by our cousin.

When all is said, though, I was glad to be this close. It let me come home for lunch most days and minimized the time we were apart. It made it easy to stop by and see my dad on average every other day, and I was able to spend at least four hours at the house every single day (apart from the lone day it rained too much). We were able to do everything on scooters except for the one day I had to drive my mother around to a bunch of banks, for which I rented a car.

It's been great to see you, Dad.

The trip to memory care is one-way. My dad is not going home. Yet he was the one with the computer, and the email address, and the text messaging. My mother is still firmly planted in the 20th century, and does everything by telephone and US Mail. I spent days getting into his computer and email, closing on-line accounts, securing everything, and setting things up so that I can handle any of their on-line needs remotely. I also excavated a lifetime of CD-ROMs, USB sticks, computer cables, old software, and the like. Midway through the visit I disconnected the fax line and the DSL Internet.

For some reason he had numerous 3D copies of the "Save" icon in multiple colors.

With US Mail and a land line being the only way to reach her, and with her being extremely hard of hearing, I also spent a lot of time on the phone (or online) trying to stem the avalanche of paper mail coming into the house. And I went through a decade (or more) of accumulated files and paper bills and statements and the like. Louise carted over ten pounds to offsite shredding, and I took a dozen or more bags to the donation center, recycling, and the dumpster. There is more to do, but I made a big dent.

As long as I had a rental car, I took advantage to get some of the larger items over to the donation center.

One evening at dinner I got a call from the memory care facility; Dad had an unwitnessed fall and they sent him to the emergency room. This is a required standard procedure for an unwitnessed fall where the head could be involved. We finished our dinner and then both rode down to the hospital to check on him, and he seemed very relieved to see a familiar face. The CT scan was negative and he was only there a few hours. I was very glad to be in town to give him some comfort.

I've written here in my DC posts that the L'Enfant Plaza hotel was the first place I stayed in DC, as a child when the place was new. I found this shoe mitt from that stay, which my dad was using to store small items.

Early in the visit I noticed some rotten wood at the base of the door frame, and we got a contractor out to replace all the rot and get the frame painted. That was ongoing when I wrapped up my final day yesterday. The contractors, and the medical staff at the care facility, were grateful to have someone to talk to that was not mostly deaf.

Wood rot on the door frame, quarter for scale. It was much larger than this once they got into it.

You may recall that I said I though we had a lot of growth on the hull, based on our speed through the water, and I asked the marina to get us a diver a couple of days ago to clean the hull. Like the marina itself, dive service here is about double what it usually costs us elsewhere, and the marina/yard tacks on another 10%, so it was expensive but sorely needed. It took two divers over 45 minutes (they have to move fast to get it done at slack water) and they both came out covered in minuscule live shrimp that were hanging out in our "reef."

It looks like seaweed but these are hundreds of tiny shrimp. They were moving.

We're now on our way to New York City, where Louise has scheduled yet another California visit with flights out of LaGuardia. It seems this is our year for dealing with elderly parents. I'll be driving back down here in a rental car, either while she is gone or shortly after she returns, to continue the work and take my mom to a few more appointments. With all that is going on it is unclear how far, if at all, into New England we will get this season.

Trains crossing the rail bridge (and the bridge's old mechanical siren) were a constant backdrop to our stay. I rode these "Comet" cars to college 45 years ago, and they are still in use.

This is our last open-water passage until we are done in the NYC area and head east into Long Island Sound, and that is probably the next time you will hear from me, maybe two or three weeks hence. Tomight and over the weekend we should be in Great Kills Harbor on Staten Island, and we will tackle New York Harbor and the East River after the chaos of the summer weekend has passed.

Delivery Trip

We are underway northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of New Jersey and bound for Manasquan Inlet and our next scheduled stop. We have basically been going non-stop since leaving Norfolk, making lots of miles each day and just stopping for the night. Skippers call this process of just getting the boat from point A to point B without taking in any of the intermediate stops a "delivery trip" (and there are professionals who do this sort of delivery for a living).

Barnegat Lighthouse, aka Old Barney.

When last I posted here a week ago, I was still getting over the flu, and I am happy to report that is behind me, with the exception perhaps of some lingering fatigue. The trip has not been without incident, however, to wit, the starboard stabilizer fin has been malfunctioning, and evidently we picked up a lot of growth in the very warm water in Norfolk that is costing us over a half knot. In hindsight I am sorry I did not call I diver in my final week there, but I was so flat on my back with the flu that I just did not deal with it.

I sorted and stowed the "take-out" supplies from the life raft service. This is an even older water ration, from the last time I did this, which I replaced with the "new" take-outs. These go in our ditch bag.

Thus last Tuesday turned out to be a much longer day than expected, taking us over ten hours to make Solomons. Arriving after 6, the best anchorage was full and we ended up going up the creek to our backup (map). We tendered to the Island Hideaway for dinner, where we asked for seats on the deck but were very shortly scrambling for cover due to a rain shower. We had a short walk after dinner.

Each half-liter pouch (one per person of liferaft capacity) contains ten individual 50ml servings. I tasted these, from 2007, before cutting them all open and dumping them. They were fine.

Wednesday we got an early start for a fair tide, which let us go all the way past Annapolis to the Magothy River, a first for us. We dropped the hook just outside of Deep Creek (map). We tendered up the creek to Donelly's Dockside for dinner. They have a nice courtesy dock and the food was decent.

We passed this interesting mailbox, made from an old scuba cylinder, on our walk around Arnold from Donelly's Dockside.

Thursday we left with the tide. The bay was quite choppy for most of the day, thankfully mostly behind us. We pressed on to the canal and whizzed to Chesapeake City with over a knot behind us. The entrance to the basin has again shoaled in, and we had just 8.3' on a tide of 1.8' as we made our way in. For the very first time ever in our history here, we found the basin completely devoid of anchored boats, and we had our pick of the best spot in the anchorage (map).

Vector all alone in the anchorage basin at Chesapeake City. A first for us.

We splashed the tender right away and headed ashore for dinner at just 4:30 to beat a forecast rain storm. With temperatures pleasant we opted to eat at The Deck at the Chesapeake Inn, at a table well under cover. It did rain while we ate, but it was done by the time we headed home, and we managed to stay dry the whole evening.

Approaching Hope Creek generating station. The steam and the overcast might persuade you this was a cool, crisp day, but it was 94° with 74% relative humidity.

Even on a delivery trip, pushing against the tide in the canal is not something we want to do, and so we had a free morning Friday while we waited on the current to reverse. I took the tender across the canal to Schaeffer's for gas, then landed back in town for a walk. The mercury was already headed into the 90s when I picked up a couple of breakfast sandwiches at Cafe on the Bay to bring home for brunch. I also took the time to finally clear the condensate drain for the pilothouse air conditioners; a quick shot of compressed air did the trick.

I kept getting CPA alarms for this tugboat, so I had to call him. He was driving in circles spreading shells on the bottom. You can see pumps blowing the shells off the barge with water jets.

We weighed anchor at the turn of the tide, which corresponds to near dead low tide. I had sounded the entire entrance in the dinghy when I went for gas, so I knew we could just squeak out along the east bulkhead. As it happens, just as we were weighing anchor a passel of speedboats were making their way into the basin on a poker run. They swung past the docks at the Inn to grab a card and then headed right back out; I could see no end in sight so I made my Sécurité announcement and we used the Law of Gross Tonnage to make our way out. A down-east headed eastbound on the canal did not get the memo and nearly T-boned us before realizing he needed to change course; such an expensive boat not to have a radio.

Not what you ever want to see underway: both fins on the same side of center. Here the port fin is trying to lean us to port while the starboard fin is trying to lean us to starboard.

We had a nice push out of the canal and part of the way down the bay. Normally we would just stop wherever we ran out of tide, but today we had to push on to the Cohansey River, because forecast westerlies overnight would have made the east side of the bay miserable, and we were still trying to put miles under the keel. Somehow in over a dozen years running the bay we have never had to go up this river, but today was the day.

Centering the fins reveals the port returns to center but the starboard is "stuck" in position, trying to lean us to starboard..

When we ran out of tidal push our speed dropped considerably. I attributed some of that to the dirty hull, and some to adverse tide, but there seemed to be more. When I looked at the stabilizers I could see the finicky starboard fin was actually "stuck" in the wrong position, with the computer using the port fin to compensate. The fins fighting each other like this likely cost another half knot or so, but there was little I could do about it out in the bay. We continued to the Cohansey, hoping for a quiet anchorage and maybe dinner ashore at the Bait Box restaurant at a marina a couple of miles upriver of our planned stop.

The difficult to access and even harder to manipulate terminal strip where the potentiometer and valve connect to the cable at the actuator.

The adverse tide in the bay became a fair tide in the river, and we had the hook down at a comfortable spot in a bend (map) by 5:15. Our hopes of dinner ashore were dashed the minute we passed the mouth of the river, when a cloud of biting flies descended on the boat, covering every outdoor surface. It was all Louise could do to be out on deck, covered head to toe in the heat, long enough to set the hook. We had leftovers on board. After dinner I tore into the stabilizer, replacing the positioning potentiometer, a likely culprit, on the starboard fin.

Walking to the grocery store in Atlantic City is a stroll along the Monopoly board. Here I am at Baltic and Pennsylvania, but I also passed Vermont, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and New York.

Saturday morning we had to push back out of the river but then had a fair tide most of the way down the bay, only having to push at the very end and through the Cape May Canal. The starboard fin behaved itself all day, leading me to believe the pot was the entire problem. We got a good spot in the anchorage (map) across from the Coast Guard station. The forecast said rain at 6, and so we headed ashore well ahead of that for our favorite joint, next to the boat ramp. Alas, it was not to be; the heavens opened just as we approached the dock, and we turned around like wet rats and went home to dry off and cobble something together from the pantry.

 We also landed on Luxury Tax, another space on the board. There it is, just above the total. I think this is 3% on the beer.

Our reservation in Brielle was set for Monday, but we need at least two days of good ocean weather to make it there from Cape May, and by Saturday night it was looking like we would have to hunker down for two full days, possibly right there in Cape May. But Sunday morning things looked barely acceptable to make a run for Atlantic City, and at the turn of the tide we poked our nose out the inlet. It was, indeed, just barely acceptable, and I had to curve around to follow the shoreline rather than the straight-line route that would take us out past the 3nm line.

The Borgate had a very yummy looking bake shop in its food court.

We were both well past done with the sea state by the time we made Absecon Inlet. With a fair tide at both ends and a 7:20 start, we had the hook down early at 2:30 in our usual spot (map) and we each had a well-earned nap. At dinner time, Google told us our preferred eatery, the Back Bay Ale House, was "as busy as it gets," unsurprising on a pleasant weekend. The harbor itself had also been "as busy as it gets" all afternoon. Instead we tendered over to the casino, hoping to eat at The Deck, their waterfront venue. The live music, while good, was way too loud and we ended up inside at Dos Caminos, where the service was glacially slow. Also, the cigarette smoke from the casino does not respect the restaurant boundary.

Mostly alone again, in the Absecon anchorage.

I much prefer to hunker down in Atlantic City than Cape May, but hunker down we did, with one more day to wait to continue our progress north. So Monday was something of a free day. We were out of lunch food, so I started my day with a walk across the Monopoly board to the Save-a-lot grocery store about a mile and a half from the Gardner Basin day dock. This is a terrible store, but the nicer Acme in Brigantine requires a bus ride in both directions. I filled my backpack and then caught a bus back to Gardner's, cutting the time in half since I had a half gallon of milk in my bag.

Still leaves open a lot of sporting possibilities.

After lunch I tendered ashore and walked to the Borgata, something I have meant to do on every visit but somehow never managed. There are zero sidewalks between the two casinos, making for an, uhh, interesting walk. While it is tacky in the way that all casinos are tacky, it is much more upscale than the closer Golden Nugget or even Harrah's, between the two, with much nicer dining options. On some future visit it might be worth taking the Jitney over for dinner. Things were much quieter on a Monday evening and we had no trouble getting in to Back Bay Ale House.

Sign over the bar at Back Bay Ale House. This cracked us up, because seven digits after the decimal point is precision down to less than a hundredth of an inch. And I am pretty sure these coordinates are actually inside the aquarium.

It is nominally a one-day run from Atlantic City to Manasquan Inlet, but in order to be able to dock we need to arrive at slack tide. That timing is much easier when broken into two legs, and so yesterday we set our sights on Barnegat Light. A fair tide at both ends would have had us leave Absecon Inlet at 10, but the forecast said the seas would be building all day and become untenable in the early afternoon, so we instead started to weigh anchor at 7:30. As soon as I turned on the stabilizers, however, the starboard fin was again back to its old tricks, after working OK for two days.

Barnegat Inlet from the top of Old Barney. It's calm; nothing like when we came in.

I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to get the fin to center so I could pin it, feeling our weather window slipping away the whole time. Eventually I had to give up, cutting power to the solenoid and just letting the fin "freewheel" for the day. The port fin worked extra hard all day, but we managed well, right up until we were making our way into Barnegat Inlet. We had nearly three knots against us in the channel, which caused our speed to drop to the point where the fin centered. The boat took some serious rolls in the turbulent inlet before either of us noticed the fins were not working, likely because we expected the lone fin to be less effective to begin with. Things got much better when I over-rode the speed sensor.

Looking back to the anchorage. Vector is just above center frame.

We dropped the hook in a wide spot off channel, just outside a handful of moorings (map). On our last visit I wrote there were so many moorings here that it was nearly impossible to anchor, but this time it was fine. We tendered over to the town boat ramp and walked to Kubel's for dinner, which was quite good. Afterward we took a short stroll. The starboard fin ended its day in a position where I was able to center it manually with my spud wrench and get the pin in for the next leg, and Craig from Stabilized Marine gave me some pointers for further troubleshooting.

The old mechanism, now fixed in place, from the original Fresnel lens. The light still operates, now with a modern rotating beacon.

Today's slack arrival to Manasquan meant leaving Barnegat Light at 11:30, and so I took the morning to take a longer walk and climb to the top of the eponymous lighthouse, affectionately known as "Old Barney." The boat ramp had an attendant during the day, who collects the ramp fee, and he had no issue with me leaving the dinghy there. On my way back to the boat I stopped at the Inlet Deli, clearly the town meeting spot, and picked up a couple of breakfast sandwiches for brunch. We are finally back in the land of decent bagels.

Lightkeeper sculpture, installed in 2019 when the lighthouse turned 160.

Today's conditions have been very benign, which is good considering we are still running on one fin, like Nemo. In a short while we will make the inlet, when I will have to set this aside for photo placement. We expect to be here at least a week and maybe closer to two before we continue north to New York. My next post will be underway on that leg, whenever it is.

Some sort of rescue squad training exercise was going on in the anchorage. I think this is an aircraft life raft and not a maritime one; the put about a dozen rescue workers in yellow helmets in it.

Update: We are docked at Hoffman's Marina in Brielle (map). I was unable to get the photos done before we arrived, and I've been going great guns since the minute we tied up, so I am just now getting back to it on a rainy afternoon. I'm going to just go ahead and post this, and I will pick up from our arrival here in the next post.

Travel bug

We are underway northbound in the Chesapeake Bay, making tracks toward our next scheduled stop, in New Jersey. It's been an eventful couple of weeks, and I want to catch up the travelogue here before it again gets away from me. The write-up of the Sail250 and Harborfest events will have to wait.

Vector tucked in at Little Creek Marina, as seen from the bridge over the creek.

I ended the last post on Sunday evening, our final evening at anchor off Hospital Point. Monday morning was the end of the show, but we needed to weigh anchor early to have a favorable tide out the Elizabeth River. We were on our way out of downtown before the first tall ships left the dock. It turns out that had us running right into a half dozen warships from several countries all backing out of slips at Naval Station Norfolk, we assume for FleetEX 250. The pilot aboard a Brazilian destroyer called us to ask us to move over to the red side, which meant I later had to call a pilot aboard a different warship to cross back. It was amusing to leave the harbor in a conga line of warships.

This Brazilian warship is overtaking us after backing out as we passed by.

We arrived to our destination of Little Creek right after lunch, made a quick stop at Cobbs Marina for a pump-out (our reserved marina's pump was down), and were backed in, tied up, and plugged in at our slip at Morningstar Little Creek (map) just as the mercury climbed into the upper 90s. We were thankful to have the power for the air conditioning, and spent the rest of the day inside. It was too hot to go anywhere else, so we ate at the on-site restaurant, Stony's Dockside, which was decent. An expected storm hit around midnight that gave the boat a good rinse, but also had me on deck moving fenders so we would not hit our neighbor just a foot off our starboard side.

Vector at Little Creek marina.

We arrived here a full day early, and Tuesday was spent packing and getting ready for our trip to Nevada. I got in an early walk before the heat became brutally oppressive, making stops at UPS, the grocery store, and a barber for my ministerial 'do. The heat and another storm trapped us on the boat all afternoon, and we finished up some leftovers aboard for dinner.

Wednesday morning we had a 5am Uber to the airport, which from here is just a ten-minute ride, and we were off on our whirlwind visit to the Reno/Lake Tahoe area for our niece Jennifer's wedding. We were on the ground in Reno by 1:30, picked up a car, checked into our local hotel, and met up with local friends at a Chili's across the street. It's been a very long time since we were last here, and it was great reconnecting with Dee, Julie, Jim, JC, Melissa, and Jimmy Joe over dinner.

Sunset over the Sierra Nevada from our hotel in Reno.

Thursday we drove up the hill to Stateline and South Lake Tahoe, which is something of a trip down memory lane for us. We'd both spent a lot of time here between skiing, camping, and motorcycling over the years. We checked in to our hotel and then met up with the family. It was great to have a day before most of the wedding guests started arriving.

The bride's family's condo had a lovely view over the lake.

Friday was the rehearsal, wherein we all learned just how windy it was going to be lakeside for the ceremony on Saturday. Afterwards was the welcome dinner at another lakeside venue, and I tried to meet as many guests as possible so I would not be facing so many unfamiliar people at the ceremony. I quickly exhausted my capacity to remember names and relationships, but it was great meeting everyone and it was a fun party.

Saturday was the big day, and after a hearty breakfast at the hotel I did some eleventh-hour practice on my delivery, mindful of the wind forecast for the lake. Being on east coast time we were up early every morning and had the mornings to ourselves. We took a good half hour to get dressed; it's been over a decade since I last donned black tie. I even had a brand new wing-collar formal shirt delivered to the hotel for the occasion; my two older ones were showing their age.

We visited one of the many parks on a free morning. This sort of vista takes me back; it is one of the things we miss living on the boat.

We got to the lovely Edgewood Resort a half hour early for sound checks; as I stepped up to the trellis I could see spray whipping off the lake onto my pant legs. There was a small craft advisory and two to three footers on the lake, with maybe 15kt winds onshore. Louise wisely brought warm fall clothes to this summer wedding, and I was quite comfortable in a wool tuxedo.

Pretty much everything went to plan, and, wind-tossed as they were, the entire wedding party filed in in grand style. I was a bit teary-eyed watching my niece walk down the aisle, but I managed to hold things together for the relatively short ceremony. I did not draw anything out, with the wind uncomfortable for many, and all too soon I was pronouncing them husband and wife and sending them off to the relative comfort of the more sheltered patio for pre-reception cocktails.

Officiating. Photo: Joyce Irby 

My part thus mostly concluded, I was happy to assume the role of just another wedding guest. It was a great reception, and we ate, drank, and danced a lot. After the reception, Louise dropped me at the after-party (seriously) before driving herself back to the hotel. This may have been a mistake, as the young groomsmen insisted on plying myself and the father of the bride with shots. I escaped with only minor damage after about an hour when I caught a ride to the hotel with the bride's parents. I tip-toed into the room at 1am, or 4am on my internal clock.

Louise snapped this between dances. That's the resort's signature espresso martini in my hand.

Sunday morning we went to the farewell brunch, where we again saw I would say the majority of the guests as they filtered through on their way out of town. It was at this point that Louise and I parted company; she needed to be in the Bay Area Monday morning to get her mom moved into assisted living, something of a last-minute change to our itinerary. She caught a ride to SFO with friends, and I stuck with our original flight and hotel arrangements.

I did my best to live up to this bobblehead doll, a gift of the bride and groom a few months ago.

That included driving our other niece Lauren, the bride's sister, to the Reno airport Monday morning. On the way we stopped in Minden at the county recorder's office so I could discharge my final ministerial obligation of filing the marriage paperwork. After dropping Lauren off at the airport I had time for a final lunch with our good friend Dee before turning the rental car in and hopping on the shuttle to the Silver Legacy resort downtown for the night.

Yes, that is a pair of black bears seeing if they can get in the back door of the condo. No, we did not open it for them.

I had a final few hours to myself to stroll Reno and marvel both at what has changed and at what has stayed the same in the 45 years I've been coming here. I ended up eating dinner at the cafe in the Whitney Peak Hotel, a rare casino-less establishment on the strip that was blissfully quiet compared to its surroundings. I remember when this building was, instead, Fitzgerald's Casino. I took a spin through the midway at the Circus Circus just for old time's sake, though there was no show when I passed through. And I turned in early to make the 4:00am shuttle to the airport, the entire reason I chose this hotel in the first place.

This did not exist on any of my early visits to Reno. 78 lanes.

The resort and all of Reno was packed with bowlers here for the months-long USBC championship at the National Bowling Stadium, and I think the shuttle driver must have loaded 50 bowling balls before he started taking normal luggage. Bowlers, it seems, all travel with a minimum of three balls in their luggage. I was at the airport in plenty of time for my pair of uneventful flights, and I was back at the boat by 6:30, walking over to Stony's for a quick bite. The place was packed with people in Sweden team colors for the FIFA match, some of whom appeared to be actual Swedes.

The Swedes and their cohort. Very cheerful considering they lost the match.

Tahoe had been blissfully cool, and even Reno was comfortable (it's a dry heat) compared to what I faced on my return. Wednesday temperatures had climbed into the 90s by lunch time, and after picking up some packages at the office I basically shut myself in the air conditioned boat. After getting unpacked I spent a good deal of time researching and ordering a new computer for Louise. At dinner time I braved the heat on the e-bike to run to The Dirty Buffalo for draft beer and dinner before making a quick stop for milk on the way home.

Lake Powell, rather what's left of it, from the air.

Thursday was another scorcher and I resigned myself to more inside projects. Our friend Dave had gifted us an electronic piano that had some inoperative keys, and I tore into that, quickly learning that it was every eighth key was was dead. That gave me false hope that it was just a ribbon cable or a bad connector on the key matrix, but after two days of working on it I had to concede defeat and consign it to the dumpster. I took the e-bike to Regino's for dinner, decent Italian food but the bar was charmless. By the time I turned in, I had the sense I was coming down with some kind of crud; my niece had reported getting sick after I dropped her at the airport. I had taken a quick walk at 11pm, when the temps had finally come down into the 80s, and I found myself getting chills.

Attempted keyboard repair. I had to take all those keys off to get to enough of the circuit board.

The descent was rapid, and whatever it was had me flat on my back for the next couple of days. It was all I could do to finish up the keyboard project and then just vegetate in my easy chair watching videos. On Saturday, fearing the worst, I took one of our remaining viral tests, which immediately came up positive for Influenza-A. No wonder I was miserable. By the end of the day Saturday I was out of cold meds.

Enough said. I want more of these tests, which we got as part of a clinical study.

Sunday morning I had a rental car booked, and so I put on an N-95 mask to go get it. I immediately hit up the drugstore for some more cold meds and the grocery to replenish the lunch supply. I again donned the N-95 to pick Louise up at the airport, one of the two reasons I had originally booked the car.

My seatmate on the flight to Norfolk.

Yesterday morning I was feeling considerably better, and I headed off stag to Viking Lifesaving to pick up our freshly recertified liferaft. Complete service on the raft was north of $1,500, but we're good now for another three years. We loaded the raft aboard and I returned the car while Louise wrapped up the last of the laundry in preparation for departure.

We were both sitting in the saloon waiting for the dryer to finish when we felt something hit the boat hard. We ran on deck to see another boat backing in to the slip next to us, and he had underestimated the cross-current and gotten cattywampus on his way back. We had several fenders out on that side from when we originally backed in next to another boat, having left them there for just this sort of thing. But we could not be so lucky that he would have just hit the fenders; his steel rub rail hit our paint forward of the fenders, with one of the mounting screws taking a big gouge.

Another gouge. Through the paint, primer, and part of the fairing, but thankfully not to bare steel.

Normally I would have just gotten contact information and insurance from them, but after the mate first told us they did not hit, and then, when confronted with the actual damage, told us it was not them and we'd just have to fight it out with their insurance, we just called the Virginia Marine Police instead. They dispatched an officer who was about a half hour out; we informed the marina we would need to remain in the slip until they arrived.

Our paint embedded in their rub rail screw.

Considering we had a fresh gouge, and some of our paint was embedded in their rub rail, it was pretty cut and dried and I expect the report to read that way. I do have their insurance information; this is the third time we have been hit while docked in the span of a year, all in Virginia, and this is the third Progressive insured responsible. As soon as I have the police report I will be calling Progressive to file a claim; the last claim is still open since we have yet to repair the damage. We might be eligible for the Progressive Frequent Guest club.

Tennessee River.

All of that delayed our departure by another hour and a half or so, but at least we had air conditioning. We were finally off the dock and leaving Little Creek a little before 1pm. Due to the short day, I had picked out an anchorage off Mobjack Bay, a ten mile detour from our usual route. But an hour or so into the cruise, with the air temperature well into the 90s and the seawater temperature not much cooler at 88°, we decided to push on to Deltaville with a 7:30pm arrival so we could have more air conditioning without running the generator.

Passing over the Elizabeth River, with the Hospital Point anchorage much quieter than a week earlier.

Perhaps an hour out of Deltaville I stepped in a puddle on my way to the galley. The condensate drain pan for the pilothouse air conditioner, into which the drain from our mini-split is routed, had overflowed. Accessing that drain plumbing to figure out why is a major challenge, and so we just rerouted the mini-split drain into a bucket, an arrangement we had worked out while running it on the hard. We have to empty the bucket every hour until I can get the proper drain working again.

Condensate collector.

We dropped the hook in a new spot for us (map), in the other arm of the creek, but close to our old haunt at Deltaville Boatyard. Our friends Tim and Crisalida aboard s/v Paquita are just across the neck at a different boatyard, and it would have been great to get together for a beer at the Deltaville Tap Room adjacent to our anchorage, but I definitely do not want to pass the flu along to them. I likewise could have visited with friends Stacey and Dave aboard Stinkpot, who were docked a half hour away in Great Bridge while I had the rental car, but I did not want to risk transmission.

Moonrise over Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek.

The very full day and the lingering fatigue of the flu had me crashing early last night, and we had a quiet night in the anchorage. We were headed back out of Jackson Creek by 8 this morning. Solomons is a long day from Deltaville, at 9-10 hours, but once again we wanted the nearly-free air conditioning for the majority of the day. Right now the plotter says a 6pm arrival, and the CDC says I should no longer be contagious, so maybe we will tender ashore for dinner.