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.

Virginia, the bumper-boat state

We are underway southbound in the Pamlico Sound, finally back in motion after nearly a week pinned down by weather. We're not alone; with the first good weather in that long, everyone, it would seem, is on the move.

This serving tray was on the wall at Back Bay Ale House. I grew up in a Ballantine household.

When last I posted here, we were underway offshore to Atlantic City. We made good time and thus arrived a bit ahead of the flood, pushing our way in Absecon Inlet on the last of the ebb. We had the hook down in our usual spot (map) just before 5:30 and we immediately splashed the tender and headed to dinner at the Back Bay Ale House in Gardner Basin. We decked the tender as soon as we returned home, for an early morning start.

Saturday morning we weighed anchor at 5 AM to catch the tail end of the ebb. Conditions looked good for a straight run to Hampton Roads, but as cheap insurance we ran closer to shore on the route toward Cape May instead, giving us both a calmer ride and also an easier bail-out. The slight diversion added just a mile to the Hampton Roads route.

Leaving Absecon Inlet at zero-dark-thirty. Taken through a messy window.

With the forecast holding and actual conditions 3nm offshore excellent, we made the call about halfway to Cape May and came left onto the direct route. With westerlies for the whole ride, I plotted the course very close to shore off Assateague Island. The longest fetch was the open jaw from Cape May to Lewes, and even that was decent.

Traffic offshore was very light. We were passed by a couple of power cruisers, and we passed a couple of sailboats. I had one tug towing a barge, the Bart L, going the other way that I had to dodge; he was doing exactly what I was doing and "running the beach" as my tow-skipper friend calls it. By contrast, all the pleasure traffic was another ¾ mile or more offshore.

Our view underway when maneuvering I have towels over the plotters to see out the window.

We had a fair current the whole way, and before the start of solo watchkeeping I dropped the rpm so we would not arrive too early. As expected, though, we reached the mouth of the Chesapeake while I was still in the berth. This was the first open fetch since Delaware Bay, and here toward the end of the good window we found ourselves in 2-3 footers on the beam. Louise increased rpm accordingly, and I ended up waking up a good hour early and took over the watch at 8 AM, before we even reached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.

Our intended destination was the anchorage at Phoebus, as we always prefer anchoring over docking at the end of an overnight passage. I will spare you all the gory details, but while we were offshore I spent hours Saturday working out travel arrangements to go back to NJ for a visit with my folks from the Hampton area, since the weather had us whizzing by them without being able to stop as I had planned. I had the perfect trip arranged by train out of Newport News.

Sunrise over the North Atlantic.

What we learned before Louise even turned in was that there was not a dock to be had anywhere near Hampton on Monday for love or money. Evidently the enormous "Salty Dawg" offshore rally was staging in Hampton Roads and waiting on good offshore weather (they all left this morning). I call every marina from Newport News to Portsmouth and nary a space was to be had. I had cancelled all the travel reservations by Sunday morning.

What that also told us was that it would be a very, very tight squeeze into Phoebus, if we could fit at all. All of the rally boats who could not get a dock, or those who simply did not want to pay for one, were packed into every anchorage in the Hampton Roads area. And so it was that we decided to wave off Phoebus even as we were crossing over the Bridge Tunnel.

Sunset and a blurry crescent moon over Assateague Island.

Fortunately, we had the flood behind us coming into the roadstead, and that flood would take us as far down the Elizabeth as we cared to travel. We decided we could muster the energy to get tied up at High Street in Portsmouth, or maybe even Great Bridge if necessary, since it was the middle of the day in fair conditions. We knew wherever we stopped, that's where we'd be pinned down for the impending winds.

Normally I cross the ship channel and run down the northern part of the Elizabeth just outside of the green side. But an hour out we heard an announcement that they were moving dredge pipe and the whole channel would be closed until after noon, and so instead I swung wide and took the red side, where we could get around it. A cruising sailboat under power whom we had seen offshore, who does not understand the special channel rules at Thimble Shoals, nearly ran us into one of the reds in the Auxiliary Channel, even after clear communication on the radio. Clueless skippers in the very busy Hampton Roads area was a key reason we slowed down enough for me to be on watch as we arrived.

Lots of offshore wind farm activity now in Norfolk.

The diversion proved wholly unnecessary, as they had reopened the channel by 9:45, well ahead of the noon estimate, but I was already on the red side and had to stay there. Just as well, because by this hour the ship pilots were already fed up with the pleasure craft operating erratically. One pilot on an ultra-large (a special category with special rules) had the patience of Job explaining how, yes, he was indeed going to need the entire channel.

We arrived to High Street right around noon, and, unsurprisingly, the basin was entirely full. Our secret-squirrel spot on the outside bulkhead was open, but we had to think long and hard about spending three days pinned down there in a windstorm. In the end, we opted to pass it by and press ahead to Great Bridge, taking a chance on there still being room at the bulkhead.

Lots of activity on the water, at least for now while the last of the funds holds out.

Our planned fuel stop at Top Rack is between these two docks, and even though it meant arriving an hour later to Great Bridge, we decided to make the stop and fuel up. We took on 750 gallons and left the dock in plenty of time for the 2:30 lockage at the Great Bridge Lock. The bridge past the lock, normally hourly, is opening only on the even hours now due to mechanical issues, and we had the lock to ourselves.

We were relieved to find two spots left on the bulkhead just before the bridge. Had there been none, we would have had to lock back through the other way and go back to Top Rack. We were tied up before 3 PM (map) and got secured for the coming winds. Louise, who had been fighting a severe allergy attack all day and did yeoman's work to dock, lock, and dock again through all the sneezing, crashed.

Vector at the Great Bridge bulkhead. We never saw anyone on the sailboat behind us, which seems to be just stored there.

She was in no shape to go out to dinner, and I ended up walking to Jersey Mike's, in the plaza that replaced our beloved Mexican joint here, for an Italian sub and some chips for dinner aboard. I had to walk right past the now-shuttered Vino's Italian Bistro, which had been our go-to since the Mexican place closed, until they moved out of walking distance earlier this year.

Monday the winds started building as forecast, but it was still a pleasant enough day to get off the boat and walk. That let me go straight to Kroger for emergency supplies. Louise had gone through every tissue on the boat over the course of two days of heavy allergies, and I had to replenish the Strategic Kleenex™ Reserve. She felt OK by dinner time and we walked across the bridges to the Lockside Grill for dinner. Monday turns out to be $6 burger night (we had no idea) and the place was packed, with people mostly older than us.

Coming home from dinner we got a strong smell of diesel crossing the bridge, and we could see a sheen moving past the boat. I made a report to the Coast Guard. I snapped this picture a full 17 hours later. There is a fuel dock just the other side of the bridge from us.

Tuesday was the most intense day of the storm, with winds gusting to 40 and heavy rain all day. We stayed cooped up inside all day, surfing the web and checking off indoor projects. Except when we were paying attention to the parade of boats that, for some reason, were still coming through the lock and bridge. Many never got the memo about the reduce openings for the bridge and had to station-keep for over an hour. And the weird schedule had too many boats to fit the lock on some openings, leaving the latecomers with unplanned two-hour delays.

By dinner time we were stir-crazy, and when the rain let up to something less than torrential, we grabbed our umbrellas and walked to the closest place. With Vino's gone that is now Chili's, and despite docking here for a decade we had never set foot inside. I think the last time we ate at a Chili's was on a Red Cross disaster deployment maybe 15 years ago, and we are no longer acclimated to this kind of American chain-restaurant fare. At least they had several beers on draft.

Vector on the wall as boats wait for a bridge opening.

Wednesday morning we could have gotten underway and made a Thursday window to cross the Albemarle, and in hindsight I am really sorry we did not. But Louise's phone went to the great cell tower in the sky in Atlantic City, and the replacement I ordered on Amazon had not yet arrived to the locker. By the time the notice came in the afternoon we had missed the window to depart. I took the e-bike down to the locker in light rain, hitting the dollar and grocery stores again on the way home. We walked to dinner at Kagura, with acceptable Japanese fare at an all-you-can-eat price of $26. Louise reported the sushi as a B-, but everything else was decent.

At 11 PM, after Louise had already turned in, I listened to a latecomer as he came through the lock. Apart from towboats, almost no one comes through the lock after about 6 PM. He asked both the lock and bridge tenders if they could see any room at either of the free docks, and as it turned out there was a big space right in front of us. Being nosy I watched him out the back door as he approached from the lock, and then I moved up to the pilothouse to watch him dock.

As seen from across the canal. We have three fenders out "just in case."

As I looked out the pilothouse door I was aghast to see him rapidly approaching Vector, and I flung the door open in my bathrobe just as his starboard side made contact with our port. We had set three fenders out on the port side as a precaution, and the center one saved us from what would have been a lot of damage from his rub rail. It cushioned the blow enough that Louise said it was my screaming rather than the impact that woke her up.

Unfortunately, his complete lack of skill and panic of the moment meant that he turned hard to port and applied power to get away (hard to starboard and rocking astern/ahead was the correct maneuver) and he swung his stern right into us, missing the aft fender and putting a deep gouge in our hull paint. After that he managed to get it docked, and I took a photo of his transom and told him to come by in the morning to provide his insurance. I did not want to go back out  in the rain.

This gouge is about 3" long. Fortunately not down to bare steel, but it's well into the fairing and will need to be ground, faired, primed, and painted, "hoping" it will blend in.

In the morning we heard him calling the bridge at 7:45 for the 8:00 opening. He had not said a word to us and I marched over there to get his info. Never even an apology, just some mumbling about how "these things happen." I showed him the damage, told him there might be more we have not found yet, and got his name, number, and insurance information. He was already gone by the time we called the Virginia Marine Police to come take a report.

There are few words to express how upset and disappointed I am that we have been hit yet again and need paint repair yet again, but while we are literally headed away from the place that should do that repair. We managed to go ten years without anyone bashing into us, and this is now the third time this year. Arranging repairs is highly disruptive, and we are never made whole for that disruption.

Buckets, a sports bar, is one of our dining options. Not today.

Any thought we had about shoving off Thursday morning went out the window as we were waiting on the marine police. Realistically we would have had to make the same 8 AM bridge opening as Dimwit had, and, even then, we'd be stuck in the North River for two nights waiting on today's window to cross the Albemarle. We decided to overstay our welcome by yet one more night, and I had a nice walk in the afternoon. We just went back to Lockside for dinner, which I guess will be our new standard here. It was very quiet in comparison to Burger Monday.

Yesterday morning we dropped lines at 5:45 for the 6:00 bridge opening. It was just us and the towboat Island Fox pushing a deck barge. We had to close the blinds on our back door as his floodlights were coming right in and ruining my night vision. Me made the 6:30 opening at Centerville Turnpike, just before it locks down for morning rush hour, and I moved over to let Island Fox get ahead of us.

Sunrise as we approach North Landing Bridge. That's Island Fox ahead of us.

Normally I have to either run wide open throttle to make the next bridge a half hour later, or else slow roll at idle to make it a full hour, and in the pitch dark it would have been the latter. But they open on demand for tugs with tows, and we just followed Island Fox through the bridge at 7:20, and just stayed behind him the rest of the day. With such an early start, we had time to make it all the way across the Albemarle and to an anchorage off Croatan Sound, but it was still blowing 25 when we got to the south end of the North River.

I called ahead to one of the faster boats that decided to plow across the sound and asked for a condition report. "Breaking over the windscreen" was all we needed to hear, and we pulled over to a familiar spot in a partial lee off Camden Point (map) for the night. We had the hook down before 2 PM. The new solar kept us topped up all afternoon and through dinner, until we needed heat in the evening.

Sunset over Camden Point last night from our anchorage.

This morning we slept in, getting underway around 8 AM, and the conditions have been perfect. Which is why pretty much every boat on the east coast is on the move. These are great conditions for the Pamlico Sound route, and yet still hardly anyone uses it. We've seen only three other boats since leaving the North River, while watching a whole conga line headed for the Alligator on the marked ICW route.

Peeling away from the conga line.

The downside to this route is a dearth of reasonable overnight stops, and tonight will find us in a lee at the Long Shoal River. We will be online entirely courtesy of satellite Internet. Tomorrow we should be back in civilization.