Thankful

A belated happy Thanksgiving to everyone.  We had a nice holiday yesterday, and I decided even to take the day off from the blog.  I knew, one way or another, that I would have plenty of time to do so today.

We are still in Morehead City, at the Portside Marina (map).  The ocean forecast for today continued to deteriorate, and we decided to postpone our departure until dawn tomorrow, when conditions are forecast to be much better.  So I am taking the day to catch up on a few things.

We had a most excellent meal yesterday at Floyd's 1921 Restaurant, just a couple of blocks from here, which is one of the most popular and highly rated restaurants in town.  The meal was served buffet style, and included all the traditional flavors, and then some.  We each had a heaping plate of turkey with all the trimmings, and I also had some roast beef while Louise tried the ham.  A shrimp and crab casserole was to die for, and absolutely everything on the spread was delicious.  If anything, there were too many choices and we simply could not sample it all.  I can see why their annual Thanksgiving meal sells out two months in advance.

Every evening at dinner (unless we are dining with others), we like to count our blessings, with each of us listing a few things for which we are thankful.  Often those things relate to the day's events, but sometimes we count more substantial things like health, family, or distant friends.  The thanksgiving meal is no exception, but the nature of the holiday causes us to reflect more deeply on the important things in life.

And so it is that we are thankful that (above and beyond health, love, and friendship) all of our worldly problems are what we are fond of calling "first world problems."  I know I write a lot here about what broke, what went wrong, how much time, money, or effort we spend fixing things, and the like, and perhaps it may seem at times that I am whining about life.  Today is a good day to say that nothing is further from the truth.  Not only are all our problems of the first-world variety, many are of the "poor me, my yacht is broken" variety -- the sorts of problems that 99.99% of the world's population will never have, but would love to.

If you are reading this page, then you too are among the most well-off in the world; you can read (one in three can not), you have access to the Internet, and, if you have any money at all to your name you are one in twelve people on Earth.

I do not want to disappoint that portion of our readers who come here for the schadenfreude, though, and, of course, we've updated our travel plans, so read on.

Yesterday we "slept in," which these days means we got up after 7am.  We knew we had only a couple of hours to travel, and it started out as a beautiful day.  We did enjoy our coffee over our usual morning reading in a very leisurely way, with good Internet access and no pressure to move along.  We did want to be docked and in quarters well before our 3:30 reservations, though, so we weighed anchor around 8:15 for an arrival here before noon.

Conditions on the ICW were so calm that more than once we remarked it was almost glassy.  A handful of die-hards were out in their small fishing boats, but there were no cruising boats in sight of us the whole trip.  We were pleased to pass the Statute Mile 200 marker, a fifth of the way to our interim destination on the Florida coast.



The calm persisted right up until we crossed the railroad bascule bridge coming into the port.  Then we were hit in the face with 20 knots of wind out of the south -- Louise could barely stand on deck to prepare lines and fenders, and had to wait until I could get her a partial lee to finish the job.

The docks here run east-west, and we were assigned to a spot on the north side of a pier, nose-to-nose with another boat.  We knew the spot, as it is exactly where we were tied up on our last visit.  The marina was closed with no staff on hand, so we knew we were on our own for docking, which is usually our preference anyway.

Try as I might, I just could not get the boat next to that dock.  With winds steady at 20 and gusting to 25 pushing us away from the dock, no sooner could I get the bow near the pier than we'd be pushed so quickly away that Louise could not possibly lasso a cleat.  This is exactly the kind of docking where, if we have to do it, we'll ask for help from a dockhand.  Not an option this time.

After three unsuccessful passes, we gave up and had to regroup.  They had told us the fuel dock was an option if winds were high, but they were thinking about the forecast northerlies.  With the south wind, it was perilously close to a concrete quay -- one slip with the throttle and we could be in serious trouble.  We went back into deep water and I reluctantly called the dockmaster on his cell phone on his holiday to ask if we could dock instead on the channel-side face dock, across from our assigned spot.   On our last visit, there was a superyacht tied up here for repairs; we did not know if it was now reserved for someone else.

He told us to take whatever we could find, and we re-rigged the fenders for a starboard side tie.  I eased the boat up next to the dock, and the wind brought us alongside, a bit more forcefully than we normally like, even though I was using every ounce of thruster and propulsion to slow down the approach.

Neither one of us thought there would be any issue with this, even in this wind -- we've come into many docks like this before.  But this floating dock is extremely low to the water.  As soon as we touched, every single fender popped out and onto the dock.  The side of the boat then came up against the dock's rub strip, which offered some protection.  However, we have a steel half-round that protrudes an inch or so from the side of the boat starting about midships and extending all the way to the stern.

Ironically, this is a protective part of the boat, there to deflect logs, icebergs, shipping containers, and anything else that might pose a hazard under way. However, it's painted to a yacht finish, something you will be glad to part with when deflecting a shipping container on a dark night in the North Atlantic.  As luck would have it, this deflector was just below the dock's vinyl rub strip, and, in fact, it was at exactly the height of all the rusty bolt heads just beneath that rub strip that hold the dock together.

With 20 knots of wind pinning us to the dock, and wind-driven waves bouncing us up and down, we worked feverishly to try to cram the fenders back into place. In the perhaps three minutes it took us to get some fenders in there, those bolts managed to rip huge gouges into the deflector, some all the way through the paint, the barrier coat, and the fairing compound and down to bare steel.  It was particularly disheartening to see the damage, because we literally just had this re-painted at the yard a few weeks ago, repairing damage from other minor dings along the way, including a couple from an errant tender that ran into the boat.



We ended up having to lay our barrel fenders on their sides, floating on the water, to keep the boat off the dock.  Lesson learned -- if we come into a dock this low to the water again, you can bet we'll already have the fenders floating horizontally in the water on approach.  It took every fender we had, including the four big round buoy-style ones, to keep us off the dock for the next few hours. By dinner time, the wind had clocked around to the other direction, now blowing us completely off the dock, and our battery of fenders just made us look paranoid.

First. World. Yacht. Problems.

I had ended up calling the dockmaster again, to get the WiFi password, and told him about our minor mishap when he asked how it went.  First thing this morning they came down the dock, took one look at the boat, and told us our dockage would be on the house for our whole stay.  I went to the office mid-day to see if I could at least give them something for the power we were using, but they would not take a penny.

We had already decided to postpone our departure by the time we turned in last night, so I had today to see what I could do about the damage.  While it looks awful, the real issue is that the parts where the bare metal is exposed will start rusting almost immediately, and that rust will then work under the adjacent, undamaged coatings, causing a real mess.

It was not really warm enough today to do it (the directions say apply only above 50 degrees, and today's high was 44), but with few other options I scuffed up and cleaned the damaged areas and put some Gloss Black Rustoleum on them.  That will keep the rust at bay, at least for a while, and it makes the damage all but disappear.  If you look closely you can tell it's different paint and an amateur touch-up job, but at a distance it is hardly noticeable.  Best it not be too invisible, as the Rustoleum will have to be sanded off to do a proper repair with Awlgrip.

As long as we are in town another night, with convenient dockage, we walked down the block to another of the half dozen or so restaurants nearby for a final restaurant meal before heading offshore.  We ended up at the new brew-pub in town, Tight Lines, which was excellent.

Notwithstanding my contention in the last post that our next stop would be Wrightsville Beach, one day's run outside from here, we've decided to change plans.  That means we'll miss the boat parade tomorrow night, which we enjoyed very much last year.  However, our weather window is good for the next three days, and then slams shut abruptly on Tuesday, and we want to get while the getting is good.

Unless the weather deteriorates, our current plan is to cast off in the pre-dawn hours tomorrow, ride the ebb out the inlet before sunrise, and  aim directly for Florida, specifically St. Marys Inlet, which leads to Fernandina Beach.  That's a voyage of some 55 hours give or take, three full days including two overnights, our first two-night trip.

In between here and there on the straight-line course are the infamous Frying Pan Shoals, which we will cross via a natural channel known as the Frying Pan Shoals Slue.  The channel is marked at both ends and in the middle by buoys, and is said to carry at least 20' of water the whole way, but traversing at night I admit to some slight apprehension.

We do have several bail-out options along the way, should weather, mechanical difficulties, or just plain crew fatigue cause us to change plans mid-cruise.  Those include Masonboro Inlet tomorrow night (just in time for the boat parade),  Cape Fear Sunday morning (which would involve backtracking), Winyah Bay or Charleston by Sunday evening, or St. Simons inlet (Jekyll Island) Monday morning.  On the other had, if we have a really great run and make more speed than we are counting on, we might pass St. Marys and go all the way to Jacksonville inlet.

We'll be out of Internet access about an hour out of the inlet tomorrow, and I don't expect to be back in range until Monday afternoon as we approach Florida. We have filed a float plan and our emergency contacts know how to track us, and we'll be in VHF range of the USCG the whole way.

We're looking forward to being in Florida in just a few days.  While it does mean we will miss seeing friends in Georgia, honestly we are happy to be skipping South Carolina and Georgia on this pass, as those two states have always been difficult to negotiate in Vector.

Yacht delivery

We are anchored in an old standby, a wide spot off Adams Creek near Beaufort, North Carolina (map).  We remembered from our last visit that we found some WiFi here, welcome after a full day spent off-line.  We stopped early today, with the hook set before 2:30 or so, just two and a half hours short of our next stop in Morehead City.

We got under way from our anchorage in the North River yesterday by 7am, having started preparations at first light.  As expected, conditions were very calm, and we had a lovely crossing of the Albermarle Sound.  Before we even made the Sound, Louise did her first engine room check, and came back to the bridge with a look of absolute defeat, reporting that the stuffing box had already climbed past 90 degrees.

I, too, felt a bit defeated at this report, but I suggested we give it a short while for the packing to "seat in" after my adjustments.  After her next check 20 minutes later she reported it was down into the 80s, and the check after that it was back into the 70s, and right at the delta-T we expected and had seen prior to all the yard work.  What a relief.

It took many more checks throughout the day before we were comfortable enough to declare victory, but it would appear at this point that the crux of the problem was the obstructed hose.  Once it was properly repacked after clearing the obstruction, things worked as they should.  There was a brief remission today, when the temperature started climbing again; I actually needed to tighten the now-seated packing just a bit to again force the water to where it should be.  We seem to be running at the proper temperature again.

As long as the packing was working right, I was comfortable adding more RPMs to get a bit more speed while we had good weather.  We ended up cruising at seven knots most of the day, in part due to the slickness of our brand new bottom job and clean propeller.  We had such as good run that we were at the anticipated end-of-day stop before 1pm.

That stop was the last possible anchorage before a marathon three-hour transit of the Alligator-Pungo Canal, a monotonous man-made cut  nearly ruler-straight and lined with stabilizer-killing submerged tree stumps.  If we had arrived at the entrance to the canal any later than 1pm, we could not have entered without risking arriving at the next possible anchorage in the dark.  As it was, though, we felt we had plenty of daylight to make the transit.

Our good run of speed held, and we exited the canal into the Pungo River well before dusk.  We ended up pushing all the way to Belhaven, where we anchored in the harbor just behind the breakwater (map) just after sunset.  We were hoping to find some WiFi there, or even a usable cellular Internet signal, but it was not to be, and we did the best we could with low-speed email on our phones.  Our last visit to Belhaven, as well as the stop at the aforementioned anchorage north of the canal, were both chronicled in the same blog post.

Another reason we pushed to Belhaven was that we wanted the protection of the breakwater for the forecast heavy winds overnight and rough seas today.  We even supposed we might be pinned there for another day.  But things were calm enough this morning that we got back under way shortly after 7am.  With sunset before 5 each evening, an early start is essential to make any progress.

The weather did deteriorate, and we pressed on through some chop and heavy fog crossing the Pamlico River.  We also had heavy fog on the Alligator yesterday, in the same spot that prompted our first use of our fog signal over a year ago.  Angel tolerates the fog signal after the first couple of blasts, but George never got used to it, and having to sound it yesterday and today made both of us think of her.

Exiting the Hobucken Cut into the Bay River we started to find some really rough stuff, but with winds astern it was not at all bad.  The already high winds were being exacerbated by a line of thunderstorms as we approached the turn into the Neuse, and when we made the acute turn to starboard, the now 40-50kt winds were on the beam.  The best the stabilizers could do was to get us within 5-10 degrees of level, and we pressed on for the next hour listing to port and slamming through three foot waves.

Rather than cut across to Adams Creek via the most direct heading, I steered as close as possible to the peninsula to our north, to cut the fetch, and by the time we were approaching Oriental the combination of naturally subsiding winds, land to windward, and a narrower section of river had the sea state back to something easily manageable.  We looked in astonishment at the plotter that said we could be in Beaufort at sunset.

Now I have a sense for what a yacht delivery skipper goes through.  On our last pass through this area we were in no rush, and we were in the mode of stopping frequently to see the sights.  Also, we had very little experience, and a 20-30 nautical mile day seemed arduous.  Now we are focused on making mileage -- start at sunrise, go to sunset, and make every bit of headway possible in between. Yesterday we did 67 nautical miles, probably a record for us for an inshore, one-day run.

Somewhere in all of this we had to think about Thanksgiving plans.  On the schedule I had set before yesterday's departure, we thought we might be in Oriental, or even Belhaven, now both behind us.  In Belhaven we realized we could easily make Beaufort, but with no Internet it was hard to make plans.  We ended up doing it all today while we were under way, catching whatever cell signal we could along the way.

While I had hoped to stop in Beaufort proper, having only ever anchored, or stopped in Morehead City, on previous passes, we could not find a venue for the holiday meal.  There were some cruiser pot-luck options, but that's not what we were seeking.  Instead we found that Floyd's 1921 Restaurant in Morehead City was doing the traditional meal.  When I called, I found out that they had been sold out for nearly two months, but they were taking pre-orders for holiday meals "to go," with all the trimmings.

By the time I lined up dockage, at Portside Marina (where we've stayed before), and called back to pre-order two meals, a fortuitous cancellation had happened. The woman who first took my call held it for us and when I called back she booked us a table for two at 3:30.  I'd rather be lucky than good.



We did not feel the need to buy two nights' dockage just for Thanksgiving dinner, so we stopped here instead, with a short run tomorrow morning.  We ought to be tied up by noonish, and have a nice half day to relax before our next leg and get in some holiday calls to family.  As luck would have it, when I went to close out the day's log entry after dropping the hook here, calling up the mileage on the plotter revealed we had just completed 5,000 nautical miles.  Our friends with Nordhavns get a pennant for this milestone; we'll have to settle for an extra glass of wine with dinner.

Right now the weather forecast for the Atlantic Ocean on Friday is marginal, having deteriorated a bit since yesterday's forecast.  Tomorrow we'll know whether it will be acceptable or if we will have to wait until Saturday for the outside run to Wrightsville Beach via Masonboro Inlet.  Either way, that will be our next stop after Thanskgiving in Morehead City.  At this rate, we will be in Florida in another week or two.

Counting down the miles

We are anchored in the North River in North Carolina, near Broad Creek (map).  We chose this spot to provide a bit of shelter from southerly winds tonight; on previous stops we've anchored on the other side of the river.  This is really the last spot to anchor before crossing the Albermarle Sound, and we dropped the hook right around 3pm, with a couple of hours of daylight left.

We got moving this morning with the 8am bridge opening at Great Bridge, after a brief discussion of the weather over coffee.  There was a small craft advisory on Currituck Sound, with winds forecast at 15-20 and two foot seas.  This time last year, that forecast would have put us off, but a full year's more experience has given us more confidence in the boat and our abilities.  As it turned out, the sound was no problem at all.  We did end up meeting a 50' wide work vessel in the shallowest part of the day's run, but that turned out to be a CoE dredge (on his way to Norfolk) and we had a nice chat about shoaling in that area.

The stuffing box is still running too hot.  Wicking it up to 2,300 rpm to make the North Landing bridge opening did not help matters, but with cold seawater and a cool engine room we've been getting by with frequent checks and occasional reverse operation to move some more water through.  I speculated this might be the result of not enough packing in the box to direct the water flow properly, so this evening I repacked the box and put the sixth ring back in its proper place.  We'll see how it does tomorrow.  I'm running out of things to try.

From here our preferred route would be via Croatan and Pamlico sounds, which would put us in Beaufort for Thanksgiving dinner.  Unfortunately, the weather forecast for the Pamlico is terrible for Wednesday, so that's not really an option.  I have reluctantly plotted a course instead along the ICW route via the Alligator and Pungo rivers.  This route is both longer and slower, and the farthest we could be by Thursday afternoon would be Oriental.  One stop before that is Belhaven, and those would seem to be our two holiday meal options.  I have not yet identified anyplace in either town open for dinner, so that's tomorrow's project.

It's another thousand miles, give or take, to where we'd like to be to meet up with our friends in Florida.  It's another couple hundred miles beyond that to Key West, where we have reservations for Christmas.  I hope we will make it, but at this writing it is looking questionable.  It certainly won't happen if I can't solve the stuffing box problem.  At least we are moving, finally, in the right direction.

Well, there's your problem...

We are tied to the free wall at Great Bridge, Virgnia (map).  This is now a very familiar stop for us, and we like it because not only is it free, but there is a great Mexican restaurant right next door, and shopping of various sorts (groceries, hardware, auto parts, and more) in easy walking distance.  It was a short mileage day for us, as we spent last night at the free dock at the north ferry landing in Portsmouth (map), another familiar stop, just ten route miles from here.

Yesterday was a long, frustrating day.  We loaded up the scooters and were under way from Deltaville by 9am, which gave us an expected arrival in Portsmouth a bit after 4pm.  That would get us tied up in the daylight, and plenty of time to take the ferry across to Norfolk for a nice dinner at the Town Point Club.

Given all the work that's been done, and the fact that the PTFE packing seriously overheated on the sea trial, we set a schedule for engine room checks of every 20 minutes.  For the first couple of checks the stuffing box temperatures were again above normal, and I went down and adjusted the packing more than once to try to get more water flow and the temperature down to normal.  Unfortunately, it kept climbing, and beyond that, it looked to me like the shaft was vibrating a lot more than it had before we hauled out at the yard.

So there we were, less than ten miles into a 50-mile day, and we waffled about whether to return to the yard.  I actually turned the boat around, and we headed back in that direction for a couple of miles before deciding to do slow circles while we assessed the situation and our options, and spoke to the yard by phone.

After ruminating for a while, we ultimately decided that we could deal with the stuffing box on our own.  After all, I had done the packing myself, so it was hardly the yard's problem anyway.  The vibration means we need to have the engine alignment checked, even though it looked in spec when the yard checked it before the sea trial.  That can be done anywhere along the way, and while Deltaville would likely do the alignment at no charge, we decided paying a couple of hours for someone elsewhere to do it was worth it to keep moving.

The tinkering, about-face, and circling ultimately set us back an hour and a half, but we figured arriving at the well-lit and well-marked ports of Norfolk and Portsmouth shortly after dark would not be a huge problem.  The stuffing box, while hotter than we'd like relative to the incoming seawater, was still much cooler than it had been with the flax, and, thanks to 55-degree seawater, was acceptable in absolute terms.

En route to Portsmouth I called to make dinner reservations and learned that the place was sold out, due to the city's annual holiday lighting ceremony.  Had we learned that on our original schedule, we would have continued to Top Rack marina, where we could get free dockage and power by eating in their very nice restaurant. However, it was indeed after dark when we arrived at the ferry landing, and we were not comfortable pressing on another eight miles upriver in the dark.

The ferry landing was, of course, very busy, with triple the normal number of ferries to accommodate the crowds going to the festival in Norfolk.  Still, there was only a single other boat with us on the dock.  When we learned about the festival we had called the visitor center to make sure the dock was open, and asked them if there was still room for us -- the dock at the north landing is visible from the visitor center.

We ended up walking to Olde Towne Portsmouth and having a nice Italian dinner at Mannino's, which we remembered from last visit.  A couple of glasses of Montepulciano rounded off the very square corners of the day.

This morning, already figuring on a short day, I spent some time before departure with the stuffing box again, this time completely removing one ring of packing.  Sitting idle in the water, we had a good rate of flow coming in. Nevertheless, even in the eight miles to Top Rack Marina, where we stopped for fuel, the box again overheated.  With only two more miles for the day, though, we decided to wait till we arrived here to deal with it.  Ironically, at Top Rack, while I was switching fuel valves in the engine room, I noticed the sump box had backed up.

After we fueled up, taking on over 1,000 gallons at the lowest price we've seen since buying the boat ($3.049/gallon), we asked to remain at the dock to deal with the sump.  That turned out to be some debris in the check valve, a ten minute fix, but by this time we missed the Steel Bridge opening and ended up sitting there another half hour.

After we got tied up and settled in here, I went back to the engine room to tackle the stuffing box again.  Having tried everything else, this time I took the injection hose off for inspection.  There was nothing at all wrong with the injection port, with seawater nearly blasting me in the face at a prodigious rate. We put a stopper in the port.  Oddly, nothing was coming from the hose itself.

I watched the hose as Louise started the engine -- seawater should definitely be coming out under pressure at this point, from the raw water cooling pump.  Nada. And here's why:

Inside the end of the hose, buried as deep as the barb on the injection port is long (perhaps a bit more than an inch) was a plastic plug.

Whoever removed the hose (which had to come off to remove the flange in which the injection port is located) apparently put this plug in the end.  Then whoever put the hose back on did not notice the plug, which admittedly is the nearly same color as the lining of the hose itself, before fitting it over the barb, which pressed it well into the hose.

When I removed the plug with a pair of fine needle-nose pliers, the seawater in the heat exchanger immediately started coming out.  I'm hoping this is the root cause of the heating issue, but we won't really know until we get back underway again.

After I wrapped that project up, I walked a mile to Advance Auto Parts, where I had pre-ordered a second engine start battery.  I used the battery I removed from my scooter a couple of weeks ago as my "core" exchange, which made up for using a giant 8D battery as a core exchange the last time I did this, back in Yorktown.

I had hoped to get away with just one start battery, and if I had bought the largest automotive battery size in the store that might have worked.  But I wanted to make sure there was room in the box for a second parallel battery if one couldn't do the trick, and that limited me to a Group-24.  It starts the engine, grudgingly, if it is fully charged and the engine is relatively warm, but it just couldn't do the job in the cold.

We could not really have gone much further today anyway, because conditions are poor on Currituck Sound.  It's looking a lot like they'll be poor again tomorrow, too, so we might be here another day.  If so, we might go over to Atlantic Yacht Basin, just the other side of the bridge, to see if they can do the engine alignment.

Since our last stay, the city has put up some new signs indicating an enforced 24-hour limit, so if we stay in Great Bridge we may need to move to Atlantic Yacht Basin, or else the other free dock across from them, which appears to again be open after a closure for maintenance.  We'll decided in the morning, after the morning forecast comes out.

Back in the water

It pains me to even have to write this, but we are still in Deltaville, Virginia, at the boatyard.  For reasons known only to them, work on our boat slowed to a crawl after my last post, with sometimes days going by with no one working.  I finally had to light a fire under them to get us back in the water by the end of the day Tuesday, knowing that Tuesday night would be a hard freeze.


Finally ready to splash.

Some of the delay was the result of borescope inspection of the shaft tube that I insisted upon after the treatment was "complete."  That inspection revealed a number of voids in the topcoat showing through to the barrier coat, which is not a real problem, but, worse, a number of voids in the barrier coat showing already-rusting bare steel.

Remediating these spots in the tube took another two full days before they could begin to start putting the shaft back in, which happened last week.  Based on my insistence that we be back in the water Tuesday, so our plumbing would not freeze, there was a mad scramble Monday to get the rudder back on and painted.  It all got done just in time and we were back in the water late Tuesday afternoon.


Rudder in its gudgeon.  Still needs paint, fresh zincs, and to be connected to the post above it.  Gray paint on the propeller is zinc.

While they were getting the rudder back on, the rudder packing needed to be replaced, and we solved a mystery that had been bugging me since the rudder started leaking and we had it repacked in July.  Namely, why there was so little packing and why there was no lantern ring adjacent to the Zerk fitting on the side of the stuffing box.

This time I watched as the packing was cleaned out, and measured the depth of the inside of the box, coming up a bit more than a half inch short of the outside.  Sure enough, lying near the bottom of the box was the lantern ring, somewhat worse for wear, and under it the remains of a single, rotted ring of packing.  This time they got it all cleaned out, and got the lantern ring where it was supposed to be by inserting the first three rings of 1/2" packing underneath it.  A course of marine grease and two more rings completed the job.

We're much more comfortable now.  For one thing, we can run the boat's reverse-cycle heat, which is much more effective and powerful than the three little electric heaters we were able to run on the hard.  For another, while the air temperature has been in the 40's during the day and the 30's overnight (and the 20's the last few nights), the water is still 55 or so.  Since the hull is steel and the bilges are uninsulated, the boat loses a lot of heat in that direction, and, of course, lots of plumbing runs through the bilges.

The boat needs to "rest" afloat for a full day before the drivetrain can be aligned, so that got done Wednesday afternoon, and yesterday we went out for a sea trial.  That went mostly well, except that the fancy new PTFE shaft packing I installed after the shaft was back in caused the shaft and stuffing box to overheat quite seriously.  This is the same thing that happened a year ago with the more conventional waxed flax packing, and after we got back to the dock I ended up pulling it all out and replacing it with the same graphite-impregnated synthetic packing that solved the problem a year ago.

I was hoping to move away from the graphite, as it can cause galvanic issues, but it seems that this is the only stuff that will work in our application to keep the whole system within temperature limits.  I need to order some more of it, as this used up the rest of my supply.


New sump box to catch shaft runoff.

Replacing the shaft packing completely with the boat still in the water is not for the faint of heart.  When you pull the last ring out, the sea starts coming in until you fumble around and get a couple of replacement rings in place.  That said, my new sump box system worked beautifully, easily keeping up with the full flow throughout the process.


Non-penetrating mount I made from HDPE. It clamps over the "T-beam" top of the keelson.

This box replaced a hokey arrangement made from a Sterilite sweater box and an old bilge pump, held in place with string.  The chief impediment to replacing it was coming up with a suitable mounting system. In addition to just looking more "finished," the new pump also has a higher capacity.


The contraption it replaced, sort of a proof-of-concept that remained in place for a full year.

That was all done by the end of the day, and we could have shoved off this morning if not for the fact that the forecast was for 3'-4' seas on the Chesapeake, and we decided to wait for tomorrow's 1'-2' forecast.  That gave the yard a few more hours to get in the last paint touch-ups as well.

The good news is that we will be shoving off in the morning for points south. We first need to move over to another dock so we can load the scooters, the first test of our new winch cable.  I had hoped to move this afternoon, but we are experiencing astronomically low tides, and we were sitting on the bottom when the dock became available.  I probably could have backed out, but I don't want to scuff up our brand new bottom job.

As long as we were here another two weeks, I knocked a whole bunch more projects off my own list.  Chief among those was replacing the guest head, which arrived here a couple of weeks ago.  I had figured initially that we'd be sailing away with it still in the box, awaiting installation in Florida someplace.  That was a big project, taking me three full days, but we're very happy with it and we can now have guests aboard without having to worry that their head will be filling the waste tank too quickly.  I've been scrambling trying to give away the two heads we've removed before leaving the yard, but it looks as if I will be carting them all the way to Florida, where there will be more takers at this time of year.

I also serviced the windlass, replacing the oil as well as the oil level sight glass, which was so old it was no longer transparent.  It took a dead-blow and penetrating oil to separate the chainwheel from its inner clutch plate, one of the culprits in the great abandon-anchor escapade.  There was so much corrosion in between them that I had to use the oscillating sander to smooth it all back out. It's all properly greased now and we should be able to drop the anchor by gravity alone in an emergency if need be.

Louise has been complaining of cold showers lately (she likes her water hotter than I do) and, as long as we had a good address, I ordered a new tempering valve.  The one we had, which I installed last year, was supposedly adjustable to 150° but the water we were getting was barely 110°.  When I cut the old one out of the PEX I found a lot of scale buildup, which was perhaps part of the problem.  You can see some of the scale in this tee fitting, which got replaced and moved somewhat to make room for the new, slightly larger valve.  The new valve is working like a champ and I'm now having to add a lot of cold at the tap.


Scale buildup.  This fitting and the PEX is only a year old.  We've been taking on some very hard water.

The scooter is all back together with all the body damage repaired and mostly invisible, and it has a new battery as well as a fancy jump-start plug.  I added a matching plug on Louise's scooter and made a cable to go to between them.  I painted the propeller and all the running gear with zinc, and as mentioned, I packed the stuffing box, twice.  Lots of minor things got tweaked as well, as long as I was in grubbies and had tools out.

Since it was a T&M project, I also ended up helping the yard get the bow thruster back on, wherein we discovered that the bolts that came with it were too short for the job.  That explains why the last yard omitted the required lock washers, which might have been part of the problem that caused the failure.  The original bolts from the one before that were the same length, so the whole assembly had been held together by barely two threads.  I had to order new bolts; the local places didn't have them in 316 stainless.

Somewhere in all of this, Louise started the process of moving us, legally, to Florida.  We had high hopes of staying South Dakota residents for a few years -- it cost us a pretty penny to "move" there in the first place -- but our health insurance company has canceled us effective year-end, and we can't get suitable coverage in that state any longer.  Florida has more options, and probably makes more sense on the boat anyway.  We already registered the boat in Florida earlier this year, a legal requirement to be able to stay there longer than 90 days.  We'll be Floridians by New Years.

We will be very happy to be out of here.  By this date last year we were already well on our way south.  That experience tells us that we need to seize each weather window to stay on the move.  With a bit of luck, we can perhaps be as far as Wrightsville Beach by Thanksgiving, where we know there is a decent place for the holiday meal (and a great holiday boat parade).

Once we are on the move I will be posting here more regularly, with a goal of posting each time we move.  Internet access being what it is in the low country, that will not always be possible, but at the very least it will be more frequent than it has been here in the yard.

History repeats itself

We are still at the boatyard in Deltaville, Virginia, notwithstanding my expressed hope, last post, that we'd be out of here by Halloween.  The yard is closed today, and I'm trapped inside the boat due to extremely cold and blustery conditions.  Having again run out of indoor projects, I have a bit of time to blog.

Regular readers may remember that we were also here in the yard last year at this time, pulling in at the beginning of November for a couple of weeks of adjustments to various things on our way south.  I lamented then that we were a bit late in the season, having to run all of our little portable heaters to try to keep the boat livable while on the hard, and we're having to do that again -- outside temps are in the 30's overnight and today's high was 48.

In another moment of déjà vu, I learned today that the Great Bridge Lock will be closed later this month for maintenance.  That's more than two weeks from now, though, and we'll have bigger problems if we are still here by then.

Last weekend we rented another ten-dollar-a-day car and made two trips back to the bus.  I'm happy to report that a week on the charger brought the expensive house batteries back to life, and I ran both the A/C and the electric heat from them, by way of the inverter, to discharge them all the way down to the LBCO on Saturday.  I then set the charger for an "equalize" cycle and we left them to charge again over night.

Sunday we returned and a quick check found they had recovered yet some more of their capacity.  As we did not really have the luxury of doing several full discharge/charge cycles, I charged them back up as best I could and then fully disconnected them, this time including the equalizer and the SOC meter.  That, I hope, will have them in a bit better shape next time we return, which we'll endeavor to do sooner than a full year from now.

When we returned Sunday afternoon we caught up with our friends Pauline and Rod, who are also southbound and opted to stop in Deltaville to see us.  They tied up while we were still on our way back from the bus, and we made good use of the rental car to go out for a nice dinner in town.  More déjà vu, as we saw them here on our November visit last year as well.

In the past two weeks, the yard has managed to get most of the bottom paint on, including moving the jack stands to paint behind them.  They also cleaned out the stern tube and re-coated the inside, by closing off the end and pouring the coatings in from the front.  That started with a wash of phosphoric acid to treat the rust, followed by epoxy barrier coat, and finally bottom paint.  They'll have to sand some of the last coatings out near the tube ends to get the cutless bearings in place.

The yard also removed the props from the thruster, and then it was a pretty simple matter to drift the drive leg out from the inside to get the pinion off.  The new leg is now ready to go back in, and I hope that will happen tomorrow.  They've also started on the anchor locker hatch, remediating the rust, barrier coating the deck, and rebedding the hatch seat.  The anchor and all the chain is on the ground, so I've started to treat the rust on the hammer-lock connector, which I will paint with zinc tomorrow.

On my own project list, I managed to get the rust remediated on the bow pad-eye and four coats of zinc paint (aka "cold galvanizing compound") put on.  The shackle was in good shape, and I re-installed it with some stainless mousing.  I did flip it around, so the mousing wire is now on the starboard side, whereas it has been on the port side for the last year.

It's not been a good few weeks for batteries, and my scooter is the latest casualty. It still has its original battery, now over seven years old, and it just won't start the old girl any longer.  I took it out, popped the "sealed" caps off, and found two cells low on water, so I added some, but it's really too far gone.  As a result, I've been having to kick-start the scooter on the first start of each day.

All well and good, but after several days of this, the kick-starter had had enough and decided to jam randomly rather than start the bike, which is a finicky starter to begin with.  I ended up pulling the case off and basically rebuilding the kick-starter, which is probably the subject of a post in its own right.

After doing that I tried to get the scooter started, to no avail in the cold weather. Again, finicky, plus I know that the "choke," which the Taiwanese call an "auto bystarter" in the manual, is spotty at best.  After two dozen or more unsuccessful attempts, I decided to crack the throttle a bit to see if that would help.

Now, in order to start these scooters, one of the two brakes needs to be applied. Since I really need to stand left of and behind the scooter to give it a real kick, I strapped the rear brake lever down to the handgrip.  Being alone, I used my poor-mans cruise control, basically an O-ring that jams between the throttle and the bar-end weight, to keep the throttle open a bit.

That did the trick, and it started on the first kick.  Unfortunately, I had the throttle cracked just a bit too far, and, despite the brake lever being strapped down, the scoot immediately took off without me, the throttle being open far enough to engage the centrifugal clutch.

It came right off the center stand and took off for points south.  It got only about three feet, though, before crashing spectacularly into the remains of a shore-side pumpout station that was relocated to the docks sometime in the last year.  In the process it broke the fairing, smashed out the right front marker/turn lamp, knocked the mirror out of whack, and damaged my pride as whoever was left in the shop after hours came running out for a look. (I'm sure it didn't help that I started laughing immediately after determining that he wasn't hurt. -Louise)

While I was pretty upset about the damage, I am quite relieved that it did not get far enough to crash into a car, a boat, a passer-by, or myself.  All's well that ends well, but it added another dozen hours to the project list.

I've spent great parts of the last four days mixing up epoxy and repairing the marker lamp and the fairing itself.  To get to them I had to strip half the front fairing off the bike, a chore all by itself.  I've got it all back together now, and it looks no worse for wear, but it's eaten into my boat project time budget a bit.  I did take the opportunity to clean up some wiring behind the fairing and spray some T9 corrosion blocker on everything.

A new battery is already on the way to me, along with the last of the boat project parts coming from far and wide.  I also ordered some Anderson connectors and some #10 wire to add "jump start" plugs to both scooters as well as the dinghy; we've had to jump-start enough times now that the convenience will be well worth the minimal expense.

My big project for the last few days has been replacing the raw water pump.  I decided to use the opportunity to change out the decade-old hoses as well, and getting the new intake hose threaded into place was a challenge.  It's all finished now, but I left the seacock closed so there are no surprises when we splash. We'll spend a few minutes looking at all the hose connections when we first open it, to make sure nothing is leaking.

I've also finished the great LED lighting project, and now every DC light in the boat is LED except the galley and the seven "reading" lamps.  The latter are seldom used -- neither of us reads in bed, and the ones in the pilot house are used for only a few seconds each time on overnight runs -- so there is little benefit in underwriting the expense of changing them.  The galley really needs the much brighter light that the 20-watt halogens provide, although I will consider changing them whenever a bright enough drop-in replacement comes along. Fortunately, those lights are in use less than an hour a day.

As long as we had the bed torn up in the guest stateroom to work on the thruster, I spent a day adding another power outlet in that room.  We really needed one closer to the headboard, for guests to have an alarm clock, cell charger, or whatever up there, and Louise wanted one on the starboard side (the lone existing outlet was to port) for her sewing machine when she is using the room for quilting.  So I put the new outlet on the starboard side of the bed, just aft of the headboard.

I'm hopeful that we will be able to put the guest stateroom back together in another day or two, and I can start moving things back to the engine room by mid-week.  With any luck, the shaft and propeller will be back on the boat by Wednesday and we should be able to go back in the water.  The ability to run the heat will be most welcome.

With any luck, we will be on the move again by a week from today.  That said, we are coming into the time of year where waiting on weather is the norm. Yesterday afternoon there were seven foot seas on Chesapeake Bay; the dinghy dock here at the yard was eight inches under water.  Starting mid-week we will be focusing on weather, to see when we might make a break for it and hustle down the bay to the relative safety of the Elizabeth River at Norfolk.

Odyssey update, and polishing my shaft

We are "on the hard" at the Deltaville Boatyard in Deltaville, Virginia (map), a very familiar stop for us.  We are even in our old spot, closest to the shop buildings.  It's been a long and busy couple of weeks, with nary a moment to blog, but I am at an impasse now on the project front, so I can catch up.



When last I posted here, we had just dropped anchor in the Piankatank River, just outside the Jackson Creek entrance.  With high winds forecast for the coming two days, we decided to make a run for it first thing the next morning, before the winds got too fierce.  As it was, we had a good ten to fifteen knots as we made the channel, which made for some excitement as I made the sharp left turn where I normally use the bow thruster to help turn the boat more aggressively.  Once we made the turn we had the wind on the nose and it was easy going from there to the basin.

We ended up spending three nights at anchor, as the yard was not quite ready to haul us out on Monday.  Too bad, because Monday was flat calm, whereas on Tuesday we had high winds again.  I ended up having to bring her into the lift ways in 20 knots, and even station-keeping in the anchorage while they jockeyed some other boats around was a challenge.  Fortunately, the sheds over the marina's D-dock blocked some of the wind on the last hundred feet or so to the slip, and they had all hands on the ways to take our lines and fend us off, so we made it into the lift without any contact.



We spent most of the time at anchor getting the boat ready for the haulout, organizing our projects, and getting last-minute parts orders placed for delivery while we're here.  However, we did get to meet Bradley and Kathy from the Nordhavn 72 Shear Madness, who dropped by in their tender and invited us to dinner.  I've followed their blog for a while and it was a pleasure to meet them and spend some time with them, and of course we traded boat tours.  We'd been given a heads-up to watch for their arrival by Steph and Martin, who had dinner with them the preceding week in Portsmouth.

Once we were blocked on the hard, the yard got started on cleaning the bottom and prepping it for new paint.  We're doing a full bottom job here, changing from an ablative type of paint, which has not worked well for us, to a hard paint with a higher copper load.  On a metal boat that means making sure there is a good insulating layer of epoxy barrier coating before the paint goes on, and between the scraping, sanding, barrier coating, and painting we are spending a small fortune on it.

The yard has already remediated an extremely small/slow leak in our sewage macerator system, which necessitated me clearing out the engine room vestibule which serves as my workshop.  After the leak was resolved the epoxy hull paint needed to be touched up in that area, and my tools and supplies spent several days stacked in the engine room, keeping me from making any progress on the raw water pump or valve adjustment projects.

On the weekend we took advantage of Enterprise's $10/day weekend special, rented a car, and drove to our super-secret storage location to check on our bus, Odyssey.  It has been almost exactly a year since our last visit, when we laid it up for the winter, and it was in surprisingly good shape.  The biggest problem was that all 11 batteries were almost completely dead.

The house batteries were already suffering from an early end-of-life syndrome when we parked it, but, still, I'm sorry they ran all the way down.  The coach and generator batteries are a bit more forgiving, but even those were dead.  My fault, really -- I opened all the battery switches, but there are still some very minor parasitic drains that are connected ahead of those switches.  Most notably those are the battery equalizers, but the house side also has an SOC meter.  In hindsight, after opening the switches I should also have disconnected the equalizers and then the battery grounds.

The main charger, which is part of the inverter system, will not even power up unless it sees a nominal 24-volt battery connected, and the batteries were so low they did not register to the charger.  We ended up "jumping" the coach batteries from the rental car by connecting the car's 12-volt battery to the upper side of the coach 24-volt system, letting the equalizer pass half over to the lower side.  Then I was able to operate the bridging relay to send 24 volts to the house side.

Once I had power flowing from the car to the 24-volt house system, the inverter/charger could be brought on-line and the charger started up, which then provided us with power throughout the bus.  Fortunately, there is a 50-amp shore receptacle just a few feet from the bus.  It took most of the day, and more jumping from the rental car, to get enough juice into the system to light off the big Detroit, but it did eventually start after some cantankerous cranking.  The genny, by contrast, fired right up.

The batteries were so dead that we opted to leave the coach plugged in to shore power for the week, at a cost of an extra dollar a day.  We'll rent another car and go back this weekend to check on the progress, unplug the shore power, and disconnect the batteries more fully this time.  While in otherwise good shape, it made us sad to see our beloved Odyssey sitting there so forlornly, and I really need to get moving on finding her a new home with someone who will give her the attention she needs.

We took the long way home last weekend when we picked up the rental car in Gloucester ("we'll pick you up"), stopping in Chesapeake to pick up some parts at the Komat'su dealer.  That had us going right past our last digs at Riverwalk in Yorktown, a much shorter trip from here by car.  As long as we were all the way down there, we had a nice dinner at our club in Norfolk on the way home.



This morning the yard removed the shaft from the boat.  Unsurprisingly, it was covered with rust, but it all appears to be adhered to the surface (rather than the shaft itself rusting) from whatever is causing the tube to rust.



Somewhat more concerning is a handful of score lines on the shaft in the area of the forward cutless bearing, which suggests the bearing has some debris embedded in it.  We'll spring for new bearings while we're here, and I will inspect the bearing to see what's causing the scoring.  The yard polished the shaft up with a sander and it looks great except for the scoring.



When last we had the shaft out, we bought a fancy tool for removing and installing the propeller.  When we went to use it, however, we discovered it had the wrong threads for our shaft.  A bit disturbing, since the yard was supposed to have used this tool when they installed the prop on the new shaft.  So once again, the shaft had to come out with the prop still attached.   A local machinist is working on making the correct adapter for our tool, so we'll have something we can use elsewhere if the prop needs to come off.

As for my own projects, I've met my Waterloo with the bow thruster.  I removed the motor inside the boat, but getting the splined pinion off the top of the drive leg has been a challenge.  The Allen-head setscrew rounded out in no time, after turning my Allen key into a corkscrew, and I've had to drill it out.  Nevertheless, the pinion is still firmly stuck to the shaft, as are the propellers to theirs.  I've asked the yard to remove the props, and then I will try to drift the shaft out of the pinion from the inside.  Fortunately, I have a spare mount and a spare drive coupling from the very first bow thruster fiasco.

I came to an impasse today because I can do nothing further with the thruster until the yard gets the props off, and the engine room is off limits while they remediate some rust on the hull stringers and re-paint them with epoxy paint. My around-the-house list, at least the part slated for Deltaville, is already knocked off.

That list included replacing the davit winch cable with a fancy synthetic one, replacing some interior light bulbs with LED items, and adding some additional LED deck lights to increase our visibility at anchor.  I also bought a "crane scale" so we can finally weigh our tender, along with anything else we want to lift with the davit.  I'm working on a way to insert it into the anchor tackle temporarily, without getting it wet, so we can get an inkling of our "normal" anchoring loads as well as the setting force when backing on the anchor.

Louise is also at a project standstill, since her sewing set-up in the forward stateroom has been usurped by the bow thruster repairs. She's finished all the hand sewing she had saved up for this occasion, and now is being sorely tempted to buy fabric on-line while we have a good shipping address.

If you're interested in photos of her quilting, BTW, she's posting them on Instagram, where her user name is (not too surprisingly) @LouiseHornor.

When I booked the work here at the yard I had asked them to plan to complete it by tomorrow.  We're a long way from done, though, and I had already figured to be here next week as well.  I am hoping it will not be longer than that.  I think it's doable -- they have a little prep and barrier coat left before painting the bottom, and getting the thruster leg changed.  There is also some exterior paint and bedding needed around the anchor locker hatch.  We had asked them to quote a staple rail on the swim step and some exterior paint touchup, but we are prepared to leave without those if need be.

With any luck, my hiatus will be over tomorrow and I will again be busy from morning to night, so this may be my one and only blog post from the yard. Whenever we are done here, we will proceed with all possible urgency to Norfolk, on the first leg of a southbound trip to Florida for the holidays.

Breaking my silence

We've been docked in Yorktown, Virginia, at the county's Riverwalk Landing Marina (map) for nearly two weeks, since Monday September 28th.  That's a long time to go without updating the blog (aside from George's memorial), but we've been busy visiting friends and family daily.  I'm also behind on answering comments.  Of course, dealing with a dying cat did not help my time management.

We said our last goodbyes this morning, to Martin and Steph as they shoved off for Norfolk.  There they will pick up their delivery skipper, who will take them and Blossom all the way to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, where it will be part of the Nordhavn exhibit.  Now that it's back to just the two of us, I finally have some time to catch up on the blog.  As luck would have it, I'm again typing under way in the Chesapeake.


This morning's sunrise over the York River.  That's Blossom at the pumpout dock on the right, with the barque Alliance behind it.

Our plan today had been to shove off at high slack around 1pm, head over to the pumpout dock, and then go just a mile downriver to the same anchorage where we spent the Sunday night of our arrival, adjacent to the marina's mooring field. That would give us all weekend to make our way to Deltaville for a Monday morning start on the project list.  It would also have given me a quiet afternoon at anchor to update the blog.  The forecast has been deteriorating, though, and we decided, after pumping out, to get as far as we could today, perhaps all the way to the Piankatank, so we would not have to plow through rough seas later on.

Shortly after finishing my post here two weeks ago, we arrived at our destination in Yorktown.  We were two full days early for our Tuesday reservation, but we headed over to the marina anyway, just to check it out.  It looked like a pretty easy dock, and the dockmaster met us to see if we wanted to try coming in, but it was a good hour past slack, and I would have to dock with the current behind me to be able to offload the scooters, tricky without a working bow thruster.  With full batteries, we also did not want to pay for an extra night of dockage we did not need.  So after assessing the situation, we headed back downriver to the anchorage.


We were happy to find these signs on the docks, which were locked after hours.  I called the sheriff's office three times during the course of our stay to deal with uninvited "guests" on the docks after hours, mostly guys fishing.

After we dropped the hook and got settled in, I contacted my cousins, who were already in town and just settling in to their accommodations.  They were happy to meet us for dinner at one of the dockside restaurants right there at Riverwalk Landing, and so we splashed the tender and did just that.  It was a great reunion -- we had not seen my cousin Lawrence, his wife Lori, and their son Joe (who calls us uncle and aunt) since January, 2013, when we were in the thick of buying a boat and they were in the thick of buying a house.  Long-time readers may remember we had Christmas dinner with them after delivering their dog, Simon, and their car, having driven both across country from our pre-purchase sea trial.

They rented a suite for a week in Williamsburg, a 20-minute drive from Yorktown.  Joining them were my other cousin, Chris, whom we saw recently in Troy, New York, and my Aunt Graciela, whom we also saw recently in Haverstraw, New York.  My uncle couldn't make it, and so the five of them fit comfortably in Chris's car for the ride to the docks.

Over an al fresco dinner at the Water Street Cafe, we hatched a plan for my cousins to join us aboard Vector Monday for a short cruise.  That involved the four of them piling into the dinghy with me at the marina for a slow putt to the anchorage, then watching as we stowed the tender and weighed anchor.  We had just enough time before slack tide to cruise underneath the massive George Coleman double swing bridge and up to the naval weapons depot before coming back through the bridge to the marina and docking.  The cruise was very short, but they got to spend a couple of hours on the boat, and Joe got to drive for a while after we turned around at the weapons depot and headed back for the bridge.


Joe drives Vector towards the Coleman Bridge.

The marina was happy to have us come in a day early, and I trundled into the office and paid for nine nights, a fairly long stay for us.  Blossom arrived Monday afternoon and did exactly what we had done -- anchored downriver to make a slack-current arrival on Tuesday.  The marina crammed the two of us right next to each other, yet we had the entire marina to ourselves for most of the nine days.


Vector and Blossom all alone at Riverwalk.

After we were well tied up at the dock, we put my scooter down so that we could go over to the cousins' suite in Williamsburg for dinner, bearing in mind we could not all fit in the car.  We had a lovely ride along the National Park Service's Colonial Parkway.  My cousins ended up feeding us at their place Tuesday and Thursday nights as well, and even invited Martin and Steph along. We returned the favor at a local Italian place near their digs on Friday, their final evening in town.

We had a fantastic visit with all five of them, mostly involving overeating in the evenings.  They did some of the Williamsburg tourist stuff in the daytime, while I got some projects done, Louise had a hair appointment, and we both got massages at a local massage school.  Wednesday was, of course, focused on the cat, and we were too emotional to have dinner with a crowd, so we had a quiet dinner with Martin and Steph at the Riverwalk Cafe dockside.  Martin and Steph were also quite close to George, having cat-sit for us on more than one occasion, including while we were sea-trialing the boat.

When the four of us made unequivocal plans to spend a week in Yorktown, Steph and Louise both decided to have their mothers fly out to meet us.  Louise's mom was the last among our parents to see the boat, since making flight reservations from California to connect with us is a bit like hitting a moving target.  This is one of the few places we've stopped long enough to do so close to a major airport.

To facilitate the logistics of all the family visits, we rented a car, as did the Blossom crew.  We got a great weekly rate, and picked it up on Thursday, making it due back yesterday right after all the mothers-in-law departed. As long as we had a car, we ran lots of errands involving trips to big-box stores in Newport News.

Among many other projects, I thus finally was able to replace the failed start battery.  A handful of pulleys and some rope from Lowe's let me rig a system to lift the old one, weighing 175 pounds, out of the engine room.  I replaced it with a much smaller battery from Advance Auto Parts, leaving room in the battery tray for a second, identical battery in parallel if this one proves insufficient.  The jury is out at the moment.

We had a bit of downtime between my family's departure and the arrival of Louise's mom.  Part of that was occupied with projects, but Saturday turned out to be the annual Virginia Wine Festival at Riverwalk Landing, and we all bought tickets and sampled the local wines.  I found none worthy of actually buying a bottle, but it was fun tasting them all and enjoying the outdoor festival in perfect weather.


Super moon rising over the York.  We did not catch the eclipse at zero-dark-thirty the next morning.

This was the event that necessitated the tight quarters at the marina.  By Saturday afternoon the marina was full, with a boat at every inside spot.  As luck would have it, though, Saturday night ended up being the worst weather of our whole stay, with 30-knot winds whipping down the river and sending waves crashing over the docks.  Vector and Blossom did not move uncomfortably, being the heavy boats they are.  But the other dozen boats in the marina did not fare as well, and we saw many crews standing watch in the wee hours, tending to their dock lines.  Some of the smaller boats looked like they were having worse motion at the dock than Vector has seen at sea.


Waves coming over the docks, shot from our aft deck.

We never made it to Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown Settlement, or any of the other tourist attractions in the area.  But I did ride my bicycle around all of Yorktown, which is historic in its own right.  It is, of course, where Cornwallis surrendered to Washington, thus ending the Revolutionary War.  Many of the earthworks and fortifications for both sides still exist, as do some structures of the era, though the fortifications were altered by both sides during the Civil War.


The very first monument authorized by Congress, in 1781.  Even then, they were inefficient -- it was not erected until a century later, for the centennial of the surrender.

This week we've been entertained by numerous Coast Guard boats practicing docking and line-tying at our dock and the ones around us.  There is a large USCG training facility in Yorktown, and these were recruits, still wet behind the ears, being instructed by petty officers.  Many, it would seem, had never set foot on a boat before they enlisted.


Perhaps hard to tell, but there are five USCG small boats in this photo.  We saw as many as a dozen practicing at the docks.

Today's entertainment, just as we were finishing our pumpout, was watching the USS Farragut transit the swing bridge, which seldom opens, on its way to the weapons dock.  We only saw the bridge open one other time during our stay, for a Coast Guard cutter going to the same place.


USS Farragut, an Arleigh Burke class destroyer, heads for the opening of the Coleman Bridge.

This morning we were awakened by a DSC distress message on the radio at 7:15, which turned out to be a false alarm from a vessel some 150 miles away, in North Carolina.  At least I got a nice sunrise photo, which appears earlier in this post, and we were well awake for our 8:30 farewell breakfast date with Martin and Steph after they moved Blossom to the pumpout dock on the 7am slack.


The visitor we found under our bow line.  He's tiny -- that cleat is perhaps 10" long.

We cast off lines and headed for the pumpout ourselves at the 1pm slack.  As she was singling lines, Louise found a tiny visitor to our humble abode: a little green snake no bigger than a pencil in diameter. I have no idea how he got here.  By the time we were ready to leave, we had 5-10 knots of wind pinning us to the dock, and it was a real challenge to get the boat away with no thruster and no room for backing astern.  We made it without incident, other than some black marks from the dock's rubber bumper on our hull, which the dockmaster called a "Yorktown racing stripe," easily removed.

It's taken me most of the cruise to get this all typed, and then some, and we are now safely anchored in nearly the exact same spot we left two weeks ago, in the Piankatank River outside of Deltaville. We decided to press on the whole way, knowing we'd arrive just after dark, but that we'd be dropping the hook in a familiar spot.  Of course the five minute downpour of rain had to happen just as Louise was on deck deploying the anchor.  We'll move into Jackson Creek tomorrow or Sunday as weather permits.

Best. Cat. Ever.

.

Our sweetest girl, George, passed away today peacefully in our arms.  While we did opt to assist her passing, ultimately kidney disease is what took her from us.  The disease first manifested itself back in 2008, when she passed a painful kidney stone as we were deploying to the Hurricane Dolly relief operation with the Red Cross.  This disease inevitably worsens, notwithstanding tightly controlled diet, subcutaneous hydration, and careful monitoring and veterinary care.  Honestly, we are so thankful for all the years we've had with her, well in excess of what we were told to expect.


George and Angel on their first full day at home.  They'll grow into those enormous ears.

George came into our lives as a kitten, on the same day as her "sister" Angel, who is really from a different litter.  They both came from the shelter in the spring of 2001.  After a full day of hissing at each other, they became good friends, at least at the start, and we have many photos of them sleeping together.  In their later years, George would bully Angel, and probably the best way to describe their adult relationship is détente.


Intertwined.

Shelters learned long ago that pets, even kittens and puppies, are more adoptable if they have names, and when we got them, we liked "Angel" enough to just keep it.  (We later discovered that it was somewhat misleading, as "angelic" is not how we would describe her.)  George's shelter name was "Patch," and neither of us cared for that name at all.  We brought her home and ruminated about names for several days.


Come to the light.

We discovered in short order that she liked nothing better than to be held and loved and even squeezed tightly, and I could not help being inspired by a childhood memory of this scene from the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoon, The Abominable Snow Rabbit:



The first time I said "I'm going to hold her, and love her, and squeeze her, and call her 'George'" the name stuck, and thus we had a female cat with a male name.  To the very end she still loved to be held closely, although she was so frail that we dared not squeeze.


Sometimes I squeeze you back, daddy.

George loved confined spaces, and we'd often find her peeking out of boxes or bags.  When she was still a tiny kitten with big ears she crawled into Louise's motorcycle helmet through the visor area, and then was perfectly content when we closed the visor.


Can we go for a ride?


Take me shopping.

We still lived in a condo when we got her, moving to a different condo just a few weeks later. Shortly after her third birthday, she began her peripatetic life, starting with the car as we shuttled back and forth between San Jose, California and Sumner, Washington for monthly checks on the progress of the bus.


Antimacatsar.

Unlike her sister, who suffered from a bit of motion sickness at the start, George settled in comfortably to the traveling life.  Moving onto the bus was a big adventure for her, with many new spaces to explore, and transitioning to the boat was better still.  They have been indoor cats their whole lives, but on the boat she was allowed to roam the decks at anchor, which she loved.

Each of us has had many pets over the years, and for the last 13 years we've always said that George was the best cat ever.  She loved people, would purr just from proximity, and climbed into the bed between us for warmth and cuddles.  We will miss her terribly.

She spent her final day doing what she loved -- climbing onto our laps for morning love on the aft deck, and lying on the deck in the sun.  We gave her a final dose of subcutaneous ringers last night so she would be as comfortable as possible today.  I am very thankful we were able to find a vet to come to the boat, so she could spend her final moments in comfortable and familiar surroundings.

Goodbye, George.  You will always be the best cat ever.