OBX

We are underway across Pamlico Sound, headed for the Old House Channel and Wanchese, where we will have the stabilizers serviced. The yard probably can't start until Monday, but today's the window to cross the sound. It's a long day -- there are no decent anchorages between Ocracoke and Roanoke Island.

Vector steaming toward the Cape Fear River. Photo: Bill Parks

When last I posted I was just an hour and a half into my 2000-0300 watch offshore of Cape Romaine. The rest of the passage was quiet and comfortable; neither of us saw any traffic at all. The ocean was calm when I posted, and got calmer through the night. The Starlink dropped out once we crossed the 12nm line, and I moved our AT&T hotspot up to the soft top to get better range.

This group of dolphins swam with us for over ten minutes on our passage.

Not long afterward, even that started fading in and out. Realizing that on the rhumb line to Cape Fear there would be no coverage at all when Louise came on watch, I adjusted course to bring us back in range for at least part of the trip, adding 3/4 of a mile to the crossing. We were in the countercurrent for most of the crossing of Long Bay, and we still had plenty of time to the Cape Fear channel when I came back on watch.

As we approached the inlet we were hailed by a motor yacht coming out, and that turned out to be our friend Bill on the Blue Merle II. He was coming out with a hired skipper on sea trials for a survey, so I am guessing they've had an offer on the boat.

The Blue Merle II. That's their dog in the graphic.

We arrived to the entrance more or less at max ebb, and it was an uphill fight to get in. But this was the calmest we'd ever seen this channel, and we just pulled off-channel at the first safe spot, right off Bald Head Light (map) and dropped a lunch hook to wait out the current. That spot had us seaward of the Bald Head harbor entrance and so we did not have the enormous wakes from the fast ferries that plague the more protected anchorage further in.

We both had good naps, and lunch, before slack tide arrived around 1:30 and we weighed anchor. Just as we were pulling back into the channel we were again passed by the Blue Merle. Bill offered to meet us for dinner in Wrightsville Beach, but we are always complete zombies the day we arrive from offshore, so we took a rain check. They keep the boat in Wilmington, which is a short drive from Wrightsville, and we had seen it in the harbor there when we stopped last season.

Our lunch hook spot to wait out the ebb. That's the Bald Head lighthouse, which I climbed when we stayed here a decade ago.

Now with the flood behind us we continued upriver to Snows Cut and thence to Carolina Beach and north to Wrightsville Beach. We had the hook down in our usual spot in Banks Channel (map) by 5:40, and immediately splashed the tender and headed ashore to Tower 7 Baja Grill for dinner. This is a popular joint, and if you're not in by 6 there will likely be a wait for a table.

After dinner we walked over to Robert's grocery for beer, but opted to wait on other provisions until I could walk to the Harris Teeter in the morning, when I would have just enough time before we got under way for Mile Hammock with the tide. On our way in we had noticed that the Blockade Runner hotel, a long-time fixture of the waterfront, is now a Marriott property called Trailborn, and I tried to learn if that meant they'd have a better restaurant or dinghy policy, but got nowhere.

Louise snapped this bald eagle on our way to Mile Hammock.

After returning home we discussed whether to stay an extra day. That would let us recover a bit more from the overnight passage and make my provisioning trek into town less rushed. The fact that I crashed into bed before midnight spoke in favor of the extra day, but we woke in the morning to some text messages that sealed the deal.

Our friends Tim and Crisálida had left Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday, bound for Norfolk in their sailboat, s/v Paquita. We, and they, expected them to be offshore the whole way, and we'd wave to them virtually as they sailed past us, but sometime after midnight, Tim texted me that they were coming in at Cape Fear. That would put them just a day behind us, but a short while later another text said they had changed course for Masonboro inlet instead. They'd be in the anchorage before we finished our morning coffee.

We watched them come in and get squared away, and before they turned in for the requisite post-passage nap, they invited us to dinner aboard. Now with a day off, I spent the morning wrapping up the plotter display repair, installing permanent 12v wiring to replace the jury-rig that had gotten us going on Wednesday morning. After lunch I made my pilgrimage to Harris Teeter by way of Beach Bagels, and later in the afternoon I went back ashore with the trash and for a nice walk all the way to the fishing pier and back.

Paquita, motoring up to Mile Hammock.

We headed over to Paquita a little before dinner time with a fresh salad in hand and a few beers. Tim fixed spatchcock chicken on his kamado grill, and we had a lovely evening over excellent food, way too much wine, good company, and lots of laughter. I only regret that none of us thought to take a photo the entire evening.

I half expected Paquita to go right back outside in the morning for the crossing of Onslow Bay, but the weather was too sloppy even for a sailboat (and way too sloppy for us), so they opted to take the ICW route. Tim was having trouble with both his depth sounder and his tablet app that shows the Army Corps of Engineers depth surveys, and they decided to just follow us out of the anchorage in the morning, across the tricky spot where the Motts Channel meets the ICW.

They ended up following us the whole way to Mile Hammock, which turned out to be a good thing when we had to pass an oncoming tug and barge that needed center-channel and took most of it. I was running well outside the marked channel using the survey data alone. Tim has since got his surveys working again. In addition to the barge, we had the usual amount of weekend traffic, but its manageable here, whereas in some places like SE Florida and Myrtle Beach it often keeps us in port until Monday.

A Camp Lejeune local caught Vector in the anchorage. Photo: Tommy Blanton 

We had the hook down in Mile Hammock Bay (map) on the Camp Lejeune marine corps base by 3pm, only the second boat to arrive. Tim had some electrical system issues just before arrival, but made it safely into the anchorage even though he had to drop anchor by gravity; we had rigged fenders in case they needed to raft to us.

I dropped the dink and headed over with my tool bag to assist. It turned out to be a wonky Perko battery switch -- Tim had already isolated the problem by the time I arrived. I could see the plastic case was slightly deformed from ohmic heating. I've taken these kinds of switches apart before to clean and grease contacts, but it involves drilling out rivets, and Tim opted to just order a replacement.

Tim caught us in his sunrise photo as they weighed anchor. Photo: Tim Boehmer

We spent about an hour digging through the panel and bypassing the switch (there is another switch closer to the batteries), removing some obsolete wires in the process. I left with homework to try to source a breaker to replace one that looked to me to be getting brittle. No sooner was I back at Vector than we turned right around for another delicious meal aboard Paquita, this time a pot roast that had been cooking all day, and another salad we brought with us. I'm really glad I scored the penultimate package of romaine at Harris Teeter.

It was really great to get to see them two nights in a row. Especially so because they will likely have already departed on their Atlantic crossing by the time we catch back up to their interim destination of Rhode Island. They will be doing the Atlantic Loop, crossing to the Med, spending a season there, then crossing back to the Caribbean. We will be following their journey with great interest. Once again, we forgot to snap a photo.

The lobby of the historic post office used to house the NPS visitor center for the Shackleford Banks. The Park Service closed up shop and now the building is just the Beaufort Town Hall, but the lobby is still open, with restrooms, and still sports many park posters and graphics.

Paquita left first thing in the morning, wanting to put as many miles behind them as possible. We had a more leisurely start, decking the tender and weighing anchor at 8:15 for the 9am bridge lift. It rained most of the day, and a mid-day thunderstorm brought us face to face with a boat anchored in the channel with its navigation lights on. It took us a while to understand he was anchored and not headed right for us on the wrong side of the road, and I gave him a lecture after we dodged around him. The thunderstorm ended up being a non-event.

We had the anchor down in Beaufort, in our secret spot crammed between a daybeacon and a range light (map), before 3pm. Louise was feeling crummy most of the day, with the beginnings of a bad cold, but she pulled herself together for dinner and we tendered ashore and walked to the Front Street Grill. This after first walking out of Black Sheep, which was packed with kids; we were halfway down the block before we realized it was Mothers' Day.

Beaufort has a new payment system for parking. And the rates went up. Dinghies are still free.

Front Street is a bit more upscale and spendy, so it was a more adult experience, and I had a very nice filet that was the day's special. We've spent a lot of time in this town, including once when we spent a whole week and I walked pretty much everywhere. We've eaten at all the restaurants at one time or another, and its just a very familiar and comfortable stop.

We had figured to spend just a single night, but by bedtime, Louise was so miserable we started to think about staying in quarters another day. Apart from that, my Monday project was to start calling boatyards, starting with the nearby Jarrett Bay Boatworks just outside of town, to arrange a haul-out to replace our stabilizer seals. The port fin started squealing when we were still on the west coast, which is a sure sign the seals need maintenance.

This view of Vector provided by the Town of Beaufort.

I had figured to call Jarrett Bay first thing, and make my other calls underway, but staying planted for the day I just made them all in sequence in the morning. Jarrett Bay did not return my call until late in the afternoon, which aced them out of the running. Hoping to go offshore around the Delmarva peninsula, I looked at every yard from Beaufort to Hampton for the magic intersection of a 70+ ton lift, technicians who can work on stabilizers, and availability on the schedule. I also asked for recommendations online.

By the end of the day we had nailed down a yard in Wanchese, on Roanoke Island, Safe Harbor Outer Banks, who had the lift, help, and time. They even had the parts on order before the day was out. This fit in with our hope to take the Pamlico Sound route on this pass and avoid the slog up the Alligator River. That did mean we needed a two-day weather window on the sound to make the trip.

No motorized vessels. I will need to kayak over the next time I want a pizza.

Louise was down for the count the whole day, and she even tested as part of a study she is in; the tests were negative for COVID, flu, and RSV, so really just a bad cold. I ordered a takeout pizza at dinner time, landing at the Fishermen's Park dock, which was a lot closer to the pizza joint, No Name. I was on the street before I learned the dock did not allow motorized craft, but I figured no one would notice me for ten minutes on a cold rainy day anyway. I would not have minded a longer walk, but I only had a short gap in the rain, and I did not want the pizza to get cold.

The weather on the Neuse and the sound was not forecast to be favorable on Tuesday, and so we planned a short day just to the mouth of Adams Creek. An 8am departure would have given us a fair tide, but I wanted to walk some more and it was pouring all morning, so we stayed put until 2. I had a nice walk around 11, but we ended up with 1-2 knots against us the whole ride, and what would have taken two hours at 8 took over three at 2. Oh well. We dropped the hook in a familiar spot in Adams Creek (map) and had leftovers aboard.

The minuscule dinghy dock at the Community Store is hidden behind other docks, so they put up a sign.

Yesterday was perfect cruising weather, and we weighed anchor and launched into the middle of the northbound conga line of loopers and snowbirds. It was a fairly long day to the Silver Lake anchorage in Ocracoke, a pace we've not been in four years. The entrance channel, Big Foot Slough, is notorious for a narrow, shallow chicane that the enormous car ferries have to navigate, and you never want to meet one there. As we approached we heard the ferry call a sailboat; the latter turned out to be aground. We watched the ferry pass them close aboard.

We have good surveys now, and I always put a track on the ferry, so we had no issues with the chicane. The sailboat had freed itself by the time we arrived. It's a good 45 minutes from the channel entrance to the lake, where we had a tight squeeze into the anchorage among the ten boats already there (map). I tendered ashore stag to reacquaint myself with the lay of the land. There are dinghy docks at the National Park Service marina near the ferry terminal, and at the Community Store.

The Ocracoke Variety Store was well-stocked, if a bit pricey.

Louise was feeling up to dinner so long as it was close, so we headed ashore at the Community Store and went to Dajio right across the street, which was decent and had a couple of nice drafts. After dinner I dropped Louise back at Vector and returned ashore for a longer walk. I walked all the way through town, stopping in the well-stocked grocery-cum-hardware store, and ending at Howard's Pub, where we had parked Odyssey on our first visit to Ocracoke nearly two decades ago. From there I took the town,s free tram back, really an oversize golf cart, learning that it could get us to pretty much any joint in town with just an easy stroll.

I had checked in with the yard before they closed, and they allowed that Friday was unlikely and the haul-out would be Monday. Louise checked the weather and it looked like we maybe should just stay in Ocracoke another day, with another window on the weekend. We left the tender in the water. When we got up this morning, however, forecasts had again changed, and while there might be another shot on Sunday, it's risky, so today was the day.

The tram runs at least every 20 minutes (I found it more frequent) and will get you anywhere in town.

We decked the tender and got back underway before 8am for the nine-hour trip. The sound was pretty flat all morning, but as I type here after lunch, we have rolling 1-2 footers behind us. The plotter says we will be in Wanchese before 5pm, but after the yard closes for the day, and we have exactly one possibly anchorage opportunity along the Old House Channel, but until we get there around 3:30 we won't know if it will be comfortable at all.

My preference is to anchor tonight if we can, and arrive to the yard tomorrow fresher and during business hours, but we're ready to come in after hours if we have to. With any luck they will have all the parts in hand to get the stabilizers done Monday, and I also asked them to order a five-gallon pail of paint (the smallest it comes) to freshen up the bottom, which I hope can be done by Tuesday for a Wednesday launch. But things in a boatyard gang aft agley, to plagiarize Burns.

I took this pic of Howard's Pub for old time's sake.

While we've been through Pamlico many times, we've never taken the Old House Channel around the east side of Roanoke Island, and there is a reason: From Manteo north, the channel is 6-7' deep. We need a confluence of good weather, favorable wind direction, and high tide (what little there is here) to even try it. I'm hoping we can get through, whenever we leave the yard, because it is a very, very long way back out to the south.

Update: We are anchored between a pair of small islands right off the Old House Channel (map). It's comfortable here even though it's blowing 15-20 knots, but we had no way to know that until we got here. A storm may blow through this afternoon or evening with hail and gusts up to 50kt, and we're happy not to be trying to dock in that. We'll continue to Wanchese tomorrow.

A trio of ocean hops

We are underway northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, about 15 miles east of Charleston, South Carolina as I begin typing. Today is our third successive hop in the Atlantic, and at this writing it looks like we'll be out here overnight, bound for Cape Fear.

When last I posted, we were anchored off St. Simons Island, where we hoped to meet up with friends for lunch. We settled in for the night expecting a quiet morning aboard. But at 4am a thunderstorm rolled through, kicking off with a 61mph gust of wind. That plowed our anchor through the soft mud some 40', and we staggered upstairs with the alarm blaring. The gust was over in mere moments, and realizing the anchor was still well set and we had stopped moving, we just adjusted the alarm and went back to bed.

61mph (53kt) wind gust recorded on our anemometer. Coincidentally the outside temp is also 61.

Our anniversary gift to ourselves was just being able to sleep in after being so rudely awakened. We had a video call scheduled with our newly-engaged niece in California at noon, and we agreed with our friend John to meet up whenever that call was done. We had a quiet morning aboard, finishing up the last of the sourdough bread our friend Karen made for us for breakfast, having defrosted it to have with dinner Saturday night. I puttered around fixing a few things in the morning, and we splashed the tender so we would be ready to go when our call was over.

The call with our niece and her new fiancé started out more or less as expected. I am her uncle by marriage, but Louise has known her her whole life, and so we were not surprised when they asked us if Aunt Louise would make a toast at their wedding next year. What was surprising, however, is that next they asked if I would officiate.

Out track plot the next morning. The top and bottom lobes were the limits of our swing; lobe on the right is where the gust pushed us. We love our Bruce, but if you pull it hard enough in pluff mud it just plows through.

I am honored to do it, but I must confess also to a certain amount of nervousness. Of the "don't mess it up" kind. Louise and I had asked a motorcycling buddy of ours to officiate at our wedding, and even though he was a mail-order minister with some experience, our ceremony was probably the largest he'd done, and he married Louise off to "Sean Lawrence Welk." It was all I could do not to immediately say "ah one, and ah two." Anyway, I have more than a year to study up and practice.

After our call and with some new dates on our calendar, we hopped in the tender and zipped off to Gascoigne Park to meet up with John. Laura Lee was unavailable. We had a very nice lunch at the Mallery Street Cafe, with much catching up, and afterward John swung us by the Winn-Dixie so we could pick up a few things. It was great seeing him, as always.

The last of Karen's wonderful sourdough. This was actually from dinner Saturday; there were still three pieces left for breakfast Sunday.

The busy morning and the lunch date had us off to a late start, but we wanted to get some miles in, so as soon as we got home we got underway. I had figured to stop at the Altamaha River, where we might have tendered in to Mudcat Charlies at the 2-way Fish Camp for our anniversary dinner.  But after a big lunch neither of us was hungry, and fried food and bottled beer did not call us, so we decided to press on to a further anchorage and just have a light snack on board.

Late in the afternoon we had a favorable tide to transit one of the shallowest stretches of the entire ICW, less than four feet deep at low tide, the Little Mud River, and with no dinner plans we ran the extra few miles to get it behind us. We had the anchor down just after 6pm behind Wolf Island on the South River (map), the same spot we had chosen in the other direction when we had to wait for favorable tide to cross the shallows.

This ICW daybeacon at Doboy Sound was knocked over somehow and lying flat. I filed a report.

As we enjoyed our snack and a beer, we discussed the possibility of going outside right there at Doboy Sound. It looked like we might have favorable conditions that would improve over the next two days, and if we got lucky we might be able to run outside to Georgetown or even Morehead City over one or two nights. I spent an hour or so researching the Doboy Inlet, which would be new to us.

Monday morning the forecast still looked just acceptable for the outside run, and with lots of bailout options we decided to try our luck. We did not have enough tide to just run down the South River to the sound -- there's a 5' bar at the river mouth -- so we went the few extra miles to take the ICW to where it intersects Doboy Sound.

I had to divert to go around this anchored shrimper on Doboy Sound.

The inlet proved to be no problem, but I was thankful for all the information that had been posted about it online. I recorded our tracks and published them for other mariners to use; these tricky, poorly charted and often poorly marked inlets can be challenging and even hazardous to the unprepared. Now we have a good track for the next time we need to use it.

Things started well, but contrary to forecast, conditions worsened throughout the day, with seas three feet on five seconds by mid-afternoon. The wind had picked up considerably, and, also counter to forecast, we were fighting a knot of counter-current. We decided to bail out to Wassaw Sound, near Savannah. We've been that way before, but that was nine years ago, so I again spent some time researching the inlet. Fortunately, we arrived at mid-tide.

Sunset at Romerly Marsh Creek.

We also arrived mid-ebb, and we fought our way up the Wilmington River against nearly two knots. This river is where it all started for us, when we bought the boat from John in Thunderbolt, a few miles upriver. It was such a hard slog that we stopped at the very first anchorage that would be comfortable, a side channel known as Romerly Marsh Creek (map). We were out of the swell here and had a comfortable night.

In the morning we again had a choice to make -- continue upriver to the ICW, or go right back out the inlet. It was again mid-ebb, and outside weather looked acceptable for a day run. We decided to go back out on a fair tide and make Edisto Island. I again recorded and published our tracks into and out of Wassaw Sound.

We can still see the SpaceX launches here. In the binoculars it's a well-defined streak and not this little dot that my cell phone captured.

We were hoping for a fair tide arrival as well, but we again found ourselves pushing into over a knot of current, doing 5.3 knots while making turns for 6.5. That actually improved throughout the day, and we just caught the last of the flood on the South Edisto, another new inlet for us. We have better charts nowadays, and found the inlet wide and deep, with the ancient NOAA soundings completely out of date.

We dropped the hook in an off-channel shoal near the entrance to Big Bay Creek (map). We tendered into the creek and tied up with permission at the Marina at Edisto Beach, and walked down to High Tides for dinner. The food was decent and they had my cherished Pluff Mud Porter in cans. The marina restaurant, Presley's, would have been more convenient, but they're dark Tuesdays, and we needed the walk anyway.

Cheers from High Tides, Edisto Beach. Louise and some scruffy guy who could not be bothered to shave.

This morning found us with the same decision as yesterday -- ICW or back outside. But before we could even make it, I had to fix the chartplotter, whose display started blinking off and on just as I went to the pilothouse to look at tide schedules. It had the appearance of a loose or intermittent power cord, and so I rooted through my box of orphan cables looking for the right type. I found one, but that was not the fix.

We have a plan "B" for this problem, which involves unbolting the TV from the guest stateroom and substituting it for the PC monitor, but that takes time, and we needed something working right away or the outside choice would not be an option at all. I have a little 4" HDMI monitor that I use for setup and troubleshooting our Raspberry Pi systems and the backup plotter computer, and I was able to rig this in place. The plotter software amazingly worked on the tiny monitor, although some of the data like ETA was omitted from the screen.

My plotter arrangement for the morning.

Today's outside forecast had improved, and we'd need to wait for the inside route until the flood, as we'd need tide for a couple of shallow stretches. So with the plotter now working, back out we went, whizzing out to sea with two knots behind us. So far it's been a good run. After lunch I tore into the defunct monitor, hoping to find a simple loose wire.

What I found instead was a fried power supply. It's a simple supply that turns 120vac into 12vdc, and that led me to discover that this monitor has an unadvertised direct 12vdc input. I removed the fried power supply altogether, attached a cable with a mostly correct plug on it to the DC input, connected it to 12v, and voila, we're back in business. I was glad, because I really did not want to haul the TV up from downstairs and jury-rig it into position.

Penny for scale.

This monitor is only eight months old, and normally I would complain to the manufacturer. But long-time readers may remember that this monitor was such a piece of junk to begin with, that after replacing it once with no real improvement, they just refunded my money and told me to keep it.We'll see how much longer my "free" monitor will keep working.

We had our sights set on Charleston Harbor when we left this morning. But as we approached the turn-in towards the harbor entrance off Folly Island, we decided conditions were right to just keep going overnight to Cape Fear, with a daytime bailout option at Five Fathom and a late night bailout at Winyah Bay.

The fried power supply, sitting atop our log book. Looks like two caps are blown, and I was noodling on how to fix it when I discovered we could just use DC power.

As I wrap up typing, Louise has already hit the berth, and we're on the final leg from Cape Romaine to Cape Fear. We had a bit of a fire drill right after dinner, when a project to backflush the waste tank with seawater and detergent overflowed into the master head, leaving me on my hands and knees cleaning everything with disinfectant and enzymatic cleaner. Thankfully, it mostly smelled like detergent.

We're about an hour from the Winyah Bay entrance, and the plotter says it's 12.5 hours to the Cape Fear River, which will put us at the entrance just as I come back on watch at 0900. That will also put us there mid-ebb, so we'll bash our way in against three knots, and drop a lunch hook at the first safe spot to wait it out.

A mix of family and cruising updates

We are underway northbound out of Florida, headed toward St. Simons Island, Georgia. That will have us north of the "hurricane box" with most of the month left to spare. I have a lot to update today, as I was never able to squeeze out an update before we flew to Colorado -- there was just too much to get done. It has been a full two weeks since my last post.

Last night's fireworks at the Fernandina Shrimp Festival.

The remainder of our cruise on Saturday was uneventful, even with the weekend traffic, and we arrived to our usual anchorage at the Matanzas Inlet right at 5pm. The area seaward of the fort was still busy with the weekend crowd, so we dropped the hook just on the landward side (map) but still inside the no wake zone. By sunset all the day trippers had left and we had the entire anchorage mostly to ourselves. We had a nice dinner of grilled chicken on board.

Sunday morning we weighed with the tide for St. Augustine, which was pretty busy on a pleasant Sunday, We continued to our usual spot north of the bridge in Vilano Beach (map). That made it a short day, but the next stop at the St. Johns would have been a stretch, and we still did not have an answer on the funeral timing. Besides, I had errands to run.

Vector as seen from the Vilano pier. That's as close as we can anchor due to a cable area.

Chief among those errands was to run to Ace Hardware for a tube of bathroom caulk, as I had discovered the night before that the old caulking had separated enough to allow water to run down the walls past the shower pan. The other was a simple grocery run to the nearby Publix to restock the beer and a few other items. It turned out I could do neither of those things, because both Ace and Publix were closed for Easter.

This whimsical bird on the Vilano pier always makes me smile.

We ended up with a quiet afternoon aboard, wherein I polished up both our dress shoes for the service, and changed the charcoal in the filter canister for the waste vent. Fortunately several of the restaurants in Vilano were open even on the holiday, and we tendered ashore for dinner at 180 Vilano, one of our old standbys, with decent food and one of my favorite brown ales on tap. After dinner we took a short stroll around town.

I can stop searching now. Peacock for scale.

Monday morning I jumped in the tender to run the errands denied me on Sunday. I landed on the mainland side at the boat ramp, where I stirred the mud crossing the bar in just 18" of water at low tide. It's a mile walk to the Ace, where I picked up the caulk and a quart of denatured alcohol, which we've learned will remove mild rust stains from our paint. I have since re-caulked the shower.

It's basically an enormous but quite fabulous chicken.

When I returned to the dock I ran into a Great Loop celebrity, Peter Frank, who is doing the Great Loop in a canoe, clockwise. Most loopers, ourselves included, go counterclockwise, owing to the five knots or so of current on the unavoidable stretch of the Mississippi, so in addition to having to paddle the whole 6,000 miles, he's going the hard way. To borrow a phrase, backwards in heels. I've interacted with him online, in particular regarding stops in New York, and we had a nice chat for a few minutes before we both shoved off.

Peter Frank and the canoe he is paddling around the Great Loop.

After leaving the boat ramp I crossed the river to the Vilano pier and hoofed it to Publix. They did not have any beer we wanted, but the had the rest of our list. On my way back to the tender I buttonholed one of the workers at what had appeared to us to be a new restaurant under construction, and he told me it would be an Irish pub, with a couple of B&B units in the back. I expect it will be open the next time we pass through.

We left this tour boat, Atlantic Fury, behind in Key West. The season is winding down there and she's moved to Vilano for a time. Many of the Key West tour boats spend the summer in New England.

I returned to Vector just in time for a quick lunch before weighing with the tide for the run to the St. Johns. Timing was such that we hit the Pablo Creek Bridge, with its notorious currents, with over a full knot against us, but there was no way to avoid that and still have a daylight arrival. As we passed Beach Marine in Jacksonville Beach, we got a phone call from our friends Charles and Vicki, who were having dinner at the Dockside Seafood Restaurant there and saw us go by. It was great to hear from them; had we known ahead of time we might have figured a way to get ashore there and join them.

Vector underway in Jacksonville Beach. Photo: Charles Cornett

We caught the last of the fair tide at the St. Johns to make our familiar anchorage between Blount and Little Marsh islands (map). By this time we had received word that the funeral would be Monday, eliminating Savannah as a departure option, and we knew we would be continuing up the St. Johns in the morning. We tendered ashore for dinner at Palms Fish Camp, followed by a brief stroll over the bridge. We passed a couple of absolute neophyte fishermen on the bridge, who had caught a flounder but did not know what it was or whether it was edible. Louise did her best to answer their questions, even though neither of us fishes.

Palms Fish Camp. That's actually a public dock.

I spent the entire evening online combing through flight options, hotels, and rental cars to reserve all three. We ended up with flights to Denver, as there are no non-stop options to Colorado Springs, leaving Saturday and returning Tuesday. I booked a slip at the Florida Yacht Club starting Friday, to give us time to settle in, get the boat squared away, and have time to get ready. That would give us three nights until our arrival.

It was past 2pm before the tide became favorable on the St. Johns Tuesday, so I spent the morning refurbishing my noise-cancelling headphones, which were starting to shed bits of protein leather everywhere and were really too ratty to take on the plane as-is. I also fine-tuned the hotel reservations and car rental timing.

The bread pudding at Palms was enormous. Hand for scale, and two bites are already missing.

We weighed anchor before 2:30, and in hindsight we should have waited another half hour, because the tide was not as fair as I'd hoped. But we had a pleasant couple of hours cruising upriver to Jacksonville. Our plan was to dock for the night at the east face dock in Metropolitan Park, which had plenty of room when we arrived. However we could see lots of activity in the park as we pulled up, and that turned out to be the setup for the upcoming Jacksonville Boat Show. We did not want to be in the middle of that so we continued on.

Vector anchored off Little Marsh Island.

A small part of the face dock at the Landings, east of the Main Street Bridge, is again open, but we opted to continue to our usual anchorage between the bridges, in front of the Baptist medical center (map), or as we like to call it, the suspicious boat anchorage. We often have it to ourselves, but on this occasion there were already three boats here. We tendered ashore at the newly restored Friendship Fountain in Southbank and walked to Sake House for dinner on their patio.

This brand new pirate-ship-theme playground is at the newly renovated Friendship Fountain and it's already hugely popular.

Knowing we were staying put for a couple of days, Wednesday morning I finally tackled the slow leak in the stabilizer system. Hydraulic fluid had been seeping out somewhere in the back of the fluid conditioner unit for a few weeks, and I had already spent hours looking for it, finally determining it was either a blanking plug on the very back of the unit, or the centering solenoid on the left side. In either case the stabilizers would be unusable for the duration of the repair, so we need to be stationary and with time on my hands.

The first order of business was to pin the fins. That process requires the system to be working, and they needed to be pinned in case the repair went sideways and we'd have to run without benefit of stabilization. In hindsight I should have pinned them when we arrived to the anchorage, but it wasn't topmost on my mind, so I had to fire up the main engine for ten minutes while I got it done.

Jury-rigged support for the fluid conditioner. I knew I'd need that 1' section of PVC pipe some day.

The conditioner unit weighs 80 lbs dry, and has about a gallon and a half of hydraulic fluid in it, so a little over 90 lbs total. It's mounted on an aluminum diamond-plate backboard with studs and nuts. I had to jury-rig overhead support with a couple of 4' poplar 1x4's I had lying around, and a pair of 3/8 poly ropes with a cinch hitch. I used a 1' section of schedule 80 PVC pipe, also lying around, to allow the rope to slide freely over the boards for the hitch. For good measure I put my bottle jack under the reservoir, atop a pair of 5-gallon oil pails.

Bottle jack let me unweight the studs for removal.

Fortunately I only needed to fully remove two of the nuts, and loosen the other two, to tilt it away from the backboard and get behind it. Using my phone and a mirror, I found a leaking boss o-ring plug to be the culprit. After removing the plug I found the ~20-year-old o-ring solidified into hard plastic, with a wedge-shaped cross-section. A section of it broke away completely when I removed it.

I could just get my phone (and a tool) behind it with the mount at the end of the studs.

I had purchased an assortment of fresh O-rings for this project and had the right size on hand. Replacing the plug fixed it right up, test-running the system before getting the nuts back on the studs. We've now put more than a dozen hours on it with no leaks. I do wonder just how many other 20year old O-rings are ready to start leaking. I had everything cleaned up and the fins unpinned by the end of the day. We tendered ashore to Anejo Cocina in Brooklyn for fajitas and a pitcher of Modelo Negra.

This photo taken with a mirror shows a better view of the leaking plug.

Louise and I both ordered new "personal item" size suitcases for the trip, and hers was delivered to the Amazon locker at the transit center on Wednesday (mine never arrived, which is a story unto itself). So Thursday morning we decided to go retrieve it together, making use of the Skyway, since it is otherwise a long walk from the closest dock. This quickly turned into a train wreck, if you will pardon the pun, of the highest order.

We landed at the fountain dock on the south bank and walked to the San Marco station, only to find it closed with a sign saying all the Southbank stations were closed and to, instead, take a shuttle bus to the Central station on the north side of the river. Not wanting to wait twice for shuttle buses, we got back in the tender and went over to the landings dock on the north side, a short walk to the Central station.

Jax skyline. New logo on the CSX building is actually a locomotive. The colored lights on the Actosta bridge are off for some reason.

This, too, we found closed, with yet a different sign saying the whole system was down. Sheesh -- couldn't they have put that sign on the Southbank stations? While we were standing there, one of the downtown Ambassadors who is normally at the Central station to direct the lost came over to say they had just closed it that morning and it had been news to him, too. He'd been timing the shuttles and advised us we'd be better off taking the city bus instead.

By the time we arrived at the nearest bus stop, we realized the transit center was just ten minutes further and we ended up walking the whole way, which was pretty much the limit of Louise's feet. We did take the bus the other direction, all the way back to the landings, after first loading the transit app to pay the fares. I guess it was an adventure, but it took all morning.

We caught a SpaceX launch while we were anchored. That orange spot center-frame, still lower than most of the buildings, is the rocket. 

We spent the afternoon rifling through closets picking out clothes for the funeral, in case either of us might come up short and need a quick excursion to the store. Also, we knew some of it would need a trip through the wash, and we wanted to have everything ready to pack. We tendered ashore to the Southbank Water Taxi dock and walked to Ruths Chris for dinner, where they have a little-known and quite reasonable food menu in the bar during happy hour.

We need high tide to get into the yacht club, and we weighed anchor Friday morning for a high-tide arrival at 10:15. When I had booked the slip, Carter the dockmaster told me it was a squeeze because they were having the grand opening party for the new pool and deck, and we arrived to find the docks busier than we've ever seen (but still not full). Even at high tide, we plowed the mud backing into the slip (map).

We passed this Chesapeake Bay buyboat, possibly now a yacht, on our way upriver to the club.

After we got everything squared away, I went into the club to check on my own Amazon packages, pick up our mail, and make a reservation for dinner. That's when I learned that the grand opening party was so big that the club was not serving any of its normal dinner options in the bar or dining room. They still had room at the event, though, so I signed up for two tickets for the very reasonable buffet.

We draw 6' but the water is only 5.3' deep. Our keel is in the mud.

My Amazon order of fresh earpads for my headphones arrived, allowing me to finish that project, but my suitcase disappeared into the Amazon abyss. I would ultimately spend a half hour on their chat explaining that when it arrived after we left the dock, I would have no way to return it. I dug out another bag, and by dinner time we had everything ready to pack.

We enjoyed attending the big grand opening shindig. It's a very nice pool and patio area, complete with outdoor bar area, and the party was well attended. We enjoyed the buffet, but ended up sitting by ourselves and did not really meet any members. They had a live band, which we could hear from the boat, but they did not go to late and it was mostly pleasant.

Saturday morning I had a last-minute pilgrimage on the e-bike to the Winn-Dixie for some fragrance-free toiletries, as one of the nieces has a severe fragrance allergy. I had hoped to try out the new pool, but between the shopping trip and packing there was not enough time before our Lyft to the airport. We breezed through the pre-check line and settled in at Shula's, near the gate, for a beer before boarding. We picked up subs from Angie's, also near the gate, to eat for dinner on the flight. We had paid for upgraded economy seats and we lucked out, with each of our window seats having an empty center seat adjacent.

The new pool and patio on official opening day.

Somewhere before boarding we heard an announcement that the in-flight Internet access would be unavailable on the flight, and sure enough, when I tried it, normally free for me with T-Mobile, it was not working. You could get the on-board entertainment, which comes from a server on the aircraft, but that was it. So we were essentially incommunicado during the flight, just like the old days.

And so it was that as soon as we were on the ground, Louise's phone lit up with a surfeit of text messages. Her dad, also in town for the funeral, had taken a bad fall in his hotel shower and was being admitted to the hospital. We spent the whole time between the gate and the Hertz building ruminating about whether we needed to bypass our Denver hotel near the airport and drive directly to the hospital in Colorado Springs, and booking another room there instead.

By the time we were driving out of the airport, cooler heads had prevailed, and given that his wife was with him, and it would be near midnight on our body clocks and close to the end of visiting hours when we arrived, we instead proceeded to our original hotel a short distance from the Denver airport. Not before stopping at 7-11 for some much needed beer.

We had a little bit of a Rocky Mountain view from our Denver airport hotel.

My plans for a leisurely morning at the hotel before the drive to Colorado Springs were out the window, and we were up before dawn, wolfing down the free breakfast when it opened at 6, so we could check out and head directly to the hospital. As she was headed to the breakfast table, coffee in hand, Louise dropped her phone on the tiled floor, shattering the screen into, to borrow a phrase, many fragments, some large, some small. The phone mostly still worked, but she could barely touch the screen without getting a glass shard in her finger.

Normally on a short trip like this we would just set it aside and get by with my phone, but now there were dozens of messages concerning her family that barely involved me, and there was a real possibility I'd be heading home without her, and she'd need a usable phone. When we got back to the room I spent some time finding a suitable replacement on Amazon and ordered it on one-day delivery to a locker in Colorado Springs.

That handled, we checked out and proceeded directly to the hospital, a drive of about an hour and a half. Things were not nearly as bad as we feared, and he was in good spirits and doing fairly well. We left the hospital in time to make our commitment for a family luncheon and get-together at 11, about 40 minutes away. While the circumstances were sad, we were glad to meet all our great-nieces and nephews and it was good to spend time with our nieces, nephews, and my brother- and sister-in-law as well as her siblings.

The view from our Colorado Springs hotel. The Hilton app lets me choose a room and I selected the side with the view.

I rooted around the house where some family were staying looking for packing tape, but what I found instead was Saran Wrap and Scotch Tape, and with those I was able to fashion a screen protector so Louise could use her phone until we got her set up with a new one. After a nice visit we drove across town to check into our hotel.

We had enough time for a much-needed short nap before we drove off in another direction to the church, where we met a much larger contingent of family, our niece's in-laws, and a lot of close friends, over coffee and dessert. Any semblance of normalcy in our caloric intake or dining schedules was, by this time, long gone, and the hotel breakfast, 11am lunch, and 6pm dessert was more than enough for the day.

Monday morning we had breakfast at the hotel before driving to the graveside service. These are never easy; there is a finality to it that can not be denied, and it was very emotional for all of us. Fittingly, it was a cold morning, and we shivered through part of it. Afterward we had a full hour before the church service, and some of us met for coffee in a nearby coffee shop while we waited. When we went to pay the check there wasn't one; some kind soul who knew the family had picked it up.

Early arrivals before the service.

The service was packed. Our niece was well-known and well-loved in her community and her church. The service was a little over an hour and was live-streamed, so my father-in-law got to see it in his hospital room. A lunch reception followed, after which we made our way back to the hotel to rest after a very emotional few hours. I even managed a few minutes in the hot tub.

Although we had nothing else on our schedule, an impromptu family dinner began to emerge over text messaging, and by dinner time 14 of us were converging on the Black Bear Diner, not far from the hospital, with the thought that some would go for a visit afterward. While we were at dinner we got the notification that the new phone had been delivered to the Amazon Locker.

Family dinner.

We had intended to go to the hospital after dinner, but with at least four other family members going, and being dog-tired and still working on Eastern Time, we waved off and instead headed back to the hotel by way of the locker. We instead went directly to the hospital Tuesday morning after a quick breakfast and checking out of the hotel. Things were improving, and he had been moved to a regular room from the progressive care ward.

We wrapped up the family visit with lunch at our niece's house. Here we added the final family member to our tally for the trip, Sterling, the bernedoodle. They had adopted this dog just before her diagnosis, and I know Sterling was a great comfort to her through her illness. She is a sweet dog who warmed right up to us after the obligatory bark at the unknown arrivals.

Sterling, a good dog.

Right up to lunch time it had been in question whether Louise would be flying home with me, or would need to stay to support her father and step-mother. Over lunch it was decided that her brother and sister-in-law, who had driven down from Canada, would stay a few extra days, with the option for Louise to fly back at a later date if the need arises. We're keeping the list of accessible airports in mind as we continue north along the coast.

We drove directly to the airport by way of a cheap gas station, dropped off the car, and were through TSA over two hours before our flight. We had to hunt a bit for a bench where Louise could stretch out; she crashed hard and slept for nearly an hour while I struggled to catch up on email and messages after three days of not being able to pay attention.

Dolphins in our Jacksonville anchorage.

We had scored first class seats for the return trip and had a decent dinner on the plane. The WiFi was working on this flight, but nary a message came in, thankfully. By the time Uber was dropping us off at the yacht club it was well past midnight. That's when we  discovered that, in our absence, workmen had erected more fencing to remove the old patio and gates that were previously unlocked were now locked, and we did not have the gate code. Rather than roust the dockmaster at nearly 1am, we managed to climb through part of the fence to get back to the boat and our own comfortable bed.

We slept in on Wednesday morning, trying to recover from the jet lag. We had just enough milk for our morning coffee, after which I had to run to Winn-Dixie on the e-bike for more milk and a few other items. High tide was at 2pm, and so after lunch I finally got in a brief swim in the nice new pool. It was lovely, but not as warm as I like; that will be a non-issue shortly in the brutal heat of Florida summer.

More of last night's fireworks. I have dozens of photos.

We dropped lines at high tide and made our way out into the river, heading right back where we left from on Friday at the suspicious boat anchorage (map). We needed another night to recover and get a few things done before heading back downriver.

One of those things to be done was to set up Louise's new phone and transfer everything. I had been prepared to do that in Colorado if she was going to stay, but once that decision passed, it made no sense to be monkeying with phones right before she'd need it to board the flight. I had plugged it in to charge first thing in the morning, and after we set the hook I got to work.

Vector at anchor as seen from the Skyway as it crosses the Acosta Bridge.

I did not get far. I had ordered an unlocked model, brand new in box, and while it was in generic packaging I immediately got an error while trying to activate Android, telling me to call a certain number. That number turned out to be Verizon, so what was supposed to be an unlocked all-carrier phone turned out to be a Verizon model. Louise does have Verizon, but we never take the carrier-specific model.

That phone went right back to Amazon, sadly no longer new-in-box, and I hunted around for another one that could be delivered overnight. Jacksonville was the last Amazon locker location we will see for a while. That committed us to another night in Jacksonville, and Louise also ordered some meds to the only Walgreens accessible from the docks, buried in the bowels of the Baptist Hospital. We found the Post Street dock to be reopened and we had dinner at relatively new Rodrigos Pizza in the Five Points neighborhood, ending with ice cream from a joint just called Waffle Cone.

Old Hickory himself. Behind him on the site of the Landings is a new riverfront park under construction.

Thursday as soon as the Amazon notice arrived I set out on whirlwind excursion on the Skyway, once again operational. I tendered ashore at the Landings, locked up the dink, and walked to the UPS Store to drop off the incorrect phone, by way of a stop at the Chase branch to take care of some account business. The Skyway entrance is right next to UPS and it was a short ride to the transit center for the new phone at the Amazon locker. A change of trains took me across the river to Baptist Hospital with its Walgreens that is little more than a pharmacist counter.

At dinner time we were hoping to head back to Five Points for either the biergarten or the Mediterranean place, but the river proved far too choppy south of the I-95 bridge, and we turned around and headed to Brooklyn instead. We ended up back at Anejo Cocina for another pitcher of Modelo Negra to close out our Jacksonville stop.

This ocean-going Ro-Ro barge is being loaded for Puerto Rico.

Yesterday morning we got an early start to have a fair tide all the way downriver and into Sisters Creek. There was a bit of a glitch as the anchor came up with the hammer-lock hockled, but it was able to bash its way over the roller and through the hawsepipe so we could get underway; I freed it later on our way downriver.

The anchor chain somehow jammed on the hammer-lock like this. I had to pry it apart.

As we were turning off the St. Johns into Sisters Creek, our friends Amy and David aboard Selah Way hailed us on the radio; they had spotted us as they were entering the river from the other side of the ICW. They passed us under way and we caught up with them later at the fuel dock.

Vector underway north of Cumberland Island. Photo: Amy Deutl

The early start and fair tide let us get all the way to Fernandina Beach by mid-afternoon, in plenty of time to catch the Port Consolidated Fuel Dock before they closed for the weekend. Fuel here is just $2.65 a gallon for cash or check, with no tax if the fuel is leaving Florida. We had to wait a little over an hour for our turn, after a shrimp boat, and spent another hour at the dock putting in a full 1,100 gallons, which should take us all the way to New England and then some.

While we were fueling this "pirate ship" came in on its way to the shrimp festival.

After bunkering we headed straight for the anchorage (map) and tendered ashore, running right smack into opening ceremonies of the 60th annual Isle of Eight Flags Shrimp Festival, the biggest thing that happens each year in Fernandina Beach. While fresh shrimp from a stand has a certain appeal, we wanted a sit-down meal with a draft beer, and we made our way to Scully's Irish Pub while it was still uncrowded. We've done all the must-see restaurants in Fernandina, and wanted something different and less crowded. This one was fine, but not worth a repeat.

Contestants in the Miss Shrimp Festival pageant lined up for the stage.

After dinner we strolled downtown, the entirety of which had been closed to traffic for the festival, with center street and two blocks either side of it filled with vendor stalls. I somehow neglected to snap an overview shot, but I caught Louise with the mascot shrimp. We heard the music from the main stage well into the night out in the anchorage. Fortunately it was mostly our era. We got to take in the fireworks show right from our deck.

Louise tangles with the festival mascot.

As large and vibrant as the festival was, the couple of hours we spent was plenty, and we did not feel the need to spend another day. Nothing they are selling at any of those booths is something we need aboard Vector. We got underway this morning with the tide, arriving at the St. Marys Inlet just as the flood started.

This pirate-ship tour boat, en route from its winter cruising grounds in Marco Island to its summer grounds in New Jersey, smoked us. We had the last laugh when we passed him at the fuel dock in Jekyll Island. No autopilot; he's hand steering for 1,500 miles.

Update: We are anchored in the Frederica River at the north end of Lanier Island (map). We had a fair tide a good part of the day, and arrived at Jekyll Island right at high tide for an easy passage through this notoriously shallow creek. The Coastal Kitchen restaurant nearby is still closed for some reason, and we were not up to walking a mile, possibly in the rain, to the next closest place, so we ate aboard. Tomorrow we hope to see our friends John and Laura Lee for lunch before we weigh anchor and continue north.