Down the shoah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This window made of old bottles adorns The Ark.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, there's your problem.

A different view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's been great to see you, Dad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Delivery Trip

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

Barnegat Lighthouse, aka Old Barney.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mostly alone again, in the Absecon anchorage.

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

Still leaves open a lot of sporting possibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebration! Sail250, Harborfest, and Juneteenth

As I mentioned in my last two posts, I took a lot of photos while we were anchored in Norfolk for the Sail250 Virginia tall ship event that ran concurrent with the annual Harborfest celebration and, this year, also included Juneteenth. Today's post will concern only these events and will mostly comprise some of the photos I took throughout.

Harborfest just on its own is the biggest event in the area each year, and the organizer, Festevents, is well-practiced at setting up. This is basically a giant street fair, comprising several live music stages, a large line-up of food trucks and stands, myriad booths and tents hawking all manner of merchandise, a fireworks show, and various and sundry other entertainment acts and activities. It occupies the entire waterfront, which this year also included the flotilla of tall ships.

Sail250 Virginia was part of the broader tall ship element of America's 250th celebration of independence. For many of the tall ships, Norfolk was their US port of arrival, whereas other ships participated in organized events ahead of the Norfolk event in other nearby ports. I spotted some of them in Yorktown on my road trip to Deltaville. After they were done in Norfolk, many continued to Baltimore for an event there, and they all converged on New York Harbor for the July 4th weekend in what, I think, was the largest gathering of tall ships ever to occur.

What follows is a selection of photos from this event. They are mostly in chronological order, which means they are grouped roughly as follows:

• Parade of Tall Ships
• Juneteenth Fireworks
• Visiting the tall ships in port
• Harborfest Fireworks
• International Parade of Cadets (including Mexico, even without their ship)
• More ship visits

I have captioned some of the photos, but for many I am leaving it as an exercise for the reader to suss out the relevant country from the flags and uniforms. You can find the full list of ships and descriptions here.

We dressed ship for the parade. If you look between our two top flags at right you will see the start of the parade, with fireboats spraying water and the Eagle behind them.

USCGC Eagle, "America's tall ship," always heads a tall ship parade in US waters. Note the cadets on the yardarms.

Godspeed, from Jamestown. Each of the 250th parades attracted a number of regional ships.

Smoke On! The US Navy Blue Angels overflies the parade.

The fly-over was timed to pass over Eagle just as she made her turn at the end of the route.

Schooner Virginia, the hometown girl.

The ships that had sails up furled them quite a bit downriver of us. I tried to capture a couple; here is Gorch Fock in the distance mid-furl.

Gorch Fock of Germany, and sister ship to USCGC Eagle.

BAP Union of the Peruvian Navy. The largest of the fleet and one of the newest sail training ships in the world.

Traffic jam. Here the Gorch Fock is headed out the other way, to her berth downriver, passing the inbound Oosterschelde. The big motor yacht between them is one of the escort vessels.

Oosterschelde still has some sail up.

ARC Gloria of Colombia. More cadets on yardarms. The Colombians had the best music, over a very effective sound system.

Six tall ships in a row, a taste of what we were witnessing.

Pride of Baltimore II fires her cannon. Note the 1812 flag.

INS Sudarshini of the Indian Navy.

NS Mircea of Romania, another Blohm & Voss sister ship to USCGC Eagle.

BE Guayas of Ecuador.

V/E Capitan Miranda, Uruguay.

NRP Sagres of Portugal, the final sister ship to USCGC Eagle. These four of the "five sisters" had a race to Boston from New York; the Gorch Fock won the Five Sisters Cup.

This "escort vessel" was towing a pair of tub toys, which cracked us up.

ARA Libertad of the Argentinian Navy.

I took a lot of Libertad photos for my Argentinian aunt.

DAR Mlodziezy, Poland.

B/E Esmeralda of the Chilean Navy.

B/E Juan Sebastian de Elcano, Spain.

m/y Vector, US. 

As the sun set the ships began to light up.

This was our evening view throughout the event. Not too shabby.

Looking downriver to the more distant cluster of ships.

Juneteenth fireworks.

B/E Guayas as seen from ARC Gloria.

Displays aboard ARC Gloria.

This ladder aboard ARC Gloria is about the same pitch as our ladder on Vector.

Everything, including these representative berths (hammocks), was color-coded to the flag, including all the sailors on the yardarms when she arrived.

Vector in the busy anchorage as seen from Gloria.

Every ship was selling merch.

This "welcome mat" reminded me of our original shower sole.

A view into the rig, BAP Union.

This decorative brightwork covers a capstan.

Even the bitts are ornately decorated.

Modern chart/pilothouse.

Ship's bell, marked 2016.

Zip-ties are a modern universality. In the old days this would have been laced.

The tour passed through a room with a number of Peruvian cultural items.

Passing this window into the galley. That's a lot of eggs for a hungry crew.

I liked that their merch included these hand-made monkey fists, an ancient pastime of sailors at sea.

Harborfest craft beer tent. That's a lot of kegs.

They were labeled on the front side so you could step up to the right tap.

BAP Union's bowsprit came out past the flag poles, dwarfing USCGC Eagle to her port.

People walked underneath without rally noticing, that's how high they were.

At 175', BAP Union could just clear the Bay Bridge to visit Baltimore, but could not continue on to Delaware Bay via the C&D Canal, which easily accommodates large container and RoRo ships.

The main stage, where Sister Sledge and Patti LaBelle performed, among others. We heard every word in the anchorage.

The Front Street Piers venue was a long way from the main venue and they ran shuttle buses. This steel drum band playing at Front Steet had but this lone attendee. I listened for a few minutes; they were pretty good.

I snapped this photo of Esmeralda at Front Street before boarding Gorch Fock, moored astern of her. The blue hull tied alongside is bunkering.

The main helm of Gorch Fock. It takes six sailors to move this mechanically linked helm when the vessel has any way on.

The modern nav station.

Wing station. This Gorch Fock is a much more modern replacement for an older Gorch Fock, built to the same plans, so she has more modern equipment and conveniences than her sister ships, including USCGC Eagle (ex- Horst Wessel).

Esmeralda.

The old ways.

I am on Chilean soil here, and the Chileans saw fit to have their security detail armed, which may just be their usual routine. The only other armed detail I saw was was for Eagle.

Aboard the NOAA survey vessel Ferdinand Hassler. Their Kahlenberg control is a bit more complex than ours.

We also have Jastram steering, again just a little less complex than this.

We also both use white boards to keep track of fuel tank levels.

The fire bottle releases are cable-operated. The cables, inside tubes, go over these sheaves to change diirections.

The actual manual relelases.

Stilt walkers on High Street, part of the companion festival across the river in Portsmouth.

The anchorage got crowded for the fireworks. These rafted boats had to move when the tide reversed and we started looming over them.

Harborfest fireworks.

The fireworks were launched from barges both upriver and downriver from us and we kept swiveling our heads to try to see it all.

The anchorage, as illuminated by fireworks in two directions.

Cadets staging for the parade near Freemason basin.

The parade converged on Nauticus from two different directions, led here by the US Navy Band.

Some participating groups had a cultural element.

After passing the review stand each group marched up the gangway and on to the USS Wisconsin to man the rails.

I'm not as tough as these cadets and I had to take shelter from the sun. I caught part of the parade from under Nauticus.

Lots of midshipmen and sailors now lining the decks of Wisconsin, and they are still coming.

US Navy Band giving a Sousa performance.

Security was no joke. Snipers on a nearby rooftop.

The Eagle had the longest lines. I lined up early and got a seat in the shade on a bollard. By the time they actually opened for tours, the line wrapped around the corner and past BAP Union. I left the parade early to get a spot.

Breathing apparatus for firefighting in a deck locker.

Even the Coasties need a meters-to-feet reminder.

Eagle helm, the only way she steers. No hydraulics, no autopilot.

USCG security detail. Unlike the Chileans, he gets to stand shore-side.

The Germans wanted to sample some Cajun food.

My kind of tall ship — a wet bar with a beer tap. Oosterschelde.

Oosterschelde is actually a charter vessel, one of the few non-military foreign participants.

Norfolk PD and the FBI respond to Oosterschelde, I think for an unidentified substance or package.

INS Sudarshini, built in Goa.

So that's where you are supposed to keep it.

Sudarshini was the only one of the big girls to have deck prisms.

I refrained from taking one of these minuscule flags at an exhibit table.

Vector as seen between Juan Sebastian de Elcano and Libertad.

One of the Harborfest exhibits was this radio-control model club.

The French entry was among the smaller vessels.

NRP Sagres.

Precious cargo, m'dear. To celebrate our 250th.