In Memoriam, William J. Welsh, 1928-2026

I write today with both a measure of great sadness, and a measure of relief, of the passing of my father, Bill. The call came yesterday morning at 10:30, while we were underway on a remote stretch of waterway. In the universe's way of reminding us that life still goes on, less than ten minutes later we were boarded randomly by the Coast Guard for an inspection.

At our wedding in San Jose, California.

I know very little of my father's early life; he was very private about it. He had a difficult childhood in New York City, becoming estranged from his family and eventually an emancipated minor, making a living however he could. At 18 he enlisted in the US Army and did one tour, where he served in Occupation Forces Japan.

Perhaps my favorite image of us together. Taken at dinner on a trip to Miami with his friend and business partner.

After the Army he put himself through NYU on the GI Bill, majoring in business. Somehow in his early adult years he was able to scrape enough together to buy into the family business of friends, supplying wholesale meat in New York City. He eventually became a full partner in that business, which ultimately provided me my first W-2 job at age 14, operating a plug-cord PBX.

At the house in Emerson with our dog, Pepper.

He met my mother at NYU, where they were both members of the Newman Society. A devout Catholic, his faith remained important to him his entire life. They began their life together in a small apartment in New Jersey, eventually saving enough for a house in the town of Emerson, where I grew up. He left every weekday in the wee hours of the morning to drive to his office in the Bronx, and dinner in our house was always on the early side.

A tender moment, dancing with Mom in the living room.

We took up skiing as a family when I was perhaps ten, and my dad and I stuck with it. Some of my fondest memories of him are of skiing together, which we did until I left for grad school in California. We skied locally in NJ but also had many great skiing vacations in Canada and Vermont. He was my ski partner longer than anyone else. I also have fond memories of going with him to his club in Manhattan every winter Saturday to participate in a youth program there.

At the Banff Springs Hotel on a ski trip. We froze our buns.

Of necessity my father was very handy, and apart from his day job, he was also a plumber, electrician, carpenter, painter, tiler, and floor-layer. I'm quite certain I got my own disposition toward being Mr. Fix-It from him, and it has stood me in good stead. When I wanted built-in bookcases and a platform bed in my childhood room, he built them, and had me help.

At the Stanford quad while I was in grad school.

He had little time for it during his working years, but he was an avid stamp collector, and he returned to that hobby in his retirement. Sitting still was not his style, and he also picked up a part-time job driving limousines in his retirement, and he often had a few good stories from that avocation.

Skiing at, I think, Bolton Valley.

His was a life well-lived, and he went strong for some 95 years. More recently he succumbed to vascular dementia, and it has been over a year since I was able to carry on a conversation with him. Since June he has lived in a memory care facility, where he has been comfortable. He passed with nothing left undone, and we can honestly say that he died simply of old age.

A contemplative apres-ski moment at Mont Tremblant Lodge.

Rest in peace, Dad. I will miss you.

Goin' to Carolina

We are underway southbound through the Pamlico Sound, on the second half of a mostly open-water passage toward our next stop in the Beaufort/Morehead City area. We've been making good time and will very comfortably make our schedule to Myrtle Beach.

Wednesday after I posted here we had an uneventful crossing of the very busy ship channel at Hampton Roads, made our way into Willoughby Bay through its north entrance, and dropped the hook more or less mid-bay, about equidistant from the marina dinghy dock and the public boat ramp (map). We splashed the tender, rode over to the boat ramp, locked up, and walked a few blocks to Swell Charcoal Grill & Raw Bar, a casual neighborhood joint on the Willoughby Spit. The food was decent and they had a few decent canned beers, and we were happy to have a stretch. A 7-11 is next door. I had explored this neighborhood when we were docked in Little Creek back in June.

Sunrise over Virginia Beach and Norfolk from our anchorage in Willoughby Bay.

While at anchor I spent a bunch of time researching whether we could leave the bay via the west channel in the morning. The channel begins and ends in unrestricted water but it passes just inside of the boundary of the naval security zone. I could not get a good answer, so in the morning we left the way we came, via the north channel, a diversion of about a mile and a half.

We left on a fair tide and had a nice push upriver on the Elizabeth. Our day plan had been to end at the High Street Landing in Portsmouth, one of our regular stops, or maybe the nearby Hospital Point anchorage, just to have a short day and a relaxing evening in Norfolk/Portsmouth. But we would arrive before lunch time, and on our way upriver we discussed passing it by, for two reasons. One is that my replacement battery was already sitting at Walgreens, and they had called me to say it really should not be there due to hazardous materials content. And second is that there is a diesel shortage in the region, and we did not want to put off our fuel stop any longer than necessary.

Cheers from Swell on Willoughby Spit.

Thus it was that we cruised right past High Street and continued on to Top Rack Marina, which had the best diesel price in the region at $6.04/gallon. We bunkered just 350 gallons; it will most likely be cheaper in Myrtle Beach, and this way I did not have to change valve settings in the engine room during fueling. The 20 minutes we spent had us missing the 12:30 lockage at Great Bridge, and we dropped a lunch hook in front of the lock to wait for the 1:30.

We pulled up to the free bulkhead in Great Bridge just before 2pm to find a large chunk taken up by a crane barge conducting a diving operation. We were just able to squeeze in at the very west end of the wall (map), after first spinning around to come in port-side-to. This in case we needed to offload a scooter for some reason during our stay. Call it a premonition.

After getting tied up and squared away I offloaded our little folding wagon and walked down to Walgreens to get our packages. A large box of fabric that Louise had shipped here was waiting for me, but the all-important battery had been returned to FedEx. It was marked in the system as "refused," even though it had been accepted and signed for on Tuesday. They had literally handed it back to the driver just hours before I arrived; I had no idea you could refuse a delivery after you'd already signed for it. I spent the next 20 minutes sitting in the store with my phone out, opening a case with FedEx to try to track it down and retrieve it before it went back to the shipper in Utah.

Sharing the dock with a crane barge running a dive operation. Some kind of drainage project.

At dinner time we walked across the bridge to the Lockside restaurant, which is the pinnacle of mediocrity, if you will permit me the oxymoron, but is also, sadly, the best remaining option within walking distance of the dock. At least they have a couple of decent beers on tap. We came right back to the same shopping center in the morning for bagel breakfast sandwiches at NY Bagels, also mediocre but also the only bagel game in town (the Sunrise Breakfast restaurant a few doors down is a better choice when in the mood for something more).

After breakfast I called FedEx back, seeing no progress on my case, and I asked if the local station could just hold it for me for pickup. FedEx agreed, and the package was still at the station, so we deployed one scooter and I headed across town to pick it up. This is not a customer service center, just a distribution hub; you ring a buzzer out on the street outside the gate and someone comes out with your errant package. As soon as I said it was a package refused due to haz-mat they said "I'll be right out with it" without even asking my name. I did have to show ID and sign for it. The little voice that had told me to bypass Portsmouth and dock port-side-to, it turns out, had been right.

As long as I had to ride across town, on my way back I stopped at Home Depot to drop off some small rechargeables for recycling, and swung by Walmart to pick up a couple gallons of motor oil and a few other items. I had caught the crud that Louise had and this was probably the worst day of it for me, so I had to rest up before going back out to drop our accumulated recycling off near city hall, and get a can full of gas for the dinghy. While I was out I stopped off at Big Ugly Brewing to pick up a couple of four-packs of their excellent 22 Porter, which I first discovered, I think, out at Swell. A full day on the roads taught me that traffic in Chesapeake is miserable.

The CG had been making announcements about a boat aground near North Landing. This crane passed us on its way to go get it.

With all those errands done we decked the scooter; I did not want to have to do it either after dinner or in the morning chill. We walked to Chili's for dinner, mostly because it's next door to the Kroger, where we filled out the provisioning list before walking home. A pumpkin pie was my reward for soldiering through the day while under the weather. This was my second visit to Kroger; I had stopped by earlier to see if they recycled glass, the one item the city does not take. They do not; VA is not a bottle-bill state.

Saturday morning we took a short and chilly stroll before dropping lines, knowing we would not get off the boat again for several days. We dropped lines for the 9am bridge opening, getting out ahead of the conga line coming out of the lock. I expected at least a couple of boats to pass us after Great Bridge, starting the clock on getting the Centerville bridge opened, but no one did, perhaps because they thought the bridge only opened half-hourly.

The tug came back and tied up with us; the next day we passed the barge with someone's pride and joy on deck. They strayed off-channel and hit the cypress stumps at high speed.

We arrived at the bridge at 9:25, which would have let us just catch North Landing at 10, but the Centerville tender did not open the bridge until 9:37. On top of station-keeping for a dozen minutes, this guaranteed we could not make the 10 at North landing, and I had to slow-roll for 50 minutes to make the 10:30. I was pretty hopping mad at the time; bridge tenders do not have the authority to delay an opening for 12 minutes, but there is little consequence when they stray from the rules. The rest of the day was slow, uneventful, and mostly relaxing, and we had the hook down in the North River (map) just before 4pm. We could have gone further, but north wind dictated stopping at this end of the embayment.

I charged up the new battery underway with my regulated power supply, and with both it and the rest of the bank at full charge when we dropped the hook, I spent the first half hour or so integrating the replacement back into the battery bank. It was an exact fit, the only difference from the older batteries being the addition of bluetooth monitoring, which is nice but only moderately useful for just one out of six batteries. We are now back to full capacity and were able to make it all the way to morning without running the generator.

New battery installed. I put it in the middle to keep an eye on it.

Yesterday we expected a delayed departure due to winds decreasing throughout the day, but when we got up it was flat calm. A quick check of conditions revealed we could take the Sound route as long as we had a place to tuck in for northerlies overnight, and as soon as we entered the Albermarle Sound we veered off from the conga line to come this way instead. I spent yesterday's open-water segment making hotel plans for our upcoming trip, and diagnosing the water heater coolant loop, which has again quit working. We had a fine ride with the wind picking up all day behind us, but got slapped a bit when we made the turn around Long Shoal.

We tucked up as far as we could into the Long Shoal River (map) for acceptable conditions overnight. It is pitch dark and very quiet here, one of the most remote anchorages we visit. There is no cell service and a surfeit of stars to be seen. The wind started to lay down after sunset and we had a comfortable night.

That choice of anchorage makes today a very long 60-mile day to the protection of Adams Creek, so we were underway just after 7. We're both still recovering from the crud and the long slog with little to do apart from supervise Otto is actually a bit of a relief. Tomorrow we will be back in civilization, where we might take another day or two before moving on.

ICW-bound

We are underway southbound in Chesapeake Bay, on our last open-water segment until the Albemarle Sound. It's good to be moving back into more temperate conditions. We are on schedule to make our Thanksgiving flights in Myrtle Beach, with a two-week buffer, which we will whittle down as we get closer.

Monday we dropped the hook just after 5 behind Reedy Island (map), enjoying dinner aboard and a quiet, calm night at anchor. We weighed at 7 Tuesday morning for a fair tide to, through, and out of the canal. We whizzed right past Chesapeake City, normally one of our stops, and continued down the Elk River until we ran out of tide.

Entering the C&D Canal at Reedy Point. The canal was so calm I just had to snap this reflection of the bridges.

Underway I went back and forth with Dave about my impending car trip back to NJ. It turned out that he had a pair of Victron inverters he needed to drive up to Point Pleasant, just ten minutes from my folks, for carry-in service, and he had a car booked for a Wednesday trip. Seeing as we would be docked together in Pasadena, it seemed ridiculous for us to get two cars for trips to the exact same place two days apart, and so we worked out the logistics to share one car. I had booked a single day, planning to leave right from Enterprise, but he needed a two-day rental to get an early morning start. We ended up splitting the difference on timing, and I moved our marina reservation up one day.

Sunset over Aberdeen from Worton Creek.

We ran out of tide at Worton Creek and dropped the hook in a familiar spot there, tucked in tight to the north shore (map). We had the hook down by 12:30 for a short day. In hindsight, we might have been more comfortable stopping even sooner, in the Sassafras, as it became a bit lumpy in the morning, but we were comfortable enough. With a whole afternoon free, I finished up the project to replace the junction box under the new sat compass, as the previous one had some holes exposed from the last compass, covered with tape as a stopgap.

"And I thought they smelled bad on the outside."

Wednesday morning we had a good push downriver through the Poole Island Flats. As we were crossing the ship channel we could see what looked like a USCG cutter doing donuts in front of us, and as I was noodling what to do about that they called us on the radio as "the Hellenic Navy vessel formerly the Coast Guard Cutter Brant" to tell us they were doing steering tests. The Greeks have been buying a lot of retired USCG cutters to use as naval patrol craft.

Once I got the BMS out the damage was obvious. This trace burned clear through.

We were docked at the Maryland Yacht Club (map), a familiar spot, by mid day, and met up with Stacey and Dave. Enterprise was late picking Dave and me up for a 2:00 rental, and they were even later getting us a car due to an inventory shortage. We ended up walking next door to Bahama Mikes for a beer while we waited the half hour or so. We all went to dinner at Anthony's, a decent Italian joint that was the shortest drive from the dock.

Wider shot of the whole BMS with the wires removed.

Thursday morning Dave and I were on the road at 6:30 am. We pulled up to Tekris Power Solutions just a couple minutes after they opened at 10, where we were met by the lone tech on duty, who immediately set to working on the pair of inverters. We hung out for maybe a half hour for Dave to answer his questions, and then left, expecting to have most of the day until closing time to do other errands. We drove right over to the Brick Diner for brunch, having eschewed any stops on the way up. We ended up at the same table Louise and I had a week or two earlier.

A view from the other side.

In short order we drove down to Toms River for me to check in on my dad, who has improved greatly over the last week and has become something of a handful for the staff, then back to Brick to check in on my mom and drop some things off at the house, and then back to Tekris to check in on the work. They had made great progress but were still a couple of hours from done, so we went and camped at the public library to use the Internet and have a comfortable place to sit. I dropped Dave back at Tekris for the home stretch while I ran one more errand at a local bank, and we were loaded back up and done at Tekris by 4:30.

The cells were not penetrated in the event. The black mark is soot from the smoldering board.

That put us in traffic, of course, and it was a long slog home. We ended up making a dinner stop at Firebirds in Newark, Delaware, while Louise and Stacey just walked to the yacht club for dinner. It was around 9pm when we finally rolled back up to the dock. It was a long day but we checked off all the boxes, and it was great to have company on the drive.

Cheers from Firebirds Wood Fired Grill.

We had the car all Friday morning and so we all piled in for errands and brunch. We stopped at the Amazon locker to pick up a few items, and Aldi to provision both boats. Brunch was quite good at Johnny's Family Restaurant. My plan was to drive everyone back, then return the car and catch a ride back, but we literally drove past Enterprise right after we were done at Aldi, and on a hunch I stopped in to ask if they could run us all back to the yacht club if I turned the car in early. They were happy to oblige, saving me a 45-minute round trip.

Triple threat. Left to right, an LNG tanker, the LNG storage facility, and the nuke plant.

We had only taken two nights at the dock, to cover the car trip, and so we dropped lines and headed just 500' away to the anchorage (map). I spent the afternoon tearing apart the failed battery, so that I could be sure there were no cell breaches, disconnect the BMS to ensure it could not do further harm, and get the very stinky burnt  case, BMS, and wiring off the boat. At dinner time we tendered back to Stinkpot, where Dave made us a delicious pot pie. I just finished the last of the leftovers for today's lunch.

The cells were damaged enough that they have to go to hazmat disposal. This portable heater bit the dust a few days ago, and I used its heating coils as a load to drain all the cells down to zero for safer transportation.

Louise had been sneezy all day Friday, we assumed due to bad allergies, but Saturday morning she woke up sick. She was so miserable she had to wave off boatswain duties for the day, and I ended up decking the tender, weighing anchor, and getting underway single-handed. We had a pretty short day to a new stop for us, Selby Bay off the South River (map). That was really the last anchorage before the long stretch to Solomons, which was out of the question for the day. It was a comfortable spot, and we might have been able to go ashore, but with Louise down for the count we just stayed on board. With our battery capacity down by a third, we had quite a bit of generator run time after sunset.

The Reedville water tower and the Market restaurant from the free dock.

Even with the extra runtime, the inverter went offline at 5:30am Sunday morning, making for a rude awakening. I think the state-of-charge meter had still not caught up and we had shut down too soon. We had a dawn start for as much fair tide as we could get for the long run to Solomons. It was a perfect day on the bay, with little commercial traffic, and we even were lucky enough to arrive to Cove Point just after an LNG tanker cleared out. We dropped the hook in our preferred spot near Molly's Leg (map), and by dinner time Louise felt well enough to tender over to the Island Hideway for dinner.

We had a neighbor but only for a few hours. I guess they came just for dinner. They ran their generator the whole time.

Monday was another near-perfect day on the bay, with an easy cruise to Reedville, where we tied up to the free dock at the Reedville Market Restaurant (map). The restaurant has reopened under new management and we made a reservation for dinner. The food was quite good and they had a few nice draft selections, but it was very spendy for this neck of the woods. Before dinner I had a nice walk around town, my first in a while and I felt it.

Oversized skeletons to go with the oversized Adirondack chairs in front of the ice cream joint. Which is closed for the season.

Tuesday morning we had another early start for tide, which gets earlier as we progress down the bay. It was a short day to our planned stop in Deltaville, where we came in to Broad Creek for the first time ever. We normally anchor on the other side of the neck, off the Piankatank, where there is plenty of depth for us. By contrast, Broad Creek is just six feet deep at low tide. We arrived close to high tide at 11am and had a little over a foot under our keel. There is no place for us to anchor in Broad Creek; instead we tied up at Norton Yacht Sales (map) after first using their pump-out. Norton is trying to bolster their limited transient business and dockmaster Ian pulled out all the stops to make our stay pleasant.

Moonrise over Cockrell Creek.

We chose Norton because it is just two doors down from the Jolly Skipper Boatyard, where our friend Tim is having his sailboat, Paquita, worked on. The Jolly Skipper does not have enough depth for us, so this was as close as we could get. Tim dropped by right after lunch and we spent an hour catching up, and somehow he managed to borrow a car for the evening, and at 5:30 we rode over to The Galley, the only joint in town open on a Tuesday evening, for dinner. The food was decent, the prices reasonable, and the company superb. We are only sorry that we missed his wife Crisalida, who is in NY visiting family.

We did not think to get a pic until we were on the dock, in the dark. Photo: Tim Boehmer

This morning we waited until 9am to shove off, so we would have enough tide to get out without drama. We had no trouble at all, and in hindsight we could have left a half hour or so earlier. Conditions were worse than forecast and we had a choppy ride for a couple of hours, but things have flattened out some. We've also had the tide against us most of the day; I have a little reprieve right now but it will be against us in the Elizabeth River.

We passed this bald eagle on our way out of Broad Creek this morning. He was unfazed.

Normally we'd end our day at the Phoebus anchorage in Hampton, but, just as happened this time last year, all of Hampton is overrun by the Salty Dawg rally, with 80+ sailboats taking up every available spot. Depending on when we reach the Thimble Shoals Light, we'll either try for a new-to-us spot in Willoughby Bay, or else press on to Hospital Point.

Moving along.

We are underway northbound on Delaware Bay, which means southbound (finally) on the ICW. You will be relieved to know it is a short update today, given I just posted on Friday, but I don't want to waste the opportunity to get an update out while we are in open water, lest I once again find myself scrambling to find the time. That said, now that we are making tracks, I should have more opportunities until we are "in the ditch" south of Norfolk.

Saturday morning the marina was kind enough to run us over to Enterprise, two towns north in Rio Grande, where we had our car and were on the road by 8:30. Our first stop was the AAA in Northfield, which is an Amazon counter, where Louise had a package waiting that we had expected to collect while we were in Atlantic City. From there we headed to our now-customary stop at JT's Bagels on our way to my dad's new digs in Toms River.

They had transported him from the hospital Friday evening, and we wanted to make sure he was settled and all his things made the trip with him. Even though one reason he had to come to this facility was for "isolation," we found him sitting partly upright in a rolling lounger in the day room. Every facility makes its own decisions about isolation protocol, and this one wanted to have him in full view of the nurses' station to mitigate fall risk and other issues, rather than out of sight in his room.

Ducks in a shop window along Washington Street, a pedestrian mall. Louise for scale.

He did not wake while we were there, so we just spent some time with his assigned nurse to brief/debrief the situation, opting to come back later after we finished our other errands. That included swinging by the other Amazon locker where I had two packages waiting, and dropping by the house to drop off some paperwork and to see if my mom needed anything. I was gobsmacked to find my long-lost second cousins over for a visit; I have not seen them in at least three decades. We only had time for a quick fly-by, as we needed to get back to the nursing facility, but it was great to catch up with them briefly, and for Louise to meet them.

Dad was able to wake briefly after we returned, and we determined that he was comfortable and not in any distress. We spent maybe a half hour and talked again with the nurse before leaving, knowing it might be a week or so before I can get back. We were satisfied with the standard of care we observed during the visit.

We were back in time to spend a few minutes at the boat before dinner, then headed into town. We ended up at the Blue Pig restaurant, in the historic Congress Hall hotel. The whole town was busy, even for a cold October weekend, and we had to circle to find parking. Even though online reservations were booked out to past 8pm, we were able to get a table as walk-ins at 5. In hindsight we should have gone downstairs to The Boiler Room, which was a bit more casual and lively. After dinner we strolled a couple of blocks of the Washington Street pedestrian mall, busy and decorated for the season.

One of our lithium batteries, on the dock. No, that is not a bullet hole.

With four hours of driving, visits, and our big night on the town, it had been a very long day, and we settled in for a relaxing evening. The outside temperature plummeted, heading for a low in the low 40s overnight, and we were maxing out our 30-amp shore connection, which we had chosen over our usual 50-amp to save another $53 on our stay. Sometime after 9pm the internal 30-amp breaker on the inverter popped for the first time ever (normally either the 30-amp output breaker or one of the 30-amp input breakers trips first).

The inverter is silent about doing this, and it merrily continued running all our heaters from the batteries until the low-battery alarm went off. I could not figure why the inverter was inverting and not charging, since the input power was fine. I opened up the battery compartment to look at the meters on each of the six batteries, which revealed they were seriously out of balance, with one showing zero bars. I went down and switched to the backup charger to get everything working. And that's when the magic smoke came out.

I'm very glad I had the cover off the battery compartment, because we noticed it right away. A stream of smoke accompanied by an acrid smell of burning plastic and electronics. Louise grabbed a fire extinguisher while I ran down to disconnect the charger and turn off the main battery switch. Fortunately, the burning stopped when I switched everything off. We opened the whole boat up to clear the smoke and the smell, which meant plugging into 50 amps so we could run the big heaters. The little ones can keep the boat comfortable when its all closed up, but are no match for 44° air flooding into the boat.

Scorch mark on the side of the battery compartment, in the saloon settee. This could easily have become a fire if we did not nip it in the bud.

I eventually found the tripped breaker, which pops out of the inverter like it's a turkey ready in the oven. Unfortunately, it appears there is no way to fashion an alarm to tell us this breaker has popped, so we have to just rely on the low battery alarm. And I disconnected the bad battery from the bank before turning everything back on. By this time it was nearly 11pm, and we thought long and hard about whether or not the battery needed to come off the boat before we turned in. Yes, of course it did.

I spent the next 20 minutes surgically excising it from the bank, and Louise walked it off the boat and all the way to the parking lot — we did not even want to leave it on the wooden dock. It did not ignite, and at the end of the day yesterday I brought it back aboard and set it in the middle of the foredeck, where a fire can't ignite anything. I need to hang onto it until Lion Energy answers my warranty claim; I really want to open it up and disconnect whatever smoked from the cells before I do anything else with it, but I can't until they talk to me. I do not have a theory about why the battery picked this time to fail.

Yesterday I ruminated about going back up to the nursing facility, since we already had a car. Enterprise is closed on Sunday, so we had to keep both the car and the marina until this morning. Ultimately we decided to take the day off; it would be a three-hour round trip to spend maybe fifteen minutes. Instead we had a quiet morning, and in the afternoon I took the car to run a bunch of errands, including a well-overdue haircut, a massage, and gassing up the car.

Closer view of the damage. I think the BMS is behind this spot.

In the evening we went back out to Lower Township (place names in this part of the state are weird) for dinner at the Red Brick Ale House. After dinner we hit the Acme supermarket a few doors down for our last easy provisions for the foreseeable future and then headed home to prepare for an early departure.

This morning I returned the car first thing. Enterprise here does not give rides on Monday morning so I had to Uber back to the boat. We dropped lines right at 9:30 for a fair tide the whole day. We had a very choppy ride across the easternmost part of the bay, but it got better when we were back in the lee around Egg Island Point. As I wrap up typing, abreast of the nuke plant, the plotter is projecting a 5pm arrival to the anchorage behind the Reedy Point dike.

If all goes to plan, we will transit the C&D Canal tomorrow with a fair tide, then head down the Elk River and Chesapeake Bay on Wednesday to Rock Creek, off the Patapsco, where we hope to catch up with friends Stacey and Dave aboard Stinkpot. I've also booked a couple of nights at the yacht club there and yet another rental car, as this will be our last stop within reasonable driving distance of NJ.

Window of opportunity.

We are underway southbound in a choppy North Atlantic Ocean. Seas are not yet angry, but they are at least mildly annoyed. By tomorrow they will be untenable, and likely for at least a week, and therein lies a tale: Despite having a marina slip through tomorrow and even having extended our rental car to tomorrow morning, with expectation of a Sunday or Monday departure, at 6:30 this morning we decided instead to make a run for it.

My giant pretzel at Landing Point Tavern seemed very happy to see me.

When last I posted here, we were also shifting gears, trying to move our rental car reservation up to Friday morning from our scheduled Friday evening booking. The local office was hemming and hawing and saying they could not commit to having cars then, yada, yada, and so I just changed the booking online, which is what I should have done in the first place. We had a nice dinner underway, the leftovers from the previous evening at Goodfellas, and we ran the last hour and a half after dark. The city lights in the distance made the going a bit easier. We just caught the tail end of the flood into our usual anchorage (map), where we found just one other boat.

Friday morning we double-checked our anchor circle and that we were well set through two changes of the tide, checked on the battery charge, then dropped the tender and headed ashore. Lyft picked us up at the casino, since Enterprise had no pickup drivers available, and we were in our car and on the way to the hospital just a few minutes after 10. This would be the first of four trips north to Brick over the course of the week, but the only one with the boat left at anchor. I checked in on our cameras, battery monitor, and position report throughout the day; Vector did just fine on her own. We got back in the dark after dinner.

Sunset over the Jersey shore en route to Atlantic City.

Saturday we decked the tender and moved over to the Farley State Marina, operated by the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino. In over a dozen years stopping in Atlantic City, this is only our third time at these docks. Once was a free dock-and-dine stop to kill a couple of hours on an overnight run to NYC, and the other time, also free, we needed a dock for a diver to replace our line cutters. We pulled into the slip (map) bow-first so I could effect repairs on the bow roller at some point.

We were happy to be well-secured to the dock when a nor'easter came through, confining us to the boat all day Sunday. I used the downtime to make adjustments to the new satellite compass and to work on the last bits of trim for the settee reconstruction. We never set foot off the boat, eating aboard rather than braving the driving rain. Online acquaintance Lou aboard Sister Kate had pulled in to the marina Saturday evening, and it was too messy to even walk down the dock to say hello. We missed each other Monday as well and by Tuesday morning they had already moved on.

Fixing the sat compass settings. This may seem like gibberish, but I need to know the meaning of all 22 of these three-letter "sentences" to get this right.

My father's situation, meanwhile, has been a moving target. We were hoping to move him to hospice care, in accordance with his wishes in his health care directive. But an indwelling catheter for the next two weeks and an MRSA infection that required isolation and IV antibiotics for three more weeks mean he can not yet return to his memory care facility, nor can he remain in the hospital. We got the word on this late in the day on Monday, while we were in a nearby Walgreens getting our flu and COVID shots.

I ended up spending all Monday evening researching skilled nursing facilities where he can finish his isolation and antibiotics before he goes back to his own bed, and then we spent most of the day Tuesday driving around to the three facilities that came out of that research, while the hospital made referrals. He was accepted by all three, and we sent our choice to the hospital first thing Wednesday.

The other end of the equation: the autopilot settings. More gibberish and even harder to get right.

Tuesday on our way home we stopped off at the house to brief my mother on the situation, and we left with four bankers' boxes filled with every file folder we could find in the entire house. My dad was the person who had done all the organization and filing, and we needed to help mom get on top of it all and whittle it down.

Wednesday was Louise's birthday, and the way she chose to spend it was going through all four of those boxes and purging seven decades of accumulation. She handed me maybe five percent of it to either go through for disposition, or just for my own edification or amusement before discarding things. I did find a handful of photos and documents of sentimental value which I have either kept or photographed; I will spare you the dorky photos of my childhood. For dinner, she wanted me to take her to a dive bar a half hour out in the boonies at May's Landing because they had highly-rated pot pie.

Louise's birthday dance. Mid-sort.

As long as Louise was in her happy place (she finds purging things very cathartic), I spent much of Wednesday working on the boat. Tuesday we had found the condensate tray from the pilothouse air conditioners overflowing onto the floor, and I spent a couple of hours working on the hard-to-reach drain plumbing to get it unclogged. And I took the anchor roller carriage off and managed to get it halfway bent back into shape so that the forward roller will start turning again.

Yesterday ended up being given over mostly to errands, including taking 25 pounds of papers to the UPS store for shredding, two full bankers' boxes of papers and folders to recycling (along with all the accumulated recycling from the boat), dropping off two Amazon returns at Staples (where we could just as easily have also taken the shredding, it turns out), and picking up five Amazon deliveries from a locker that just happens to be at a marina. I also indulged myself by driving up to the Net Cost Market in Manalapan to see if they had my Żywiec porter, but they carry no beer there. The Vingo bottle shop a few doors down had it, though, and I bought a case of 20 (in hindsight I should've taken two cases).

One of the many interesting finds in the files. My dad served his tour in the Army as part of Occupation Forces Japan, and went to NYU on the GI Bill. Many returning vets were housed on North Brother Island while they attended NY colleges, and most likely someone he knew was housed there.

We swung by the memory care facility to pick up five changes of my dad's clothing, which he will need at the skilled nursing facility, and I dropped Louise at the hospital to check on things while I drove my mother to the bank. We heard in the morning that our choice for skilled nursing could not provide the required IV antibiotic, and by the end of the day the hospital had arranged instead for our second choice. With that being a moving target, we opted to just keep his clothes in the car until he was actually discharged. After dinner we swung by the CVS and picked up our accumulated mail that we had forwarded from Florida, since we needed to get our ballots. It was a long day.

Anticipating that he would be discharged today and that we would want to drive back up, I had extended the rental car to tomorrow, and we figured to leave the marina after I turned it back in and then spend one or two more nights in the anchorage. But after we got back home last night, Louise-the-weather-router gave me the bad news: the storm that was going to just miss us looked like it might instead make an ocean passage untenable. At 6:00 this morning she checked again, confirming those fears.

The end result of the files clean-up. Two neat portable file boxes that just fit in these two shelves.

The bright spot, if you can call it that, is that today's weather had actually improved slightly, and we determined we could have a tolerable passage if we left first thing. Louise ran out to the car with the wagon to offload my case of Żywiec, a gallon of hydraulic fluid, and my dad's clothes, all of which we had left in the trunk, while I got the boat ready for sea. Then I ran the car back to Enterprise in Absecon while she singled up lines and took on fresh water. The Lyft dropped me back at the marina just after 8 and we were underway by 8:30.

We still have to get back up to Brick to check in on him once he moves, and we still have three Amazon deliveries to pick up. So I have another car booked for this afternoon in Rio Grande, one town up from Cape May, and a marina reservation in Cape May. Three nights in Cape May is more than we paid for a week at the state marina. The plotter says we will be docked by 2:15, and I might not even have this post uploaded by then.

I went through a few more things at the house, too. This one is a blast from the past, and provides some insight into where I get my parts-hoarding behavior. Saving an obsolete electrical item for who-knows-what.

Over the course of a full week docked there, we did not eat at a restaurant in Atlantic City even once. We typically wrapped up at or around the hospital between 4:15 and 5:30, and we'd stop somewhere on the way home for dinner. Those places were the Black Cat Bar & Grill, Villa Rifici, Calabria Pizza (BYOB), and the Hangtime Bar & Grill  in Absecon, Fred & Ethel's Tavern (really) in very touristy Smithfield, and the Landing Point Tavern in Mays Landing. All were decent and worth a return. We also stopped more than once at JT's Bagel Hut in Forked River, and I now have more than a passing familiarity with the Frank Sinatra and Celia Cruz rest areas on the Parkway.

Update: As predicted, I did not get finished before I had to drive through the inlet. We are now docked at the South Jersey Marina (map) in Cape May, a familiar stop even though we normally just anchor in Cape May. I had arranged for a rental car this afternoon, but when the transfer from the hospital still had not happened by 3pm we postponed it until tomorrow morning. We walked across the street to dinner at long-time favorite Smokey Bones.

We both filled out our mail-in ballots underway today and they will go to the post office tomorrow.

We are very glad to be here, and that we made the mad scramble this morning, because we will now be able to continue our journey via Delaware Bay on Monday or Tuesday morning. The decision to press to Atlantic City a week ago and do all our visiting from there now seems prescient; had we stopped in Brielle we would be pinned down another week at least, and at a lofty rate to boot.

In the morning we will make our way to Rio Grande, the next town north, to pick up our rental car and then proceed directly to Toms River. We have the car till Monday morning, and it remains to be seen whether we can leave Cape May after we turn it in. If not, we will move out to the anchorage for another night. My next update here will be underway in the Delaware Bay.

Premature evacuation

We are underway southbound in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of NJ. And by just off, I mean we are hugging the shoreline at about a half mile to shelter from mostly westerly wind. On a chilly October day, the beaches are deserted. Conditions are less than perfect, but we're in a hurry, and the forecast is for steadily decreasing winds and seas. We had a bit of a bumpy ride first thing in the morning.

One of my favorite views, lady Liberty seen under the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.

Yesterday we made a very rushed exit from the Derecktor shipyard so that we can get the boat to NJ as quickly as possible. Friday I got a call at 7am from the memory care facility telling me they sent my dad to the hospital due to blood in the urine. By 8am I was at Enterprise just as they opened to pick up a car, and we raced out of the yard headed for the hospital. Before I left to get the car I met briefly with the yard manager about re-doing some of the work in the bilge, where a greenhorn worker had painted over a bunch of corrosion instead of remediating it first.

The week up to that point had been uneventful. The topsides painter wrapped up all the myriad touch-up spots we had marked out, the upholstery shop finished up the cushions with much more appropriate foam, and I wrapped up various projects around the boat. Louise got a new phone, I sold the old one, and I tore into the old sat compass to see if it could be repaired before listing on eBay for parts. We were generally moving toward closure, with the bilge repair being the last outstanding item, and when I learned our friends Tim and Crisalida were in NYC for a couple of weeks I was concocting plans to get down to the city to meet up before we left the dock.

The most I could coax out of Louise's old phone.

The Friday morning phone call changed everything in an instant, and the ensuing week has been a whirlwind of nonstop phone calls and medical research interspersed with trips to the hospital. We spent Friday night in a hotel in Brick just ten minutes from the hospital, and we spent several hours on Saturday, after they moved him to a room from the ER. With the bleeding not stopping by Saturday, and no physicians planning to stop by over the weekend, we made our way home Saturday evening to start wrapping up our stay at the yard.

I was hoping we might be able to leave Monday, but when I descended into the tiller flat Sunday morning to check on the repair, I was very disappointed to find they had fixed the gaffe on the port side but not the starboard side. "Greenhorn" might have been too kind a word to describe this worker. That meant we'd be in the yard until at least Tuesday morning, and I extended the rental car, due Monday morning, by a day so we could drive back down for the day.

I thought I bought a seat pedestal, but it seems I bought a depestal instead. This same misspelling repeated throughout the manual.

That timing turned out for the best, because we arrived at the hospital just as the urologist and the cardiologist were there to discuss the case. We ultimately agreed to a cystoscopic procedure to try to stop the bleeding, and we remained at the hospital the rest of the day until they wheeled him into the OR, then headed to dinner nearby. The urologist called while we were out to say the procedure was a success and that he would be in recovery for a couple of hours. Knowing he would be out of it for the rest of the night we headed home.

No work was done on the boat Monday, with the repair instead scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. I dropped the car back at Enterprise when they opened Tuesday morning and we spent the rest of the day alternating between medical research, phone calls, passage planning, and scrambling to get the boat ready for sea. Our final dinner Tuesday night was at the Village Station where we said our good-byes to Sindy and Hannah, and we popped in to F&F on the way home to say goodbye to Dave.

The sum total of the innards of a satellite compass. Two GPS antennas and a circuit board. 

I spent a good deal of time on Sunday looking at marinas in NJ where we could spend maybe a week within an hour's drive of the hospital. With a good window to get down the coast, I ended up reserving at the Farley State Marina in Atlantic City. It's a lot less convenient than where we stayed in Brielle, but it does not require planning a dead-slack arrival and it's less than half the price. It also shortens the window we need to get to Delaware Bay when it comes time to move south. It's normally a three-day trip for us from Long Island Sound to Atlantic City, and I booked an arrival Saturday for a full week.

Business side of the circuit board. The power LED comes on but all the ports, including the diagnostic USB, are dead.

Yesterday morning I had to get the yard to fix one last gaffe; they spilled something down the side of the boat while they were fixing the paint work in the tiller flat. Fortunately that all came off with lacquer thinner and I was able to finish up in the tiller flat and have everything else ready to go by departure time. We dropped lines at 9:30 for a fair tide the whole way to Great Kills Harbor on Staten Island, where we dropped the hook in our usual spot (map).

With a 3pm arrival I had hoped to make it to Net Cost Market for some more of my favored Polish porter, but I ended up spending an hour on the phone with various care providers and I had to wave off. We tendered to the Richmond County Yacht Club and walked to Goodfellas for dinner. This morning we weighed anchor at 7:20 for a fair-tide departure, skirting around the dredging operation at the Sandy Hook Channel on our way out to sea.

A pile of rust sandwiched between old white paint on the bottom and fresh gray paint on the top. Who does this?

Seas have flattened out a bit even since I began typing, and as I wrap up we are just an hour from our planned exit at Barnegat Light. But as I made yet more phone calls regarding care plans and discharge dates, it became clear we will be better served to arrive to Atlantic City tonight, pick up the car in the morning instead of our planned end-of-day pickup, and get up to the hospital before the holiday weekend starts. We have a much better chance of seeing the right people tomorrow.

And so it is that we will pass right by Barnegat Inlet, with the plotter now projecting an arrival to Atlantic City around 8:30pm. We should just catch the very tail end of the flood at Absecon Inlet, and we will spend two nights at anchor instead of our originally planned one (a one-week car rental is seven full 24-hour days, but a one-week marina stay is six hours shorter than that). We'll move to the marina mid-day Saturday.

I think this was paint residue in brush thinner that spilled down the side.

I appreciate all the well-wishes we have received concerning my aging parents. We always knew this time would come, and we are thankful to have been in the NJ/NY area for this particular phase. We will linger here for this next week, but then we will resume moving south to more temperate climes. We hope to be in Myrtle Beach by Thanksgiving, where we will fly to California for the holiday. We have a buffer of about two weeks that I will use to periodically drive, fly, or take the train back here to take care of whatever might arise.

We're sorry to once again miss our friends Tim and Crisalida. We had hoped to get up to Maine this season and see them on Monhegan Island, then they had to shoot past us in Mamaroneck to make their offshore window, and, of course, we missed their wedding when Uber stood us up in Titusville. We will hope to catch them in Deltaville as we pass by on our way south.

Approaching New York City from Long Island Sound.

My next post here will most likely be on our passage from Atlantic City to Cape May. We are booked at the marina until next Saturday, but our actual day of departure maybe be earlier or later than that depending on the offshore weather. At this time of year the windows get fewer, shorter, and further between.