Racing the weather

We are underway northbound in the Chesapeake Bay, bound for Solomons, Maryland on what will be a very, very long sea day. The bay is calm and we have the tide behind us, but it is the literal calm before the storm, so we are getting while the getting is good.

We had just enough protection behind Camden Point to have a very comfortable night Monday. But being all the way at that end of the river meant an early start Tuesday to make the gantlet of bridges in Chesapeake, Virginia before the afternoon rush hour lock down, wherein if you miss the 4pm opening you have to wait for 6pm.

Royal Engineer tied astern of us at the Great Bridge bulkhead, alongside the spiffy new walkway, painted terracotta.

We had a good run with some favorable current all the way to Coinjock and through Currituck Sound, and in short order we were a full half hour ahead of schedule. So we made the 2pm opening of the North Landing bridge. We had originally planned to make the 2:30, then take a full hour to go the 4.1 nautical miles to the Centerville Turnpike bridge at 3:30 and thence to Great Bridge Bridge, which only opens on the hour, at 4 pm.

Making the 2pm at North Landing meant either slow-rolling the whole thing for two full hours, or else speeding up to eight knots, nearly our top speed, to make the 2:30 at Centerville. The engine needed its daily 10-12 minute run-up anyway, and we've done this before, so as soon as we cleared the no wake zone I advance the throttle to 2400 rpm and we ramped up to eight knots.

This has never been an issue in the past, and we've run the engine at full throttle, 2600 rpm, more than once. But on this occasion a horrific rattle developed a few minutes into the run. More concerning, there was also a small amount of surging, where the rpms would lag  enough to be visible on the tach for a second or two. I starting modulation the throttle to see if I could affect or minimize the rattle, while Louise ran around the boat looking for the source. Often these rattles are just a loose piece of sheet metal or a bracket or something that has a resonance at a particular engine RPM.

The not-so-abandoned Albemarle & Chesapeake Railroad Bridge.

Everything on the engine and transmission looked normal, and we continued on at about 2250 rpm, just a bit higher than my daily run-up, making the bridge just in time. But this bears further investigation at a more opportune time. In the evening I re-torqued the shaft coupling nuts, and tightened down the engine mounts, one of which was loose. I don't have the means to apply the correct 360 lb-ft of torque to these mounts. I am hoping the slight rpm drop is just due to fuel filters, which are due for a change.

After clearing through the bridge all returned to normal for the rest of the trip. However, just as the bridge was opening, our hearts dropped as we watched the railroad bridge beyond it closing in front of us. By my count we'd passed this bridge 18 times over ten years, and never once seen it close. The control room is boarded up and the entire structure is covered in graffiti; it had seemed essentially abandoned to us, but clearly it is not.

We tried hailing the bridge on the radio, and I was just about to sound whistle signals when the Centerville bridge answered me and told us that the train bridge never answers and "the railroad isn't afraid of the Coast Guard." Well then. At least he did tell me the train normally comes right away and the bridge goes up promptly afterward, after I told him we were hoping to make Great Bridge at 3pm. We could see the two guys the railroad sent out in a pickup truck to operate the bridge, clearly a rare occurrence.

Vector trying to hide behind a tiny sign and a couple of trees, like a cartoon character, in Great Bridge.

By the time the train crossed, the flagman returned from the other side of the bridge, and they got the glacially slow opening started, we had no chance of making Great Bridge at 3, and just resigned ourselves to stopping short at the Battlefield Park dock if there was any space. Nevertheless, after we cleared the bridge I called Great Bridge to ask if there was any chance we would be able to get through; sometimes they open for commercial traffic, and we could see there was a towboat tied to the bulkhead on the other side of the bridge.

Normally these bridges are very strict -- miss the appointed opening time by even a minute, and you're stuck waiting until the next opening, in this case an hour away. But when I gave him our ETA of 3:07 I was very surprised to hear that he would open for us. I'm sure he heard my conversation about the railroad bridge, and he had just enough leeway in his timetable to get us through; we were very grateful.

After clearing the bridge we pulled over to the bulkhead (map) and tied up behind the towboat Royal Engineer, who had just passed us two days prior, pushing a dredge northbound through the Alligator River. We see this boat a lot, but this is our first time as neighbors.

Flat bow and push knees make this a towboat and not a tugboat. In front of us is a southbounder that just cleared the lock.

At dinner time we walked the short distance to Vino Italian Bistro, now our go-to place at this stop. After dinner I hoofed it down to the Kroger to stock up on provisions, including the beer I missed in Belhaven. A key reason we prefer the bulkhead to the park dock on the other side of the bridge is that it's all a much shorter walk from here, and we don't have to risk our lives darting across Battlefield Boulevard. As a bonus, in just the few months since our last visit, the city has put in a nice concrete walkway all along the bulkhead.

After dinner our attention turned to forecasts and plans. Louise has been tracking weather that looked like it would keep us off Chesapeake Bay and pinned to the Hampton Roads area until the end of the weekend. Great Bridge, which allows 48 hours at the dock, would be a good place to spend part of that, and then we could spend another couple of nights at the free dock in Portsmouth as well, wrapping up at the Phoebus anchorage in Hampton for a night or two before venturing into the bay.

Forecasts are ever-changing, and over coffee yesterday morning, Louise was seeing a small but non-zero chance we could make a run for it on the Chesapeake today, before weather moves in overnight. That would mean forgoing the extra time in Great Bridge and Portsmouth for just a small chance to keep moving, but the possibility to hang on to more of our arrival buffer outweighed the lure of a more convenient place to wait it out.

Just as we were dropping lines a work crew arrived with new trees for planting. Clearly the city is improving the park. The numerous trash cans are gone, I hope temporarily, and I had to hike a bit to find one.

And so it was that we dropped lines for the 10am lockage, steamed past our usual fuel stop at Top Rack ($3.52/gallon) since we don't want extra fuel while we are in the yard, and also steamed right past our usual stop in Portsmouth, for the first time in a very long time. We were hoping the fairly early start would let us get as far as the Back River, but the Chesapeake was uncooperative, and we instead stopped in Phoebus, where were dropped the hook by 1:30 in a familiar spot (map) near the seemingly unending Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion project.

At dinner time we splashed the tender and ran under the bridge to the town dock. We walked through the quaint downtown and out to Mama Rosa's, our second Italian venue in a row, mostly because it was across the street from the Food Lion. When I had gone to Kroger on Tuesday we had figured to be in Great Bridge and Portsmouth for a few days, with tons of dining options, but now we needed to stock up for five days or so at anchor.

Not a common sight, a pair of lifeboats tied up at Top Rack. They look brand new and we speculate that Top Rack splashed them for one of the numerous working vessels across the river.

We weighed anchor pre-dawn this morning so that we could catch the entirety of the favorable tide on the bay, while driving east out of the harbor without staring into the sun. An overcast morning made that moot, but it was prudent to get an early start in any case. We were figuring on an 8.5-hour, 52-mile trip to Ingram Bay on the Great Wicomico river, where we knew there was plenty of protection available for incoming weather, and maybe a couple of places to go ashore once we were pinned down.

Making the turn into the bay just ahead of the flood has meant that we are "riding the tide" all the way up. The end of the flood gets progressively later as we continue north, and so it appears we will have a fair tide almost to sundown. Our arrival time to the Great Wicomico kept improving through the morning, until finally the plotter was saying we'd arrive by 2:15.

The next stop after Ingram Bay is Solomons, some six hours away. There's really nothing in between without making a four or five hour detour up the Potomac. But with the very early arrival, favorable tide, and the better-than-forecast near-perfect conditions today on the bay, we made the decision to abandon our approach to the Great Wicomico and divert direct to Solomons. The plotter is forecasting a 7pm arrival, which is optimistic because the tide will become steadily less fair, but twilight goes to 8 and we will certainly be there before then. Whenever it is, we will be eating under way -- Louise is making Italian food, because why change the theme.

One of the ubiquitous guard towers at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. You can see the 50-cal mounted to the rail, and there are rifle ports in the bulletproof glass.

The wind will clock around to the north and increase after dark. Today's high was 81° and tomorrow's will be in the 50s. We will be pinned down in Solomons until the winds let up, maybe Sunday afternoon. But we'll have put 86 nautical miles under our keel, two days closer to the finish line than if we were starting from Hampton Roads.

My next post will be when we are back under way, either northbound in the Chesapeake or southbound in the Delaware. We have one more major hurdle to clear, which is the offshore passage along the New Jersey coast. We'll be very glad to have preserved our buffer if we end up waiting a week or more for that window.