Please, Not Another Trip to West Marine! Ep. 25

This week’s update is a little unique – we haven’t moved anywhere! We have been at the town docks in Hampton, VA getting ready for the upcoming 1500 nm passage to Tortola, BVI’s. We have decided to join the Carib 1500 rally that leaves here, weather permitting, tomorrow morning (Monday). As some of you may have known, we had planned to have our friends from California, Martin and Nancy Thomas, join us for this offshore leg, but they had some medical concerns that arose at the last minute and had to cancel their trip. After some thought on our alternatives, we decided to join the rally here and also use their crew list to get 1 or 2 more people onboard. We were successfully in lining up Ray Smith, a sailor from the Washington DC area, who is here now and getting acclimated to the boat and the rally.

The folks that run this rally are very well organized. We have been spending quite a few days attending their seminars on a variety of topics including food/fuel planning, engine troubleshooting, medical issues and safety. We have been making numerous trips to the local West Marine and Lowe’s getting stocked up on additional safety equipment, spare parts, and anything we think we might need for offshore and while we are in the Caribbean. We rented a car earlier this week to run errands, including a super Walmart nearby, which was great for provisioning the boat, but comes with a challenge of where to put everything. Here we are trying to figure out that conundrum!

On one of our errands, we found simple Halloween outfits for the boys and attending an indoor celebration at the Virginia Air and Space Museum. This museum is very well organized and in some ways more enjoyable then the National Air and Space museum in DC.

Afterwards, they organized a short trick-or-treat walk around the area businesses in downtown Hampton, so the boys were able to still come home with a stash of candy!

And, of course, a Halloween would not be complete without a few pumpkins!

So, getting back to the rally, the weather is looking favorable for the start tomorrow. We will be in the company of 75 other boats and checking in on the SSB radio twice a day with position reports and any pertinent news. Apparently, they will be posting the positions of each boat on their website, so if you are interested, check that site out. I will also be trying to sending position updates to the Pangolin link, so you can also look there if you want to follow along with us. Don’t panic though if you aren’t seeing updates coming through every day! This rally is well organized and they have been doing this since 1989, so if there’s any safety issues with any boats in the fleet, they will be on top of it and getting the help that is needed.

If the weather is favorable for the trip, we should be there in 9-12 days. We’ll be staying in Village Cay Marina, in Tortola for a few days and enjoying the celebratory dinners they have been planned. After that, our cruising plans are up in the air. We’ll be staying in that general area of the Caribbean for awhile, but since none of us have sailed in those waters before, we are leaving our plans open.

On a final note, I don’t know how easily we will be able to get to internet connections, especially in some destinations in the eastern Caribbean, so we may not be able to post weekly updates as timely as we have done in the past; we’ll do our best, though, to keep you informed on our progress.

Take care!

Chesapeake Finale, Potomac to Norfolk! Ep. 24

I am coming to the conclusion that our kids will live in a big city when they grow up! They both light up and become energized as we descend on each big city … New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and now Washington, DC. Maybe they take their lead from Tom and I. We do LOVE cities and maybe our moods and excitement are infectious.

Our first day in DC, however, was spent on our boat! The winds were blowing around 30 knots and we were anchored with a whole fleet of other boats. As all the surrounding boats put out more anchor rode to hold in the building winds, we found ourselves increasingly pinched. Being the last one in the anchorage, we moved and re-set our anchor at least three times throughout the day. We also put out a second anchor as backup.

We spent five nights anchored in the upper Potomac, a brisk 10 minute walk to the Washington DC Mall and all that that offered — the Smithsonian museums, Washington Monument, Capital Building, Lincoln Memorial, Library of Congress, White House and many more monuments and memorials which will have to be enjoyed on a future DC trip!

We did make it to the National Zoo, which was a very pleasant surprise. Nestled inside a quaint DC neighborhood, this zoo was very impressive for what they had, the amount of research done there and the habitats they maintained for their animals.

The highlight for me was the Library of Congress and the Capital Building. Both of these are such magnificent architectural structures in and of themselves. When the historic value, the exquisite art and statues and the knowledge of what these places mean to our nation are added on, it makes these two destinations rise to the top.

We couldn’t get our youngest out of the National Air and Space Museum and Zachary loved the zoo and enjoyed the overall historic significance and being able to see places he had heard so much about. Here is a picture of a ceiling inside the Library of Congress, followed by two great quotes found on its walls

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DC Doubletake Ep. 23

Wow, this is one of those weeks where I don’t know where to start, there’s been so much happening for us! We started off last weekend under the wings of Phil and Pat English in Columbia, MD. Phil was a close friend of Karen’s father, and he had offered several times to take us in when our voyage brought us through the area. We left the boat at a small marina on the Rhode River on the western shore just south of Annapolis. Phil picked us up for what would be two gracious nights spent ashore in a real bed, taking real showers and a chance to enjoy someone else’s cooking — it was splendid! We had run into Phil and Pat at several family weddings, but this was a good opportunity to catch up with them and enjoy their home in this beautiful suburb of both Baltimore and Washington DC. I guess it should be no surprise, but it seemed like everyone we ran into was somehow associated with the government. Karen’s cousin Linda stopped over and her husband Rubin works for the National Transportation Safety Board. A neighbor of Phil’s also works for the NTSB. Another neighbor flies military transport jets and is on his fourth Iraqi assignment. Phil’s son Matthew works as a technical contractor for the defense department. Phil had also held several government jobs around Washington. This experiences give you a new appreciation of what it takes to keep this country running!

We started off our land-side stay by doing those things that are so out of reach by foot from small waterfront towns — post office shipments, Home Depot run, and a fabric store for some vinyl to repair several cabin cushions. On Saturday, Phil promised and Phil delivered on a thorough tour of Washington DC. I had lived in Annapolis many years ago and was familiar with DC, but Karen and the boys had never seen the sights. We started by visiting Arlington National Cemetery.

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Diamonds in the Rough Ep. 22

Last Friday, we left Georgetown on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake with a simple objective in mind — find a harbor with some excitement. The cruising guide had promised great things about Georgetown and had even forewarned us that we might encounter a “wall of boats” heading over from the more populated Baltimore and Annapolis regions. We quickly learned that you need to put on your ‘seasonality adjustment’ lens when reading the guide. What might be a wild and crazy location in July is as tame as a kitten in October. Sometimes too tame! And after spending the whole day holed up down below in the cabin in anticipation of gale force winds which never came, we were anxious to get out and see and do. So, we set sail for the western shore with Baltimore in mind, a 35 mile journey. We were finally able to show my Dad some real sailing with a beautiful 15-20 breeze out of the north that allowed us to sail on a broad reach or wing-and-wing downwind the entire day. Like the Delaware Bay, this part of the northern Chesapeake is shallow in many spots and they have designated a narrow shipping channel for freighters, tugs and the like to use. We had to keep very alert as our downwind destination forced us to criss cross the channel repeatedly. Zack stepped in and helped us out for part of the sailing, under the watchful eye of Grampa!

The entrance to Baltimore was by no means planned by the office of tourism. The shores are lined with heavy industrial activities with odd looking plumes of smoke exciting the factories and many freight terminals and container cranes. History is never far away though. After passing under the Francis Scott Key bridge, we saw in the distance a red and white stripped buoy with white stars on a blue background at the bottom. I thought it was something left over from a July 4th celebration this summer, but days later I read that this was dubbed the “star spangled buoy” and was the approximate site where Francis Scott Key got the inspiration for our national anthem while he stood imprisoned on a barge and looked across the bay to Fort McHenry to see our flag flagging. It is a little hard to see in this photo.

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Trying to be at peace with the Toolbox Ep. 21

To counteract the many photos from last week, I’m including very few this week. We covered a far amount of ground, but for some reason we didn’t record the events through the camera!

With my Dad aboard and a night’s rest at a slip at the Utsch’s Marina (a spot I can highly recommend) in Cape May, we embarked on our journey up the Delaware Bay on Monday. If you’ve ever looked at the Delaware Bay on a map, you’ll think that this would be a cake walk with the immense breadth of the bay and the likely anchorages along the way. The reality is that neither exist. It is best to make the 55 mile run up the Bay to the Chesapeake and Delaware (C&D) canal in one day. There’s a very skinny channel that runs up the Bay that oceangoing ships and tugs with barges use as they head to and from Philadelphia and Wilmington. Continue reading “Trying to be at peace with the Toolbox Ep. 21”

Civics Assignment Ep. 20

By Zachary

For my Civics class, I have recently completed a survey of 16 friends/relatives and their volunteer hours over the recent past. So that I could easily represent this data, I asked that the hours be submitted into one or more of these 6 categories: School, church, hospital, community, coaching, and other. To those of you that I e-mailed in September, thanks for participating. Sorry I could not update this sooner- I have been very busy. As I read the e-mailed responses, I converted all of the data into percentages, forgetting that I had no easy way to represent this in a graph. I then assumed that the average hours spent volunteering in the recent past would be 100 hours of volunteer work. So I converted all of the percentages back into hours. These are the results in a bar graph: