Merry Christmas!

Today is Christmas... and, while nearly 70degF, is darned cloudy and rainy. That's OK: I will relax, listen to music, nap, eat, and prepare for departure tomorrow or Wednesday. Monty can join in for some of that. 

A few days ago I finally left the mooring field at St Augustine Municipal Marina and the anchorage right in front of the fort and moved a couple miles north, just south of the next bridge. I've been here two days and am delighted. The biggest reason is that, while I'm here with some traffic noise and loads of little boats, at least I don't have cannon fire on the weekends and the incredible amount of light pollution of the city center... AND I have a little beach where Monty can run around without a leash!

A hundred yards away, people are in a stop/start traffic jam on the bridge coming home from Vilano Beach in the late pm while I watch great egrets and listen to bird song and feel hard sand (and sharp oyster shells) under my feet. Pretty nice.

At sunrise, I can row across the river to the Vilano Beach fishing pier, walk a half-mile to the ocean side, and walk the ocean front beach with many other dogs and their leashed people. And there is a Publix supermarket at the 2/3 mark. I'm sure it is all horribly crowded by 10am most days, but early mornings belong to me and a few others....

I hope all is well with all of you on this Christmas day, my friends. May you get all the joy, love, and sunshine you deserve on this day and every one to come...  

Chesapeake to St Augustine, dolphins, light shows, and storms.

Sometimes I feel I'm getting too old for this stuff. After a pleasant week at sea, my final day of wind, waves, noise, anxiety, and little sleep left me with a head stuffed with pain and mental cotton for days. If I had been far offshore and out of the shipping lanes, I could have heaved-to and slept through most of the storm... but I had boats around and fretted about entering St Augustine Inlet.

Why worry about an inlet? WELL.... I've had ones where I could make no headway and the standing waves made it very hard to control the boat. And the current conditions, big waves directly into the entrance, made things even more dangerous unless I rode an ingoing current I could only count on from 3am to 7am.... or 12 hours later: I either needed to do this in pitch darkness or wait hours. On top of THIS, I worried that the wind might not quite allow me to sail in on a single tack...

[>>This article has a good deal about entering inlets: https://www.boatus.com/expert-advice/expert-advice-archive/2016/january/the-ins-and-outs-of-inlets]

So, hugging the windward side of the channel, a dozen gulls I roused from sleep swirling in my light just ahead of the boat, I entered the channel around 4am on a close reach, felt the waves flatten as the current stretched them out, and swept peacefully into the protected waters. We sailed in, keeping a sharp eye out for unlit anchored boats, found my favorite spot PACKED with dark boats, dropped anchor out slightly in the main channel, left lights on to prevent anyone from running into us, and fell into bed with great relief around 4:30... getting up a couple hours later at dawn to move the boat, launch the dinghy, and row Monty to shore for a walk. 

Monty loves St Augustine, being an urban extrovert. I am now pretty much back to normal. Cynthia arrived Tuesday and is catching up on her sleep... although my bed seems to hurt her back... and she and Lucy are very much enjoying walking the town with us and seeing all the amazing architecture... well, Lucy mostly just sniffs it the buildings and lamp posts with Monty.

What did I enjoy about the sailing? Amazing phosphorescence with big embers tumbling in my wake rather than sparks or glowing mist. Numerous cannonball jellyfish swirling in my wake near Jacksonville. Shooting stars leaving luminous trails. Warm days and nights, at last! And numerous visits by dolphins: Monty actually stopped trying to drive them off and just wanted to sniff them. A dolphin in the pool of light at my stern on a quiet night, "sniffing" the stern... or maybe eating little fish... or playing? The blue water of the Gulf Stream. And gliding along in light wind and no waves: perfect conditions don't happen often and we enjoy them when they do.

Monty hoping for land at sunrise...

with dolphins at sunrise.. 

or dolphins blowing spray..

Amazing sunrises and sunsets...

Wind and waves...

Another try? And wonderful sunrises and sunsets in Chesapeake Bay.

Well, “Hello from exactly where I was a week ago!”. 

After Alice, a delightful new friend, offered to bring me a load of groceries from the local Walmart on Sunday 10/22, I raised anchor and sailed out at sunset. The winds, as forecast, were rather unpleasant.... but then became worse and worse and the forecast deteriorated as well. Various weather stations were reporting winds speeds of 30 kts and neither Monty nor I were enjoying ourselves at all. Forecasts told me that things would only get a little better in the next 24 hours and I knew that we'd be utterly miserable in the ocean, so I turned into the wind and fought my way upwind, gaining perhaps a hundred yards per hour, heeling over enough that my galley sink filled nearly full of salt water... By sunrise, things were a tiny bit better and by noon we were suffering from LACK of wind. After spending a night heaved-to, the wind picked up enough to sail a bit and we headed toward Tangiers Island, but the forecasts for THAT said we'd have trouble finding a sheltered anchorage, so we changed course BACK to our former spot and dropped anchor there at 1am.... and were fast asleep by 1:15.

In the morning, with Monty eager for land and water glassy and peaceful, I lowered the dinghy and tossed aboard the anchor line and bungee, then snagged my shoes etc.... and glanced around to see the dinghy twenty feet behind me. In my exhausted state, I had tossed ALL lines aboard. DOH!

SO.... swim? How about tossing in a paddleboard? Yes, but how about simply tying the anchor line to a fender and using the sailboat engine to motor over there? Even better: maybe use the slack 100' of anchor line to allow me to back the sailboat to the dinghy! That worked well! 

Anyway, I'm back in a safe anchorage, recovering, repairing my leaking faucet, jib rip, cracked cockpit surround, etc. Monty is VERY happy to be back and I think the second and third nights out probably helped him [and me] with any PTSD we might have had from the rough first night: always important to get right back on the horse. And I've been meeting folks and swimming in the still-warm water. And there a some interesting "red beard" sponges growing here.

Cold strong winds will arrive Monday evening, along with rain and clouds. When it eases up, November 2, it looks like I'll be able to head south again... and it will be pretty cold and sunny... Thank goodness for an enclosure around the cockpit!

So many wonderful sunrises and sunsets...

And a couple nice moonrise moonsets:

If at first you don't succeed... try sailing south again

After the last post, Monty and I set sail... upwind. The noise of the wind and impact of the waves made things pretty unpleasant, not to mention the strength of the wind dipping our lee deck in the water, not to mention the old vinyl window cracking and letting in the abundant salt spray. After six exhausting hours of fighting... and taking another look at the forecast that said my worst conditions would be at midnight... and looking at Monty's unhappy face [seasick?], I reconsidered and turned back to Dutch Harbor. The sail back took only an hour and a half and, with huge relief, we dropped anchor in the fading daylight and hit the hay. 

The next day, I climbed the mast to check on the masthead and found the forestay was failing. I had been putting off the replacement, but since I had at least five days to kill I tackled the job. I have since climbed the mast at least six times and gone through a lot of grumbling, but finally tightened the stays and raised the jib yesterday, just as the wind started to rise for the storm coming through today. 

And I've gotten a lot of compliments on the boat appearance/character while working on it. I DO enjoy having a boat I've done so much on.... although there IS something to say for a boat you don't need to think about much.

SO... this afternoon I should head out through the fading storm, wind across my beam, racing along at six knots or so, straight for the Chesapeake Bay. Waves should build to about five feet by midnight... although I might skirt Long island to avoid them... then diminish steadily. Winds should max out at 20 knots [at midnight: ugh], then drop. It SHOULD be a simple and fast passage, but you never know. When I get to the Chesapeake I can consider whether to haul out and paint the boat bottom or continue on to NC or even FL. I would really like to get the bottom paint crossed off my list.

I feel sorry for Monty on the long sails,although he does fine. He really enjoys being in a place where he can get to shore twice a day, take a nice walk, and sniff things.

Somehow I don't think he enjoys sunsets, shooting stars, and the rush of water nearly as much as I do. But he sure enjoys a comfortable spot beside me.

Waiting on the wind

"There is a tide..." and I seem to have missed it. Now I'm anchored in Dutch Harbor, waiting on another weather window.... and seeing NOTHING in the next week. Let's rewind a bit....

My engine has given me fits this summer, insisting on leaking fuel from the injection pump. I can attribute this to age and, even more, to my unschooled attempts to improve things. A video I watched in which a fellow tried to reseal his pump terminated with his wry observation "it seems to be leaking from, well, everywhere." He then sighed and said "well, I know better how to fix it and taking things apart the second time should be much faster." So, I was in the same boat: took it apart a couple times, and finally got the leaking down to something reasonable, thank goodness. The worst thing is that I need to drain the coolant and move the exhaust manifold and drop the starter in order to work on the pump. UGH!

I delayed heading south for several reasons, mostly storms and hope of getting to Maine or the wide beaches of Provincetown spit this summer, but time ran out. Finally we had a nice weather window: days of wind from the south that would take me to the NJ coast, then a sudden turn to blow from the west and shoot me down to Delaware Bay or even Chesapeake Bay, a nice chance to visit friends and fam in the DC region and paint the boat bottom, then down to FL before it gets too darned cold.

On Oct 4, departure day, the dockmaster in Onset encouraged me to clean the boat bottom and I decided he was right. Working hard in cold water, surrounded by bait fish, felt GREAT!... although a bit numbing and I had to get out and warm up for a couple hours in the 80deg weather. The second time I went in felt so good that I could not resist finishing up by climbing up the fairly high floating dock dock rather than the easy dinghy.... and I overstressed my leg in the effort. 

After one final walk with Monty, I departed at 1:30pm, when the current became favorable, and sailed/drifted out the Cape Cod Canal and across Buzzards Bay.

Over the next day, my hip-femur joint gradually stiffened up until I walked like a pirate with a peg leg and the wind, supposed to be on my beam, came from ahead such that I could not even clear Block Island. Then darkness fell and fog came in.... so I decided to detour into Narragansett Bay and drop anchor off of Jamestown, RI in a little harbor we've used before. Safe and stable at 9pm, Monty and I went below and fell asleep and slept until sunrise and a warm and delightful day...

That was three days ago. I wrote the previous paragraphs yesterday. My leg feels entirely better. After one more unseasonably warm September/October day things went gray; then cold, windy, and clear. Windy and big waves out in the ocean, yes, but maybe I should head out anyway once the worst has passed.... I'll look at the forecasts.... Hmmm.... possibly, I'll depart today: it looks like the weird and fluctuating winds might allow me to make my way south quite effectively.... Final decision after noon today...

It is nice being back on board, although sometimes stressful. I DO like being back in my home, taking Monty for walks, making some progress on improvements, chatting with nice folks ashore and meeting their dogs,

seeing sunrises

 and sunsets,

listening to the sounds of water lapping at my hull. I sure look forward to warm nights down south and hope I can get there in time to enjoy the Geminid meteor shower under warm, dark skies. And I'd love to learn how to catch shrimp the amateur way this year, without the huge environmental damage of trawlers or farms.

Hurricane Lee, Solar Panel Update, and Ghost Pipes

Here I am, in a nice hurricane hole in Onset, with a beautiful blue sky and lovely breeze.... and my weather report says that in a couple hours the skies will cloud over and winds will rise. The storm is so huge, however, that the worst will not hit until about forty hours from now, then rapidly abate. I've worried a good bit over the last week, but the worst appears to be missing us and I probably won't see winds over 35 knots or so. I laugh at this so-called storm!... just kidding: this is always serious.

My new solar panels are working well. I am slowly cooking some slices of sweet potato for Monty over my induction burner and am still adding power to my batteries. I've even turned off my propane since I hardly use it. Very satisfactory.

Monty seems sad, perhaps because Cynthia and lucy departed yesterday. On the other hand, we are both glad to be back on board: the beds seem to bother Cynthia's back, so we spent her visit ashore except for the weekend she spent visiting friends in the Springfield region. I missed my boat!

Finally, some weeks ago I walked through a yard in Chatham and spotted what I first thought were unfamiliar fungi, but on closer look appeared to have vestigial leaves and definite flowers. I identified them as Ghost Pipes, a native parasitic plant living on nutrients stolen from the roots of other plants. Rather beautiful and quite cool!

Carpe diem: I should go swimming right now before the temperature drops and the wind rises....

A bad day or a good one?

One can look at a day and count the blessings or the disasters. For example, thursday afternoon I drove Andrew's ancient car to Boston to do various errands, pumping the clutch to shift [note that this SHOULD have told me the problem, despite mechanic's diagnosis]. In the city, on the freeway, a push on the pedal suddenly met zero resistance, accompanied by a significant bout of swearing....

Fortunately, I could still get the car in gear sometimes in the very slow freeway traffic and google maps managed to find an auto parts place [in case of low brake fluid] and took that exit into Charleston. Then I realized I couldn't get to the place without trouble and that a good place to park at a gas station/minimart lay to my right, so I rolled in and parked.

I indulged in dejection and grumbling for a few minutes, then a bit of poking around and internet research showed that the problem was probably my clutch master cylinder.... another few minutes located the nearest garage... right across the street, on the second floor of an old building with no one really fluent in English: all Spanish. 

Anyway, I got a couple guys to run across the street and look, we managed to get the car into the shop, they confirmed that the cylinder was shot and found one that could be delivered the next day... but the boss took his car and got the part in a mission of mercy, even though rush hour was starting... so nice of him! This made the car driveable, but the fluid was nasty, so they tried flushing that quickly... and broke something due to years of rust.... and the boss had to go out again to fetch THAT part. 

Monty and I sat in the waiting area chairs, him sleeping on my lap and refusing to go in his backpack or in the car, me with my back aching from sitting and holding him. The guys worked until dark to get me back on the road, charged me very reasonably, and I drove home safely, praising their names. 

Monty and I arrived at the marina after 10pm and I found striped bass swirling and feeding in the pool of light by the dinghy dock, a wonderful sight from a nature point of view and seriously tempting to an omnivore and forager such as myself. 

Now I'm sitting in the blinding sunrise of the first day of September, cold morning breeze chilling me and saying “winter is coming”.... and the terns, hearing the same warning, are crying out as they dive for the bait fish, fattening up for their long flight south. 

And here is a random sunset from the last week:

New solar panels... and what to do with the old ones?

I absolutely LOVE solar panels: we get power flowing into our batteries without the noise or vibration of wind power or that plus the stink of an engine, My biggest gripe is shading: if a single little rectangle of a panel is shaded, it is as if the entire panel is shaded.... just like one low battery in a flashlight. Our old system had two big 265watt panels and, when sailing, BOTH were often shaded. After much contemplation and studying shading patterns, I replaced them with a slightly larger array of eight 100watt panels which SHOULD give me about twice as much power. I made the final connections in the gray dawn today and look forward to improved performance. 

Here is a photo of one new array and one old panel, Provincetown in the background:

Now comes the tricky bit: storing the old. We have two perfectly functional old panels, but it turns out that we can't even fit them into our cabin to store them to give away, the best we can do is putting them in the cockpit... and I HATE having excess on board. SO.... at Cynthia's suggestion, we posted them for free on Facebook marketplace yesterday and got several takers in a few hours. Today we will load them across the gunwales of the dinghy, Cynthia stabilizing them while I row, and make our way to shore to give them away. I'll be delighted to see them gone and going to someone who, I hope, will have fun making use of them.

Of course, Monty will miss them... 

Water colors and our longest passage so far

We've left the heat and humidity of FL for the coolness of the north-east, Block Island, RI, to be exact. Given my reluctance to run the engine, the trip from St Augustine took a looong nine days, studded with adventure, awe, and torment.

Torment? Sure... we had nights and days with enough wave action to toss the boat and make living aboard noisy and miserable, with occasional surprisingly massive waves that rolled us twenty or thirty degrees, throwing loose items around. And the heat kept us rather miserable until we reached the latitude of DC, about six days into our journey.

Adventure? Well... we saw a group of three whales, probably fin whales. Nice big swells lifted and dropped us for a few days, gradually becoming more and more gentle, but remaining six to eight feet tall. Fog enveloped us when we reached Long Island and Block Island Sound and we sailed through, watching other boats on our AIS, feeling gratitude for modern navigational aids! A damaging storm swept through when we were still hours south of Block Island Sound and gave us some thunder and lightning and TORRENTIAL rain....

but we are well prepared for water and continued peacefully through it. Our jib ripped, a nice 8' gash, so we lowered it, made repairs,

and raised it up again. Cynthia READ INSTRUCTIONS and discovered the CORRECT way to use the hot knife to cut sailcloth...thank goodness for people who read the manual!

Awe...  

>A few days into our sail, near Cape Hatteras, the wind and waves died enough that we could heave-to (NEVER swim without heaving-to! The boat may sail off without you...), swim in the 2-mile-deep water, clean the boat bottom, visit fish, and....maybe....cool off (VERY warm water). The water was liquid blueness, the sargassum a lovely gold,

the largest of the fifty or so fish that followed us showed two blue stripes while the smaller just shone silver-gray against the red boat hull.

>Departing the Gulf Stream, the water turns from blue to a green-brown, rich with algae and plankton. Phosphorescence increases greatly and the ocean even SMELLS of life.

>gliding from the abyssal plains to the continental shelf near Hudson Canyon, we came across a whale sleeping peacefully, breath puffing into the air every 30 seconds or so, waves gently washing over it's sleeping form as we silently passed well within 100 yards.

>Dark skies let us see dark clouds and the glowing Milky Way... as well as the incredible starry skies and light-filled waters. And, when I turned off the running lights (no boats within even 20 miles!) I could see a comet trail of turbulence running behind our rudder, reaching back at least a boat length.

>Sunrises and sunsets! 

Awesome!

Now we need to decide on Onset vs Chatham for the next few days... AND we heard that the Cape Cod Canal was closed part time, so need to check on THAT. And my to-do list seems to get longer and longer.

Goodbye, dad. We will miss you...

Wednesday, May 17th, my dad turned 91. Thursday, May 18th, he took his last breath about five minutes before sunrise, surprising us when the next failed to come. Friday, May 19th, the wordle answer was "grief".

My dad had a long life and, I think, a good one. He had a good sense of humor, good health, good friends, and a good family. 

I've been here in Sonoma for the last few rather difficult weeks and got to hear quite a bit about his adventures with his younger sister, growing up in Croton-on-Hudson. We found a video of water running over the dam there and he watched it for hours, pointing out the bits of beauty. I'm sure, if I had shown him this pic, he would have had more stories...

He married my mom, a gal he had known since her birth. All six nieces acted as flower girls... although we seem to be missing one here. Hey, ChatGPT: can you add one?

My dad surely loved the Outermost House, a wonderful beach shack on the barrier beaches of Cape Cod. Clamming, fishing, hiking...

Time goes on. Now my dad's three sons are living in Berkeley, DC, and in a peripatetic boat on the east coast. His seven grandkids are in DC; Berkeley; Portland, OR; London, UK; and Casper, WY. Happily, two sons and three grandkids were here for his birthday and departure.

I'm not sure what dad loved most, whether it was telling bad jokes (or good ones), making and/or eating good food,

making wine (and drinking it, of course),

digging clams,

or just being around people he loved,

but he certainly enjoyed his life. He has left the world a bit better and he will be missed.

And so, life goes on. I'll be heading to Cape Cod on the 30th and stay for about four weeks. Then back to St Augustine to my boat, work on it for a week or so, then set sail...

I hope all of you are doing well. May you have all the happiness you deserve...

St Augustine sand bars

Here I am, anchored in St Augustine, a quarter mile north of the Bridge of Lions. 

I fly to CA on May 1. On May 30 I fly to Boston and Cape Cod where I'll work our boats and walk beaches until I return here at the end of June. So....on to current events:

I can never resist a tidal sandbar. Monty, of course, enjoys being off-leash and racing about; chasing birds, sniffing weird things, and then returning to exuberantly nip my hand. But I've loved these intertidal zones since childhood.

Some are full of hidden life, others are far more visible. And they are SO varied! On this one, for example, I've found many gastropods of two species I've seen nowhere else (one with no shell!)

I've also seen (for the first time) starfish dragging themselves across the sand.

And some burrowing critter has left piles of sand poo at the entrance of their burrows. 

On more familiar ground, I found a buried horseshoe crab

and a pair of blue crabs trying to hide in a tide pool (the female has hidden herself, but the male on top kind of gives the whole thing away).

And, of course, there are loads of oysters. 

Anyway, I sure love this stuff! AND I saw a gal sitting in an eroded niche of the old fort here, watching turtles and reveling in life: nice to see people sharing delight in this world.

And Monty had several people fall in love with him in town today.

On the darker side, many of the fighting conch seem to be dying and Monty and I found a dying fish washing ashore:

Is there some toxin in the water? That idea makes me want to leave the crowded coast here and set sail to the transparent waters of the Bahamas or north to the rich, clean, cold waters of Maine where I can see old friends, buy lobsters from friends on fishing boats, and pick gooseberries.

Stay well, my friends.