No wind, a good thing!
06 June 2011 | Great Bridge, VA
Bill heads up the mast to do some maintenance. This was in last nights anchorage.
At the beginning of June, knowing that we were going to be off the boat for almost a month, we shipped our genoa (forward triangle sail) and our radio out for repair... We don't have either one back yet!
The sail: Sort of a long story. In short, when the mast was rigged in VT, the mast was given too much rake, tipping it back. We measured for the sail with the mast in this position. Since this rake made the boat sail improperly, I quickly read up on rig tuning and started to adjust the mast forward. This shortened the fore-stay... effectively making the luff (forward edge) of the sail too long. Hopefully the adjusted sail will fit the properly tuned rig.
The radio: We had shipped the ICOM radio back for service last summer after having problems communicating with it before then. ICOM shipped it back saying that everything was OK. This fall when we had our "incident", one of the cascade of problems was that we were not able to contact anyone (TowBoat US, Coast Guard, local fishermen) about the condition of the inlet. We shipped the radio back to ICOM... this time they said they found a loose wire in the Microphone. Since our launch this spring, we had found that the radio still doesn't work! Now they have found two components that we failing. Rather than shipping it to us in Oriental, they shipped it to our mail forwarding service in FL!! Such service does not give me the confidence to recommend ICOM radios...
For these two reasons we took the "inside" route north... and it was a good thing as there was no wind and we motored the entire way... anyway. Although we missed Ocracoke and Manteo, we did save some fuel and time.
As compared to last night, we are in the thick of civilization! We are tied up to a town owned pier in Great Bridge, VA, just 100 yards north of the Great Bridge bridge... so we are surrounded by street lights and the sound of cars going over the bridge is constant.