Bringing the boat South for the winter
14 October 2006 | Delmarva peninsula
Jeanne/COLD!
Having lived for so long in the tropics, I've lost the sense of urgency as the summer ends in these northern climes. Peter, more sensitive to the cold than I am, was anxious to get going to bring WATERMELON south, but I just couldn't seem to get organized. He finally made an aggressive push, "we're leaving NOW, who knows how long the weather window will last?"
After 18 years with only our sailboat as home, , I find that the luxury of having a land home with large ovens, four-burner stoves, and a supermarket right down the road with a car to get there and back is seductive. I prepared quite a few meals that I could freeze, bringing about two weeks' supply to the boat to make it easier for me on those long days when we were both tired and famished at the end. Having a freezer on MV Watermelon is another change. Though for long-term trips canned meats are still my choice, home made frozen meals are a pleasant option.
On Monday, October 2 my brother drove us to the marina. After bringing the boat to the dock to do a good washdown and fill our water tanks (fuel tanks were full), we left Nyack about 3 pm and went down river, planning to anchor off Sandy Hook to be ready to run down the coast the next morning. There was something wrong, however. Although I could get the starboard engine up to speed, the port engine would not go higher than 2800 rpm. We should have been doing 10 knots at 2800 rpm, yet we were doing about 8 knots through the water with about a knot of unfavorable current against us and could not get the port engine to run any faster. Oof! We had the same problem last year when Ken Winter helped me bring the boat from Nyack to his yard in Mantoloking. It was badly fouled props then, we guessed that it was a badly fouled prop this time. We chugged down the river, but when we couldn't make Sandy Hook before dark we anchored on the Jersey City side just before Liberty State Park. The bottom there isn't the best, and we had to try twice before our anchor held. It's a bit lumpy with the wakes from all the ferries and dinner cruise boats going past, but we were very tired and fell asleep in spite of the movement. By midnight or so I guess most river traffic stopped, and we slept well. Up at about 6, we were on our way by 7 before the river traffic picked up again and made it uncomfortable.
We weren't moving any better, but since it was clear we would have to be hauled, we were just going to Mantoloking which we made shortly after noontime. They had us hauled in short order, and what a peculiar sight the bottom was. The port prop, shown above, was badly fouled, as we had guessed. The starboard prop was bright and shiny and missing its zinc. Here's link to that prop's picture: http://www.fototime.com/93C518264B0A10C/standard.jpg
The yard manager asked Peter if he had had any electrical work done recently. "Yes," said Peter. He had installed our SSB radio from sv Watermelon a few weeks before, and because there's no ground plate on the boat, he grounded the radio to the engine until a ground plate could be installed. Bad idea. The zinc was gone, and I guess the current kept any barnacles from staying attached. Good thing it was only a few weeks, and we hadn't used the radio other than for testing, or perhaps our starboard prop would have been starting to fall apart.
One problem that we hadn't foreseen was that although the bottom was pretty much free of marine growth except on the very bottom, the through hulls, especially the water exhaust for the generator, were packed full of barnacles. Oh, well, our prop problem was a blessing, I guess, because a few hundred miles more and perhaps we would have found ourselves with real problems and no place convenient to get hauled.
The weather didn't cooperate as far as getting the work done as quickly as we would have liked, but by Tuesday, October 10, all the work was done, including installation of the grounding plate for our SSB radio, and the boat was splashed. A short test run that afternoon turned up no more problems, and we expected to leave on Wednesday, the 11th, a week late.
We woke up Wednesday to see fog and mist and dark clouds all around. It looked so dismal that we decided to wait a day when the forecast was for better weather. We spent the day getting more "stuff" to make storage on this boat easier and more efficient. It poured the entire afternoon which reassured us that our decision to postpone our departure for a day was the right one.
Although Thursday morning didn't look a whole lot better than Wednesday, the weather report indicated that it would clear in the afternoon and a cold front was due on Friday. We had run out of time, we had better make tracks south now, it wasn't going to get any better.
Because the winds were 10 to 15 knots we took the inside route from Mantoloking, expecting to stop in Cape May on Friday. After a slow start, we made good time, finally anchoring about 5:30 about 30 miles from Cape May. The cold front came through and I woke up about 6 on Friday the 13th morning to turn on the generator and the heat. With such a short distance to go we weren't in any great hurry to leave, and by 8:30 we were on our way.
On our trip North last year I had noted on our charts that the fuel dock in Wildwood, NJ sold diesel significantly cheaper than in Cape May, so we stopped for fuel there, just before noontime. Since it was so early, we decided to continue on to Cape Henelopin to anchor for the night which would shorten our trip down the Delmarva Peninsula by about an hour.
We're anchored in Breakwater Bay in about 10 feet of water. The weather forecasts nasty winds for Saturday afternoon, so we plan to duck in at Ocean City, MD and work our way down to Chincoteague before going back outside and on to Norfolk. The morning forecast will tell us if that's a workable plan.