Kaimusailing

s/v Kaimu Wharram Catamaran

Vessel Name: Kaimu
Vessel Make/Model: Wharram Custom
Hailing Port: Norwalk, CT
Crew: Andy and the Kaimu Crew
About: Sailors in the Baltimore, Annapolis, DC area.
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
26 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
14 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
09 January 2024 | St Marys, GA
23 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
10 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
25 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
03 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
26 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
17 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
11 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
04 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
03 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
Recent Blog Posts
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA

Just Add Water

The rainy weekend started off with overcast and fog but no rain. It looked like I might be able to get something done on the D4 dinghy. I wanted to change the bow seat which is really the bow deck. The sailing option uses the deck to hold the freestanding mast. I didn’t like how the deck looked, [...]

01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Alternative Seats

The rain event was more wind than rain, strong winds with gusts up to 44 mph. We drove into town to see what the harbor was like. There was a small sailboat that had dragged anchor and was sitting close to shore. The tide was out. We left and played with Bleu at Notter’s Pond.

23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Inside Seams

Day two of the dinghy build started out with me finishing wiring the hull bottoms together on the centerline of the bottom panels. This was much easier than the wiring of the chine edges of the bottom panels and the side panels.

15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Day One

A Wharram Pahi 26 had been anchored in the river nearby the boatyard and was hauled out with the travel lift. I went around to look at it and talked to the owner couple. I was surprised that it had been built in Martinique in 1988. The boat is more than 30 years old.

11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Redux

The inflatable (deflatable) dinghy I had bought was deteriorating. It had bottom seams separating. It is a West Marine branded dinghy made out of PVC. HH66 is the adhesive to reattach the seams. A friend had a similar problem and bought the same adhesive. I was waiting to hear from him how it worked [...]

06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

The Clincher

We decided to go to Amelia Island for the day, probably to the beach. Our plan to cycle around on the Raleigh 20’s seemed like a bad idea, Bleu can’t keep up with a bicycle for very long and when he quits he quits. So we would walk, where?, Fort Clinch State Park. She has a forever pass for Florida [...]

Sharkfin Shoal to Crisfield

09 September 2020 | Crisfield, MD
Cap'n Andy | Calm
I know a lot of my readers are saying, “Look, he’s goiing to come back with a great day of sailing after all that turmoil and hardship.”
.
Sad to say, the litany goes on and on.
.
I had anchored at Shark Shoal due to not being able to sail up to the last daymark. It was wise to call it a day and drop the hook. Maybe tomorrow.
.
Tomorrow came and the wind was so strong I couldn’t pull the anchor in. So I wrote another blog post.
.
The Coast Guard called me at 6:30 AM, waking me from precious 3 hours of sleep after 36 hours of hard sailing. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Previous owner Husband texted that they called him also at that hour. Must be a story there, he said.
.
After writing my blog post and posting a picture of the vast empty Chesapeake, empty but shallow. I found I could pull the anchor now, after some eggs on brioche roll and coffee. The problem was we were on a shoal and there was no guarantee that we could sail off it. It would be close. I pulled the anchor in first, then set sail. The genoa needs to be sorted out before hoisting, one of the first things I learned as a youth. You take the tack or the foot and run along it with your hands, making sure the sail isn’t twisted around somehow. I didn’t do this and found the sail twisted around after trying to hoist it. There were other problems, halyards wrapped around spreaders, snagged battens in the rigging, and the worst of all was that the genoa halyard was just a tad too short to allow me to put the genoa’s tack tape into the roller furler’s (broken roller furler) foil slot and hold the halyard at the same time, so I had to somehow get the halyard close enough that I could grab it and still keep it from going back out of my reach, while putting the sail into the foil. Once I got the sail into the furler foil, I could hoist it, as long as it wasn’t twisted somehow. It always seemed to be twisted somehow.
.
The mainsail was less of a problem. The boat had to be facing into the wind of course, but the main went up smoothly without too much effort. I had to be careful of the winch handle which was used for the genoa sheet winches and the halyard winches for both sails, there was only one winch handle on board.
.
We were now sailing. The anchor was stowed on deck as before, but the anchor rode was stuffed into the anchor locker which had a hatch door cover over it. The rode wouldn’t get out off the deck and cause trouble that way. We were sailing with depth sounder reading 7 and 8‘s, fingers crossed, and a bit of sailing tension. The real channel, which we had missed, went up North a bit, then crossed over in a narrow cut to Tangier Sound, which had plenty of depth. A sailboat, an expensive and well sailed sailboat took that route as we nervously cheated over the Shark Shoal.
.
It seemed to take forever. The wind that had been so strong that we couldn’t have gotten underway now was easing and we were going slowly over some shallow water, hoping not to spend too much time there. The other more expensive sailboat was far away before they turned into the Sound, then they turned up into the wind and raised sail. Beautiful boat. I watched them turn tail and head down Tangier Sound. We went and went and the depths still were, now, 8 and 9‘s. We had to keep on crossing the shoal. I was more confident because the depths were marginally deeper than when we started. I was bitten on the leg by an annoying fly. The same thing happened a couple years ago when I sailed the C&C 24, TRILLIUM, down through the Chesapeake. I had a fly swatter on board and I would say I killed a thousand flies if I had killed one fly.
.
The flies were persistent. If you didn’t react to their slightest landing on your skin and swat them, they gave you a painful bite. Swatting one on the hard fiberglass of the boat would produce a blood stain, your blood. They were annoying.
.
We ended up being able to turn South into Tangier Sound, deep and wide. If only we had the wind from earlier, we would sail the last 15 miles in a few hours and be in port. The wind was fickle, there was no wind. As for the water, the tidal current was against us, so sometimes our GPS information would show us sailing North when we were pointed South and I could watch the bubbles slowly drift by, we were indeed sailing South. But at a crab pot buoy I could see the water going North, we going South, and just sitting there next to the crab pot buoy, not going anywhere. It was nice weather, very sunny, and my face was already burnt, so I used my corona virus mask over my forehead to block out any more sun there. I was sunburnt.
.
We only had about 15 miles to go to get to Crisfield and I wondered if we would ever get there. We spent the entire afternoon bucking a tidal flood current with very little boat speed due to very little wind. I checked the forecast and it had mostly N at 10 to 15. Ha.
.
I had forgotten to include losing the steering wheel while approaching Hooper Island Straight. It started by the wheel spinning and no steering happening. Then the wheel came off in my lap. This was at a critical moment where the channel is very narrow. In the dark I felt around and lined up the key on the steering wheel shaft with the keyway inside the wheel hub. It would not mount onto the shaft. After more attempts I found the key was tilted a bit in the wrong direction, I clicked it back and remounted the wheel. Later I found the hub nut in the cockpit and screwed it down.
.
At some point I could see the Crisfield windmill, a huge wind turbine. I steered in the general direction of it while monitoring the depth sounder. I was getting strange readings, like 88 feet, 105 feet, 65 feet, all within a few moments of each other. Then it dawned on me that I was reading decimals, we were in a shoal in about 6 feet of water. I turned us toward the channel and nervously watched the depth until it started deepening.
.
A huge luxury yacht motored by and I followed in its wake. My estimate of arriving at Crisfield in about 2 hours wasn’t far off. I arrived at the last turn to Crisfield’s channel, sailing to the right of the ship channel. The wind was nearly dead and it was dark. I decided not to try to ghost into a strange harbor in the dark and anchored.
.
The next morning I found the batteries were dead. No VHF, no depth sounder. There was also no wind. After about 3 hours of sailing we had covered about 1 1/2 miles. Then we were truly becalmed. Cornelia Marie called and asked if I wanted her to come out in her skiff and tow me in, yes indeed, come and save me. I expected her to arrive about 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. She had to go get the skiff on its trailer, get enough fuel to tow a sailboat 3 miles, and launch the skiff, park the trailer some distance away, walk back, then leave the small boat harbor to come out the channel.
.
Meanwhile the wind returned, weak, so weak that I was moving backwards, the flood tidal current flows North here. At some point the wind increased so that I was standing still next to a ship’s channel buoy. Then we slowly crossed the channel crabwise.
.
Every small power boat that came out the harbor was scrutinized, was it CM? Then she did approach. On board she had her friend Eve and Nori, the wonder dog. By now I was sailing acceptably and we wondered if she should tow me or not. I thought it would be good if she accompanied me, then tow if the wind died.
.
Her trusty outboard stopped for no apparent reason and I was sailing away in a freshening breeze. I expected her to have her boat running again in short order, but she just stayed put, pulling the starter cord from time to time. I couldn’t sail on and leave her like that, so I jibed and sailed toward her.
.
We had a sort of man overboard drill and I was trying to get a line to the skiff as I sailed by. Finally we got tied together and I was towing the tow boat. Although the extra drag must have affected SUNSPLASH, we sailed to windward to follow the channel. I found out she did not get additional fuel and thought I would be closer, and probably would not have been able to tow me all the way in. I said I was saving her fuel.
.
It looked like I could tow them into Crisfield’s harbor entrance, but then I would have to cast them off to short tack into port. It was getting late but we were almost there. A pair of young lads in a skiff came by and the girls waved them down. They agreed to tow Eve and CM into port. I cast them off.
.
There had been a large Trump rally on a beach and the boats were returning to port. They were probably not all sober. As it began to grow dark I held my trusty Walmart work light up and pointed it aft to simulate a stern light. The batteries were dead, so no navigation lights. The wind was also dying and I was inching along when the marine police arrived. They deemed me a hazard to navigation and after much discussion, towed me to the city pier. Thankfully they didn’t write me up. A large fireworks display began, very impressive. I said they didn’t have to do that just because of my arrival. The cops laughed at that one.
.
Well I finally made it to Crisfield, not quite to Somers Cove and my new slip. The photo was sent to me by Eve, it shows Nori the Wonder Dog gazing at SUNSPLASH.

Comments

About & Links

SailBlogs Groups