Unexcused Absences

November 28 to December 5, 2015. Sunday morning it was time for more boat projects. Dave generously loaned me his car, and I spent several hours at Sailorman, a new- and used-boat-gear emporium; absolute heaven. Aisle after aisle of mostly used boating gear, very similar to Bacon Sails in Annapolis, but much bigger.

I had to re-wire the battery charger, as the previous installation used wire that was too small for the current being carried, so I made up half a dozen heavy-duty cables at the store. They had all the gear; wire, crimp lugs, and crimp tools. We also bought some used fishing gear (game-fish sized rod and reel, net, and gaff). While we are aware that there is an activity called “fishing,” we really don’t know much more about it than that. So rather than starting small and working our way up, we’re going to try to catch a 20-30 pound Mahi right out of the gate. Wish us luck.

“Miss Adventure” at Dave and Jackie’s dock

The Gulf Stream is not just words on a map. It is an enormous river of water flowing north up the US east coast at almost 4 knots, in places. The surface can be placid, like a pond, or it can be a washing machine, with large, breaking waves. From everything we had read, it is not something to be taken lightly. Our original plan was to park Miss Adventure in Ft Lauderdale for the holidays, fly home, then return in late December to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. But Lauderdale, the self-proclaimed “Yachting Capital of the World,” also proved to be the “Relieve Boaters of Their Money” capital of the world.

The “Phoenix II” parked near Los Olas

We actually had a great offer from Dave and Jackie to stay at their dock for the month, but by this time we had looked into prices in the Bahamas and decided that if the weather cooperated we would attempt a crossing; marina fees in Grand Bahama were surprisingly affordable, unlike in the rest of the Bahamas. Plus they have an international airport not far from the coast, so getting home would be simple and easy.

Monday I had a golf outing arranged with Rose and Richard and his brother Alan at the Ft Lauderdale Country Club (thank you Richard!), so of course it rained. We delayed our start a couple hours until a big band of rain passed, then made it through seven holes before the golf- and rain-gods ganged up on us. Everyone’s game pretty much fell apart halfway through the first nine, so I think we were all secretly relieved that a deluge stopped us from attempting a second nine. And to think it all started off so well for me, finishing the first three holes at one over par.

Anchorage near Port Everglades, Lauderdale

The weather was looking decent for a crossing on Wednesday, so Tuesday we did a final round of errands, and I topped off the oil in both engines (more on this later), and we enjoyed a final lunch with Dave and Jackie, and then mid afternoon we said goodbye and moved the boat to an anchorage not far from the Port Everglades Inlet, to give us an easy exit in the morning. After we anchored I noticed a small oil slick behind the boat, but Miss Adventure had brought us over a thousand miles from Deltaville, so I didn’t think much of it.

The 17th Street Bridge at dawn

Five A.M. came pretty early Wednesday. We had the anchor up by 6 A.M. as the first light was breaking in the east, and were headed out into the Atlantic as the sun came up. Very soon we were in the Gulf Stream, getting swept north at 2+ knots. You can’t tell by looking around the boat, because the water, the waves, and the boat are all caught in the stream, so everything looks normal. But while our compass was telling us our heading was 122 degrees (approximately east-southeast), the GPS reported our actual course over the ground as due east. I knew this would be the case, and planned our route accordingly, but it was still disconcerting to see how much we were side-slipping north.

Sunrise over the Gulf Stream

The seas were a little lumpier than the forecast predicted, so the “light south-east wind and calm seas” were more like 12-15 knots from the south-east and 3-4 foot waves. Nothing terrible, but hour after hour of rolling made me wish I had installed seat belts in the flybridge. But all was well, and the Great Isaac Lighthouse (marking the north-west tip of the Great Bahama Bank) appeared on the horizon right where it should have.

The Great Isaac Lighthouse (abandoned)

Plan A was to anchor on the Banks (an enormous 15-foot-deep sand bar) for the night, but the waves were a little big to be anchoring, and I was just starting to ponder the options for Plan B when an angry buzzer and red light lit up on the dashboard. I scanned the instruments and discovered that the starboard engine oil pressure was 20 psi (it should be at 60). Argh.

I ran below and checked the dipstick and the engine was bone dry; 10 quarts of oil had vanished since the evening before. Where did it go? I opened up the engine room door expecting to see oil everywhere, but there was none in the bilge, and none under the engine, and we certainly hadn’t burned it since that would have caused a pall of blue smoke behind the boat. A mystery for another time; at this point we were probably 40 miles from Grand Bahama and 25 miles from Bimini, with one working engine darkness about 90 minutes away, and it was time to make a plan. I didn’t really want to go to Bimini because that was in the opposite direction of where we were ultimately headed. I figured if we had to arrive somewhere unfamiliar after dark it was better if there was deep water right up to shore, so we turned about 65 degrees to port and set a course for Port Lucaya, Grand Bahama.

Eight hours later, after dodging a surprising number of large cargo ships, we pulled in to the Port Lucaya inlet, turned to port, and dropped anchor. The Gulf Stream crossing was a bit more eventful than I had hoped, but the water temperature was about 80 degrees, the stars were out, and the lights from the resorts around us were lovely, and we at last sat down for happy hour – at about 11 pm.

The next morning we moved about 40 minutes west down the coast to Knowles Marine, a boatyard halfway between Lucaya and Freeport. Charlton Knowles met us on the dock, and he quickly confirmed our suspicion that the oil cooler had sprung an internal leak, and the pressurized oil had slowly pumped out through the sea-water cooling system. Not sure if I’d mentioned this before, but the previous owner of the Miss Adventure absolutely loved spare parts. The boat had spares for everything, including not one, but two (!) spare oil coolers. So in a couple hours I had the old one out and a new one installed.

Docked at Knowles Marine, Grand Bahama

The only problem was that it took me two days to get all the seawater out of the engine. Once I shut down the starboard motor, the sea water used the same hole that had let the oil out to flow back in to the engine. So I spent hours upon hours filling the oil pan, running the engine, draining the oil from the pan and any lines I could remove, then repeating the process. I used my entire stash of 7 gallons of engine oil. And oil costs three times in the Bahamas what it does in Ft Lauderdale. Oh well, it’s only money.

Sailing with Mary Jo and Allan

The good news is that we met some very nice folks during our 5 days on the island; our boat neighbor Mary Jo, her friend Alan, the marina owner Charlton, and their friends in Freeport, Hanna and Jimmy. We even took Mary Jo’s gorgeous 50 foot ketch for an afternoon sail one day. She taught me how to clean and chop up conch for conch salad, and also took us to a neat botanical park called Garden of the Groves.

Conch salad prep

Conch salad!

Mary Jo, Charlton, Allan, and Heather on “Miss Adventure”

Now that we are safely in the Bahamas we want to again thank our friends along the way who helped get us here; Ted and Todd, who gave us dock space and a loaner car near Annapolis back in the spring so we could work on our endless list of boat projects; my Dad, who patiently accepted (and continues to accept) car-loads of Amazon deliveries full of boat parts; our friends along the ICW, Lynn and Ron (Charleston, South Carolina), Dave and Suzanne (St Simons Island, Georgia), Jack and Susan (Vero Beach, Florida), and Richard and Rose (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) who all took yet more Amazon deliveries for us; and Dave and Jackie, who not only let us use their dock in Lauderdale but also welcomed us into their home as honored guests.

Our new friends Dave and Jackie

The volume of stuff we had to order on the way down was pretty staggering. Dave and Suzanne, in particular, had the best idea. When I called a couple days out to confirm that our orders had arrived, Dave said yes, in fact they had arrived, and he was about to put up Craigslist notices to sell our stuff and make some money. A true friend.

So now we plan to pack up Miss Adventure and fly home to DC for a few weeks, then return after Christmas and start our cruising tour of the Bahamas. I’ll post updates here once we get underway in January. And in the meantime, we hope everyone has a fun and safe holiday.

East Coast Cruise – Week 6 Numbers

• Engine Hours: 19
• Generator Hours: 0.8
• Miles Traveled: 98
• Marina Fees: $0

East Coast Cruise – Total Numbers

• Engine Hours: 184
• Generator Hours: 67.7
• Miles Traveled: 1,235
• Marina Fees: $408

“Miss Adventure” East Coast Cruise – Week 6

November 22 to November 28, 2015. Week 5 was a short hop from Vero Beach down to Ft. Lauderdale, our staging area for our crossing to the Bahamas.

The trip was just over 100 miles, or two normal days of cruising at our 7.2 knot pace. We actually broke it up into three days so we would have a little flexibility in our schedule, and besides our Vero Beach friends Jack and Susan were off to New Jersey for Thanksgiving and our mooring neighbors Kenny and Bill were on their way south towards Marathon Key, so there was no longer a reason to linger in Vero. Well, there were still Kitty and Scott of Tamure, but hopefully we’ll see them in the Abacos, where they plan to spend the winter.

The very crowded Vero Beach mooring field

We used Sunday to run errands with our Enterprise rental car – they have a really good deal, $10 per day during the weekends. With no social events planned for the evening we did something very quaint in the age of Netflix; we went to the movies. “The Martian” was still playing, and was a fantastic movie. Monday morning I did some final errands and returned the car. Then it was time to drop the mooring and visit the dock to take on water, get rid of some trash, and continue our journey south. Less than two hours south was a very protected anchorage just off the Fort Pierce inlet called Faber Cove.

Jupiter Inlet lighthouse with Christmas bows

I mention that it was protected because the south Florida trade winds have been kicking, and will continue to blow this entire week. So finding an anchorage protected from winds from the north and east was critical. Faber Cove would have been unremarkable except that Tuesday, while on our way to our anchorage at West Palm Beach, we got an email from a couple who live at Faber Cove. The saw the name of our boat, found our unexcusedabsences.com website through the frightening power of Google, and sent us a nice email. They hope to buy a boat someday and do what we’re doing, and they wanted to wish us well on our voyage and thanked us for helping keep their dream alive through this website. A really nice gesture, we’re happy they reached out to us.

A shockingly nice waterfront trailer park

Fancy Florida waterfront living

South Florida in two words; “Condos” and “Boats”

We are definitely in south Florida. The scenery during Tuesday’s cruise was a constant parade of waterfront homes, condos, and boats. And more condos, and then more boats. With a trailer park or two thrown in for good measure. In West Palm Beach we anchored directly off Trump Plaza, which gave us a good laugh considering that “The Donald” is in the news continuously these days for his antics during the Republican primary season.

Trump Plaza (on right) in West Palm Beach

Wednesday morning, during our cruise south from West Palm, were drawbridges. Lots and lots of drawbridges. We could pass through most of them without requesting an opening (we are 23 feet off the water with our VHF aerial up, 18 feet with the aerial down), but we still had to request openings for seven bridges. Many of them only open once or twice an hour, so our progress was marked by several periods of no progress.

Fort Lauderdale, Yachting Capital of the World

Eventually the scenery started getting familiar (we have visited Ft Lauderdale numerous times while waiting for flights to the Bahamas), and suddenly we passed through a bridge advertising Ft Lauderdale as the Yachting Capital of the World, and another couple miles brought us to the Las Olas Marina mooring field.

Yachts everywhere

We were happy to take a mooring, even though it was expensive at $40 a night (Vero Beach was $15 per night), because the winds were still forecast to be 30 knots or more for the next few days, and I’d rather not have to worry about dragging an anchor in a crowded harbor, so the mooring ball, even at 3 times the normal rate, was a welcome sight.

This week’s money shot; sunset at Las Olas Marina

Once settled in we called our friends Rose and Richard, whom we met in the Bahamas during our visit last spring, and they invited us over for dinner. About 20 minutes in the dinghy brought us to their gorgeous waterfront home. Several brothers and sisters and spouses were in town for Thanksgiving, and we enjoyed a delicious filet mignon and tuna steak dinner with Alan and Arlene, Byron and Bernie, and John and Judy. We frankly felt a little out of place, not because each of the house guests were successful in their careers (and all we do is vacation all the time), but because we didn’t have alliterative first names.

Rose and Richard’s beautiful home, with their boat docked out back

Thanksgiving – time to set our scales back 5 pounds because of TST (Thanksgiving Savings Time). Rose and Richard hosted 22 (!) people at their beautiful house for Thanksgiving. There’s something really pleasant about eating a big turkey dinner in bare feet and shorts on an outdoor patio – I could probably get used to the nice winter weather of south Florida. Dinner was a blast, and our hosts kept everyone entertained with a few parlor games, including the President Obama Wealth Redistribution Game, where after you pay an entry fee of $5, you are guaranteed to win either $5, $7, or $10.

The pre-dinner Thanksgiving toast

Friday our friends from DC, Suzanne and Mark, drove over from Naples where they were spending the Thanksgiving holidays with family. It was so fun to dinghy over to Miss Adventure’s mooring and show them the boat. After the tour, and us showing them all the upgrades/fixes/improvements we’ve made, I suspect they were thinking, “thank goodness we didn’t buy a boat!” We went to lunch at possibly the best burger place on the east coast, definitely the best one in south Florida, Gilbert’s 17th Street Grill. The funny part is that I told Suzanne I had a place picked out for lunch, and she said she had a suggestion too, and we had both chosen the same restaurant, out of ~1,200 restaurants in the Fort Lauderdale area. Great minds…

Mark and Suzanne pay us a visit

Rose and Richard introduced us to friends of theirs, Dave and Jackie, who own a waterfront home on the New River west of downtown Lauderdale. They were sweet enough to let us park Miss Adventure at their house for a few days, so we moved to their dock Saturday afternoon. A happy hour turned into dinner which turned into a nice evening getting to know our new friends. We’ve met some great people so far on this trip, but we really connected with this friendly, generous, and interesting couple.

Dave and Jackie’s back yard, with Miss Adventure at the dock

Dave joined the Navy as the Korean War was winding down, and ended up as skipper of a destroyer in the Pacific during the Vietnam War, before he moved to a desk job. He had lots of fun stories, although my personal favorite was how he helped a crewman from Samoa, who was the barber on one of his ships, set up a barbershop back home once he (the barber) left the Navy. A number of years later Dave had a chance to visit Samoa, and his friend was now the governor! Great stuff.

The ultimate dessert; a giant cookie topped with other cookies

And that’s it for Week 5. We are now ready to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas once the weather calms down. Our original plan was to park the boat in south Florida during December, fly home for the holidays, and make the crossing early in the new year. But everything seems to be working with the boat, or at least enough of the major systems are working well enough to make the crossing, so we hope to give it a shot during Week 6.

East Coast Cruise – Week 5 Numbers

• Engine Hours: 18
• Generator Hours: 28
• Miles Traveled: 119
• Marina Fees: $135

East Coast Cruise – Total Numbers

• Engine Hours: 165
• Generator Hours: 66.9
• Miles Traveled: 1,137
• Marina Fees: $408

“Miss Adventure” East Coast Cruise – Week 5

“La Grenouille Rouge” (The Red Frog)

Great boat name; “The Rodfather”

You can charter the Gallant Lady for about a quarter million a week (wine is extra)

November 15 to November 21, 2015. First thing Sunday morning we said goodbye to the nice folks at Hidden Harbor Yacht Club and repositioned back to our anchorage off Fort Frederica, on St. Simons Island.

Our friend Dave had a day of activities planned for us. He’s a very early riser (as in 5am typically), so when we told him we were getting up early to move the boat back to the anchorage, he laughed and said, “what’s early for you guys, 7:30?” Well, actually, early for us is more like 8:30, but there you have it. In any case, we were anchored by a little after 10 and Dave picked us up and we drove to Jekyll Island for a long, leisurely bike ride.

Bike ride on Jekyll Island

The 5,700 acre Jekyll Island is a terrific spot and well worth a visit. It’s currently a state park, but includes places to stay, eat and play. A (mostly) paved bike trail circles the island, and loops through forests, fields, and swamps. The island was occupied by the English in the early 18th century, on the frontier with Spanish Florida. The plantation era followed, and lasted from the late 18th century until about the Civil War.

Salt marsh at the north end of Jekyll Island

At the end of the 19th century, the Jekyll Island Club opened as a winter retreat for the wealthy. At its peak, from the late 1880’s through the beginning of World War II, it was home to the winter “cottages” of the world’s wealthiest people. Many of the cottages still stand, which originally belonged to folks like J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Marshal Field, Frank Goodyear, George Macy, and William Rockefeller (although, interestingly, not his older brother John D.).

One of the winter “cottages” of the 19th century 1%

Most amazingly, Jekyll Island was the site of the very first transcontinental telephone call, placed by Theodore Vail (president of AT&T) to Alexander Graham Bell in 1915. His second call was to President Wilson.

For lunch, we stopped at a delicious waterfront taco shack, then continued our bike ride to the northern tip of the island, to Driftwood Beach. It appears that the area used to be a forest, but the shifting sands of the barrier islands undercut the trees and now they lie along the beach, bark long gone, trunks bleached in the sun. That evening we went back to Dave’s condo where his wife Suzanne served a delicious home-cooked dinner (catfish, crab-stuffed salmon, and pork), and then it was time for us to get back to Miss Adventure.

Driftwood Beach

Monday morning we detoured into Brunswick Harbor to pick up fuel (one of the best diesel prices on the east coast is at Brunswick Landing Marina), then motored back out to the ICW and continued south. The hardest part of the trip was off Jekyll Island, with numerous shallow spots, tricky navigation, and strong current. The tides in this part of the south-east, as was the case last week in Charleston, are still in the eight-foot range.

The most I’ve ever spent on fuel at one time

Monday evening we anchored in Cumberland Sound, just north of the Florida border and directly across from the enormous Kings Bay Submarine Base, home to the US Navy’s east coast ballistic missile submarine fleet. It goes without saying that the area was thick with patrol boats and men with automatic weapons. But the anchorage was perfect, 12 feet of water with great holding and not much current.

Fishing trawler in southern Georgia

Tuesday’s adventure was leading a pack of 4 other boats (including the Down East trawler Daybreak – more on them later) through the tricky shallows and turns south of Fernandina Beach. I offered to let the other boats pass me near the entrance to the tricky spot, and the general agreement after some discussion on the radio was that it looked like I knew what I was doing, so they decided I should lead the way. I finally broke the news that not only was it my first time through the area, but also our first cruise in the US. That got a good laugh from everyone. Once out of the shallow spots everyone took off ahead of me – remember, we’re a very slow, old boat. The rest of the day was uneventful, and we dropped our hook just south of St. Augustine, Florida.

Definitely in Florida; condos and more condos

Things are starting to feel distinctly tropical. The water temperature has warmed to the high 70’s, the ICW is full of dolphins and pelicans, and the evenings have that delicious, warm, breezy humidity typical of all those nights at anchor in the islands back when we had real jobs and were chartering sailboats during our hectic two-to-three-sailing-trips-per-year vacation schedule.

Wednesday we had another nine-hour day of motoring, this time against the tide almost the whole way, unlike Tuesday when we had a good following current. But just like Tuesday, we got passed again by Daybreak, and eventually anchored for the night in Rockhouse Creek, near the Ponce de Leon ocean inlet. The anchorage was almost perfect; shallow water, beautiful scenery, a nearby lighthouse, terrific anchor holding, and a current that flowed only one way, during the outbound tide. Can’t figure out why, but the inbound tidal current was almost nonexistent.

Pelicans

This part of the Florida waterway is really really flat country, wide open, and not terribly interesting. There were two things we saw of note, though; our first manatee (a large water-dwelling mammal), and the VAB (Vertical Assembly Building) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Thursday evening’s anchorage wasn’t scenic in any way, but it served its purpose. We needed to anchor in a spot with some protection from north and west wind, and this part of Florida is known for its lack of protected anchorages. The terrain is mostly miles and miles of shallow water, so there’s no way to get close to any trees to block the wind. The trick to finding protection is to snuggle up to a tall bridge (really) and park in the lee of the big earth berm that carries the roadway up from sea level to where the bridge starts, so that’s what we did at the Pineda high bridge.

Friday we cruised south to Vero Beach, home to lots of rich people, at least judging by the houses lining the waterway. Lots of man-made waterfalls, backyard putting greens, large boats, and outdoor dining rooms. Our plan was to get a mooring at the Vero Beach City Marina, so we called ahead and were told that they currently had 96 boats parked on 45 moorings (do the math), and we would have to raft up with someone. As we were about to pull in, I heard Daybreak call on the radio for instructions to their mooring, and since we had to raft up anyway, might as well be with someone we “know”; even though we’ve never met, we have had our daily pass and radio chat with the boat for the past few days.

The packed mooring field at Vero Beach City Marina

We called Daybreak and they said sure, come alongside. So we tied up and finally got to meet Captain Kenny and his friend Bill. Apparently Kenny’s wife was more into living on the boat, as opposed to actually boating on the boat, so Bill was along to help Kenny get the boat from Delaware to the Florida Keys. Really nice folks, and we’re so glad we finally met them – they sounded really nice on the radio.

But we had to cut short our jawboning because we had to host our friends Jack and Susan, who live in Vero, for happy hour on the Miss Adventure. We met them on the Canal de la Garonne (in the south of France) during the first summer we owned Après Ski. After happy hour and a tour of our boat we went to a local pizza place for a delicious dinner.

Us with Susan and Jack

Saturday was a packed social schedule. First, we hosted breakfast on the Miss Adventure for our mooring neighbors Kenny and Bill, then went to Susan and Jack’s house for a home cooked lunch, then got back to our boat in time to host happy hour for Kitty and Scott of Tamure, whom we met a few weeks ago at ICW mile 346 in South Carolina.

Very busy dinghy dock in Vero Beach

This cruise is so different from our cruises on the French canals, and not just for the obvious reasons (the lack of abundant, inexpensive, and delicious wine and cheese). Our pace of travel is much faster. In France we average between 17 and 18 hours of cruising per week; the past four weeks of ICW cruising is equivalent to two months of time on the canals, in terms of hours driven. And in terms of distance covered, we’ve already gone farther than during our typical three-month summer canal cruise.

Another difference is the paucity of places to stop and wander and visit. In France we can basically park the boat anywhere along the canals, get out, and take a walk through the countryside or a bike ride down the towpath or a stroll through a village. Here, access to land is tightly controlled – not that we’ve had much time to stop and smell the mangroves anyway, since we started our cruise almost three weeks late. So aside from the differences, and in between all the boat projects, we are indeed having a great time. And, somehow, we got through an entire week on the Miss Adventure without an MPOD (Mechanical Problem of the Day). I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that.

East Coast Cruise – Week 4 Numbers

• Engine Hours: 40
• Generator Hours: 10.2
• Miles Traveled: 280
• Marina Fees: $32

East Coast Cruise – Total Numbers

• Engine Hours: 147
• Generator Hours: 38.9
• Miles Traveled: 1,018
• Marina Fees: $273

“Miss Adventure” East Coast Cruise – Week 4

Fishing fleet in Brunswick, Georgia

How little tugboats are made

The Route 17 suspension bridge outside Brunswick

Driftwood Beach

The “Flying Pig” of Vero Beach, not to be confused with the swimming pigs of the Bahamas

“Paddle faster, I hear banjo music”

Up close with the Atlantic Ocean in Georgia

A nice waterfront home

This one’s a bit more “West Virginia”

More driftwood

November 8 to November 14, 2015. The previous few days’ perfect weather had to come to an end sometime, and sometime came Sunday morning. The forecast high for the day was actually at 1am, and by dawn it as cold and windy with rain squalls. Heather did a photo shoot with Lynn for her post about French scarves on her website Southern Fried French. Ron seemed to vanish once the scarves came out, but I gamely played the part of fashion photographer. Very easy on the eyes, my job, photographing two beautiful women.

My scarf models, Lynn and Heather

After the shoot I drove over solo to the Patriots Point park and museum, which has a bunch of displays related to various wars. They have a Vietnam War immersion experience (didn’t bother with that one – didn’t know whether the “immersion” included tropical insect bites and diseases), a Cold War memorial that was a scale model of a ballistic submarine buried in the ground, and my main reason for coming, a World War II destroyer, submarine, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown.

Engine room controls deep inside the Yorktown

Forward torpedo tubes on the submarine

The carrier Yorktown, submarine Clamagore, and a random cruising catamaran

Spoiler alert; the ships are awesome. I could have spent a week just crawling around the carrier. They let you in to all kinds of spaces, including the engine room, flight deck, bridge, combat information center, plus all the living spaces for the ~3,500 crew. Both the flight deck and the hangar deck are filled with vintage and modern warplanes.

View from the Yorktown’s bridge

The sub, the USS Clamagore, was built right at the end of WW II. She never saw action, but nevertheless gives an eerily accurate impression of what life was like on a sub during wartime. The destroyer is the USS Laffey, known as “the ship that would not die” because during an engagement off Okinawa in early 1945 she was assailed by an air strike of 22 Japanese bombers and kamikazes. Five kamikazes and three bombs struck the ship, killing 32 and wounding 71, yet somehow the crew shot down 9 planes while frantically fighting fires and keeping the ship afloat. Fantastic stuff if you have any interest in WW II or military hardware.

Part of the helm station on USS Clamagore

Sunday evening Heather cooked a delicious crock-pot meal (chicken marbella) and we hosted Lynn and Ron in our spacious salon onboard Miss Adventure. It’s so incredibly random that we met this delightful couple in France after being fans of their website, and are now good friends and can visit them on two continents.

Dinner onboard “Miss Adventure” with Lynn and Ron

The weather was no better Monday, so we stayed at Lynn and Ron’s dock and worked on boat projects, did some provisioning, and got some internet work done. Since Ron is interested in buying a boat, I thought I’d treat him to some “real” boating, so I invited him down to help me change the oil on the two main engines. The procedure is pretty straightforward, but it takes almost 5 gallons of 15W-40 heavy-duty oil to complete the procedure. Fortunately Amazon ships the exact oil I need in 2.5 gallon jugs, and shipping is free with Amazon Prime (bonus!).

Tuesday we left around 10am, and after navigating the treacherous Elliott Cut with 4-knot current against us had a nice 2-3 knot following current all the way to Bass Creek. The scenery south of Charleston is fantastic, lots of salt marshes and clumps of pine trees all around the ICW.

A fishing boat returning from the ocean

Wednesday we left early (for us; 8 am), and arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina, promptly at 10am. The Beaufort in South Carolina is pronounced “Buford”, as opposed to Beaufort, North Carolina, which is pronounced “Beaufort.” Whatever. Our timing couldn’t have been better, because as we were tying up we heard the distinct sounds of a marching band. We walked out to the main street just in time to catch the town’s Veteran’s Day Parade.

Veteran’s Day parade in Beaufort, South Carolina

We would have like to have stayed longer, but we hoped to get to St Simons Island, Georgia, by Friday afternoon so we could visit Dave and Suzanne, friends from Virginia who recently retired and moved south. We cruised another 4.5 hours (passing the gorgeous homes of Hilton Head) and arrived at the Wright River, near the South Carolina/Georgia border not far from Savannah.

Serious waterfront real estate near Hilton Head

After dinner I stepped outside to check on something and saw fireworks in the distance; there was probably a Veterans Day display going on in or near Savannah. And as if the fireworks weren’t cool enough, I heard loud breathing all around the boat. After the initial “what the heck is that” wore off, I realized that the sounds were from a huge pod of dolphins feeding around our boat. I called to Heather and we watched the fireworks and listened to the dolphins hunt for fish for about 10 minutes until the finale (of the fireworks, not the dolphins).

Anchored near Savannah, Georgia

Next, on Thursday, we motored south to Walburg Creek, but not before some anchor-retrieval excitement. We normally tie a small buoy to the end of the anchor, both to mark the anchor’s position (for us and for other boaters), and to give us a way to pull the anchor out backwards should it snag on something. This is all good and well under normal circumstances, but with the 9 foot tides of this part of the south-east, the boat swings back and forth several times overnight as the current switches with the tide.

Anchored up a creek with this sailboat

In this case, the anchor line had snagged the buoy line on one of the current switches, so the buoy was no longer visible in the murky water. And wouldn’t you know, halfway through raising the anchor I heard a gentle thump from the direction of the port prop. Sure enough, the anchor came up with only about 10 feet of yellow 1/4 inch line (of the 20 feet that was there last night), and no buoy in sight. No visible buoy meant it, and about 10 feet of line, were wrapped around the prop. At least it took until Thursday this week to have our Mechanical Problem of the Day (MPOD).

Fortunately slack tide was approaching when we anchored in Walburg Creek, so I put on my wetsuit and snorkel and dove on the port prop. At first glance it looked like a complete tangled mess, but it only took about 6 or 7 tries to free the line and the destroyed buoy from the propeller. Fun factor; 1 out of 5, annoyance factor; 3 out of 5. It actually wasn’t too bad, the water was 69 degrees and at slack tide the current was very light.

The mangled anchor buoy after its encounter with the port prop

Our only deliverable for the rest of the week was to get to an anchorage on the Frederica River, off St Simons Island. We anchored directly opposite the small dinghy dock maintained by the National Park Service. Fort Frederica was on the frontier between the British colony in South Carolina and the Spanish colony in Florida, and was the site of two battles in 1746. In both, the British were successful in protecting St Simons Island from the Spanish invaders, and that was it; by the war of independence thirty years later, the fort was abandoned.

Sunset off Fort Frederica

The dock is on a mud flat that is exposed for the last two hours before and the first two hours after low tide, so we had to time our shore visits with the eight-foot tides in mind. By the time the tide had risen enough to get to shore, it was 6:15pm, and we were hungry. Our friends Dave and Suzanne picked us up at the park gate and we went to the Southern Soul BBQ joint, a former gas station and now hole-in-the-wall that serves delicious (and regionally famous) home cooked southern BBQ. It’s right up there, classic BBQ-wise, with the Hickory Hut in Salina, Kansas.

Remnants of Fort Frederica

Saturday we moved the boat about an hour west across the ICW and the salt marsh to the Hidden Harbor Yacht Club, definitely not a “Yacht Club” in any New England sense of the word. But they have a great reputation, and we wanted to scope them out as a possible place to park Miss Adventure for the summer while we visit our French canal boat, Après Ski.

We finished Week 3 with an exciting (for me) series of boat projects with their resident mechanic, Alan, who spent several hours onboard helping me with a few things I was too intimidated to tackle on my own. Coming up in week 4 we’ll spend some more time with Dave and Suzanne, and then continue in our quest to reach Ft. Lauderdale by Thanksgiving.

East Coast Cruise – Week 3 Numbers

• Engine Hours: 27
• Generator Hours: 4.9
• Miles Traveled: 200
• Marina Fees: $80

East Coast Cruise – Total Numbers

• Engine Hours: 107
• Generator Hours: 28.7
• Miles Traveled: 738
• Marina Fees: $241

“Miss Adventure” East Coast Cruise – Week 3

Engine room on the submarine

Civil War cannon in Beaufort, SC

Destroyer “USS Laffey” (left) and carrier “USS Yorktown”

Docked in Beaufort, SC

A few of “Miss Adventure’s” dock lines

A southbound trawler

Georgia salt marsh

An heron

Sunset over the Georgia salt marsh

November 1 to November 7, 2015. Early Sunday morning in the bight at Cape Lookout was partly cloudy, which made a beautiful sunrise. Our original plan was to cruise “outside” in the Atlantic down to Wrightsville Beach, but once we left the bight the forecast light north winds were in reality 10-15 knots from the south-east, and the calm seas from yesterday afternoon were a bit lumpy and would not be comfortable at all broadside to the boat for 10 hours. So at Beaufort we turned back into the channel and picked up the Atlantic Intra-Coastal Waterway.

A fantastic sunrise at Cape Lookout

Our friends Carl and Leah whom we met in Deltaville had suggested the outside trip to Wrightsville because this leg of the ICW was mostly row after row of boring houses. And for the most part they were right. One bit of excitement was at Camp Lejeune (the big Army base), the authorities have not been keeping up with dredging the channel and there is now more than a bit of shoaling between buoys 61 and 63. Our depth sounder went right down to 4.5 feet (our boat draws 4 feet) so it was a bit nerve-wracking. I crawled through at idle speed, but we were being pushed by a 1.5 knot current, so we were doing over 4 knots. But we didn’t hit bottom, and soon we were on our way again.

A typical view from the ICW in southern North Carolina

Later we heard through the cruiser’s grapevine that five sailboats had all gotten stuck there the previous day. Towboat US was out there pulling people off as fast as they could hit the sand bar, but it was still pretty chaotic. The Atlantic ICW is supposed to have a minimum depth of 12 feet, so someone at the Army Corps of Engineers and/or the Coast Guard is falling down on the job.

The Army recommends you don’t transit Camp Lejeune when they’re firing live artillery

By evening the rain clouds were building and we pulled off the ICW into the small sound behind Topsail Beach, which turned out to be an awesome anchorage. The anchor held like a rock, and the entire eastern horizon was filled with beautiful waterfront homes. At “cruiser’s bedtime” (9pm) the rain started.

Monday morning we were under way at the crack of dawn so we could get to Carolina Beach anchorage before noon. More rain was forecast for the afternoon and we wanted to run some errands around town (groceries and the hardware store, just like in France). I was doing something in the engine room while Heather was cooking lunch using the 1500W power inverter, and was just thinking that it had been several days without a mechanical problem, when I looked at the big rotary switch controlling the DC current into the inverter, and saw smoke.

As you probably know, electrical devices run on smoke, and when you let the smoke out, they stop working. This was no exception. The switch was fried, I couldn’t even turn it to “off” (not so great), but fortunately when Heather turned off the hot plate the smoking stopped. The bad news was that the inverter powers our fridge (full of things that need to stay cold like wine and beer) and our freezer (full of $300 worth of frozen meat), and the current to power the inverter passes (or used to pass) through this burned-out switch.

It was now a race against time to get the switch replaced and the inverter powered back on so that the fridge and freezer would have electricity. Somewhere on the boat (I use that phrase a lot) was a brand new, 300 Amp DC battery switch, which would make the perfect replacement for the smoking one. But where, exactly, on the boat? Miss Adventure is not like our French canal boat Après Ski, which is very small and only has a few cubbyholes for storage. Miss A has literally dozens of places to stash spare parts, and the previous owner had done just that. I could picture the new switch perfectly. I just couldn’t picture where it was stored.

A frantic half hour of tearing the boat apart (while the whole time, the fridge and freezer were slowly warming up), and nothing to show for it. I lamented to Heather that I couldn’t find the switch, and we were in danger of loosing everything in the freezer (you don’t just pick up one of these switches at a local hardware store), and she asked me to describe what I was looking for. I did, and she walked to the V-berth/ship’s storage room and returned in 30 seconds with the new switch. Amazing.

So I installed the new switch, turned it on, and the inverter hummed back to life. Double amazing. Thank you, favorite wife. And it was reassuring to know that we were back on track with our MPOD (Mechanical Problem Of the Day). Speaking of which…

The next morning (Tuesday) I checked the battery voltage, and it seemed lower than it should have been. Strange, because we ran the generator several hours last night while Heather was cooking and baking, which should have given the batteries a good solid charge. I started the generator and checked the voltage again, and where it should have read about 13.5 to 14 Volts, it was reading 12.3. Not good. That’s why the batteries hadn’t gotten charged properly the night before, the charger was not doing its job. So for the second time in 24 hours, we were again in danger of loosing the fridge (wine and beer) and freezer (expensive frozen meat). It’s hard to say which device I was more worried about, at this point. I guess the fridge had some vegetables and other non-essentials too.

Again we were in a race against time, and as you probably know most boats don’t just carry spare marine battery chargers – they’re big and expensive. Except… this boat did. I’m starting to think that the main purpose of the good ship Miss Adventure is not to take us to the tropical waters but rather to allow us to carry spare parts around the east coast of the US. I had purchased a top-of-the-line battery charger back in the spring, brought it to the boat, and discovered… that the old battery charger was the same brand, just an older model. Since it seemed to be working well enough at the time, I just stashed the new one in the guest cabin for a rainy day. And not only was Tuesday a very rainy day, but I desperately needed a new battery charger.

About one and a half hours later the charger was installed and I was dripping with sweat (the engine room had cooled to 95 degrees overnight, down from about 120 degrees while the engines are running). Finally we could go ashore and visit Carolina Beach, except that it was pouring rain again, so we just hauled up the anchor and continued south.

The rain came down in buckets. Our flybridge is fully covered, but that doesn’t mean it’s dry. Lots of little seams and zippers leak, just a bit, so I had to drive with a bucket to my left to catch a big drip, a towel folded on my lap to catch a little drip, and a whole line of rags along the windscreen to keep the water off the instruments. If I kept the flybridge windows buttoned up, the heat and humidity would fog the inside, but if I opened the windows the rain would pour in. I had to constantly adjust which window was open so that it was the one downwind and would take on less water. We’re really living the dream, huh?

But the rain ended literally as we were turning into the yacht basin at New River Inlet, and we paid for our first real marina of the trip. The Coquino Yacht Club is really just a lady named Sandy who lives on a boat and rents out a few extra slips (that belong to a waterfront condo) to passing boaters. But the “Yacht Club” comes highly recommended on Active Captain, and they also have laundry and showers. We have a washing machine on board, but with the rain and humidity it was much better to do everything on land and then tumble-dry the load (we don’t have our own dryer) so that mushrooms wouldn’t grow while we were waiting for the clothes to dry. Plus, a buck a foot for Boat US members? That’s a real bargain, considering most other marinas along the ICW start at $1.50 a foot per night and go up from there.

A redneck boat (note the Rebel flag) at the “Yacht Club”

I really wanted to stay at a dock (so we’d be plugged in to electricity) in case we had further problems with our inverter and/or the battery switch and/or the battery charger. Plus, we had the great fortune to meet our boat neighbors Kitty and Scott, a really nice couple who have sailed around the world three times (!!!), including once on a 30-foot sailboat and another time with their two young children. A happy hour turned into a 3+ hour visit.

Wednesday, as we were getting ready to go, Sandy told us there was a mechanical problem with a drawbridge south of here and we might get stuck and have to come back (there are no anchorages between here and Myrtle Beach). Well, at least it wasn’t our mechanical problem, although it probably still counts as our MPOD.

Fortunately, by the time we were underway, we heard over the radio that the bridge was sort of fixed, but would only open at the top of each hour. Fair enough, at least we could continue our trip. We stopped at Osprey Marina for fuel, it’s the cheapest diesel price in South Carolina (according to Active Captain), and the marina turned out to be a real gem. Nice folks, great floating docks, and guests even get a little goodie bag of local goods (jams, vegetables, swag, etc.). But there was supposedly a beautiful anchorage a few miles south just off the ICW on the Waccamaw River, and we had already done our one marina stay this week, so we bought 100 gallons of diesel (at $2.02) and continued on our way.

The beautiful and mysterious Waccamaw River

The anchorage was more beautiful than the glowing descriptions we’d read; a narrow creek snaking through the cypress trees and spanish moss. Thursday morning we had to wait until 8:15 for the fog to clear, then cruised three hours to the free city dock in Georgetown. The dock is only for day visits, but we wanted to stretch our legs and see the town. A Montreal couple on a sailboat pulled in next to us and we used the opportunity to practice our French.

Being tourists for a few hours in Georgetown

Later, at a little deli where we had just sat down to lunch, we saw the same couple again, invited them over, and shared a nice long lunch talking (2/3rds in French) about boating, skiing (they’re season pass holders at Mont Tremblant), and more boating. Underway again by 2pm, we cruised the final two hours and arrived at Minum Creek. While we watched the sun set over the salt marsh we marveled that we had made it a full day without a mechanical problem. That evening we heard what sounded like light rain hitting the windows, but the sky was completely clear. It was little hard-shelled bugs, thousands of them, attracted to our lights inside the boat. Fortunately the bugs stayed on the outside, and we stayed on the inside.

Friday morning we woke to see the deck covered in coffee grounds. Only it wasn’t coffee grounds, it was one million of those same bugs. The pictures don’t lie; in places the dead and dying bugs were a quarter inch deep. Never seen anything like that before, and hope never to again. We washed the deck with our hose and it really was like washing thick coffee grounds into the sea. Remarkable.

Dead (or extremely sleepy) bugs on deck

After recovering mentally from the biblical plague of bugs we cruised south and through Charleston Harbor and arrived at Lynn and Ron’s dock at 3pm. We met Lynn and Ron in France (of all places, considering they are South Carolinians) several years ago. Lynn publishes the fun website Southern Fried French (check it out, Lynn and Heather did a photo shoot on how to tie French scarves) and she and Ron live most of the year in a beautiful house in southern Burgundy. Heather was a loyal reader of Lynn’s website, and when we were in Dijon in 2012 we invited them up for a cruise and a picnic lunch aboard Aprés Ski. And we’ve tried to get together at least once a year since then. We actually stayed with them just a few months ago in Burgundy at the end of our 2015 summer trip.

“Miss Adventure” docked at Lynn and Ron’s house

Saturday morning we did some boat chores and joined our hosts for a delicious pizza lunch, then took an afternoon cruise in the rivers and creeks around their house. Ron has the same look as I did a year ago, the look that says “I want to buy a boat,” and in fact he’s pretty far along in researching his options. They are taking a weekend of “trawler school” in Florida this winter, to be followed by a few days of cruising solo on a rental boat. Hopefully by the next time we see them they’ll be proud (or more likely, if they’re like us, terrified) owners of a new boat.

Happy Hour cruise with Lynn and Ron

Lynn made a delicious sautéed shrimp dish for dinner and we ate sitting at a table overlooking their deepwater dock. Miss Adventure looked great on their dock, and as we close out Week 2 we’re almost half way to our destination. Hopefully we can get by without the Mechanical Problem Of the Day during Week 3 – but I wouldn’t count on it.

East Coast Cruise – Week 2 Numbers

• Engine Hours: 40
• Generator Hours: 10.8
• Miles Traveled: 265
• Marina Fees: $46

East Coast Cruise – Total Numbers

• Engine Hours: 80
• Generator Hours: 23.8
• Miles Traveled: 538
• Marina Fees: $161

“Miss Adventure” East Coast Cruise – Week 2

If you’re gonna have a tacky house on your own island, might as well paint it pink

Sign at Osprey Marina

Best boat name of the week – “Water Torture”