Day 324, Year 8: Sail South 2013
Date: Monday, September 23, 2013
Weather: Beautiful Day, but Windy and Cool
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
It is time to get serious about planning our sail south. I’ve decided to give our little trek a name—Sail South 2013. Last year at this time we were planning on sailing south to the Bahamas for the winter. But we only got as far as Little River, South Carolina, and decided to spend the winter there. And it was a great decision. We enjoyed spending time with my sister and brother-in-law, getting to know the folks in the North Strand Sail and Power Squadron, and living at Lightkeepers Marina. But I am determined that we will get further south this year. The plan is to arrive in Little River during the first or second week of November, stay a couple of weeks, and then by Thanksgiving, we should be ready to head offshore to Puerto Rico. It is a ten-day sail from Little River to Puerto Rico, so we hope to be there well before the middle of December. That’s the basic plan. Now we are starting to fill in the details. Late this afternoon, I came up with a three-week itinerary getting us to Little River by the 6th of November. I built in time to stop in the Chesapeake and visit with friends, so if the weather allows, we’ll use that plan. But if we can’t leave here on October 17th as planned, we will have to come up with Itinerary 2 and then 3 and so on, all depending on the weather. Since we have had no hurricane threats this year, I’m fearful that those will come just about the time we are ready to leave. If so, we’ll adjust, but hopefully we’ll get to Little River by the middle of November at the latest. I wrote out the meal plan for those three weeks and set aside time while we are here to cook things and get them frozen. We have only a three-day, two night offshore passage to the Delaware Bay and then the rest of the trip is one day at a time. So I can cook on the go. But it is always nice to have things in the freezer just in case of rough weather. I also made a list of those things that need to be done before we leave, so now it is time to start doing. Today I took some of my old teacher resource notebooks to Sam’s school in the hopes that teachers there can use them. Tomorrow I’ll take some to Jonah’s school. That will only get rid of a couple of boxes from storage, but it is a start. Tomorrow we have an appointment at a local consignment shop to place the last of the furniture from storage. Once that is gone, it will give us room to sort through things and pull out items we want to take to Justin and Jo in Puerto Rico. They actually leave England tomorrow and fly to their new home on the island of Culebra in Puerto Rico. The following week they fly to New Mexico to get their pets and by the 9th of October Justin says they should be settled in Culebra with Ziggy’s chiquaqua Honey, their big dog Alfie, their medium-sized dog Lulu, and their two cats! The chiquaqua and the two cats fly on the plane with them, but Alfie and Lulu have to fly on cargo planes. I’m sure their next two weeks are going to be crazy, but we wish them the best of luck in making this move. And we look forward to seeing them when we arrive in Puerto Rico in December.
While I was writing up our sailing itinerary and making meal plans, Mark was on the computer and on the phone trying to find the best price for a gyro for our autopilot. Another term for this is a heading sensor–a three-dimensional gyroscope that is done within a computer chip that sends information on boat pitch (hobby-horsing ), roll (rocking side-to-side movement), and yaw (bow swinging from side to side) to the autopilot. This type of gyroscope used to be a large instrument and it seems amazing that this is now all done inside a little computer chip. The information on boat movement is sensed ‘magically’ by the chip and is send to the autopilot. This allows the autopilot to more readily adapt to the current conditions and sail a more direct and precise course. We found last season that Windbird was very hard to steer in the Intracoastal Waterway. We had to be at the helm every minute because the autopilot was allowing us to waver from side to side in the very narrow channel. While that amount of wavering in our course is no problem when out to sea, in the narrow waterway it is huge problem. At the end of the afternoon Mark ordered an Airmar Heading Sensor from iMarine in California. The company that manufactures this, Airmar, is in South Carolina about 80 miles from Myrtle Beach. They claim this device will maintain a heading with no more than one degree of deviation in calm conditions and two degrees in dynamic (rough) conditions. We figure if we get it installed and then have problems on the way to South Carolina, we can go right to the company and get advice once we arrive there.
Mark also spent time this afternoon talking to ‘neighbors’ and finding a mooring for us from October 7 to the 17th. Woods Hole Marine is shutting down early this year as Buzz, the owner, is heading south as well. We have to be off our mooring by October 7th, but our neighbor, Bob Morris, thinks the powerboat that is on his mooring presently will be out of the water by then. And if not, he had a couple of other options. So we are going to have a home in Eel Pond until we leave. And then Mark put our current dinghy up for sale on Craig’s List. He also made a one-page ad that we can post in the village. Even though our current dinghy is very ‘well used’ it could still have some life if someone was willing to go to the trouble of putting in TubeSeal. I took photos of Mark in the dinghy that he used in the ad and I’m posting them here for posterity. Our AB dinghy has been our constant companion since 2005 and we are going to miss her. It was the perfect dinghy for sailing around the world. Our new West Marine dinghy arrives on Friday and has a lot to live up to. We will embrace the new as we sadly say goodbye to the old.
We are making progress. One job at a time, we will get ready for Sail South 2013.
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| 130923 Day 324 Cape Cod, USA–A Man and His Dinghy |
