Out of the water

After a year in the water it’s time for Ñandú’s annual maintenance. It’s a cruiser’s life rite we’re not yet intimately familiar with, but we do know it’s not something to look forward to (unless you enjoy sanding and painting).

The first step was to choose a boatyard. It had to have a wide enough boat lift to haul catamarans; it had to allow us to live aboard with the boat on the yard; it had to allow us to do the work ourselves if we chose to; and it had to have experts’ help available if needed. The two cruising couples we’ve been the closest with independently recommended the same place: Stingray Point Boatworks in Deltaville, Virginia, a small town in the Chesapeake Bay that has more boats than people, and more boat yards than all other types of businesses combined. Since we had no reason to do any further research, Deltaville was declared our next destination. It took us five days and a scare or two to get there from Ocracoke.

The first day started with good sailing conditions in the Pamlico Sound. When we entered the narrow, dredged channel in the Roanoke Sound we had a gentle tailwind, so we kept just the head sail up and continued sailing. As we approached the Washington Baum Bridge the sky darkened ominously. We decided to turn the port engine on and furl the jib. A strong and sudden gust hit Ñandú on the port side and pushed her sideways out of the channel. I heard the now familiar beep of the shallow water alarm: 4.5 feet and decreasing, since the rudder wasn’t enough to compensate for the wind. I needed the starboard engine to point the boat against the wind and back to the channel, so I immediately turned it on, even though I was absolutely sure we were going to run aground, because the charts showed a depth of only two feet outside the channel. Then I saw a crab pot buoy right ahead, slightly to starboard. I had to chose between the risks of running aground or a line fouling the propeller. I went for the latter: I revved the engine up and hoped for the best. The buoy disappeared from our view… and seconds later reappeared behind our stern. Whew!

Very soon we were in the middle of a full-blown thunderstorm and could barely see ahead of us. We turned around before crossing the bridge to wait out the heavy rain and wind in a section of the channel that had more than two feet of water on the sides. When the visibility improved and the wind died down, we resumed our course and went under the bridge.

It had been a long day and with sunset approaching we dropped the hook at the tip of the Roanoke Island. We could see thunderstorms left and right, and the water was quite agitated. As soon as we finished the anchoring choreography, we heard a call on the VHF radio.

“Sailing vessel Nandu, this is the Coast Guard North Carolina Sector”.

Ouch. Unless I’m on distress, I’d rather not hear the Coast Guard mentioning my boat’s name. Did we anchor in a restricted area? Unlikely, but that was the only reason we could think of they were calling. Exhausted, and with a cold beer waiting, the last thing I wanted was to reanchor. We pondered not answering (“hey, we could have had the radio off, right?”) but then we could be risking a visit in person.

“Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is sailing vessel Ñandú”.

It turns out that people from a nearby house saw us anchoring in that unsettled weather. They have a private dock and they called the coast guard to let us know that we could use their dock if we preferred to spend the night in a more protected place. We declined the offer but went to bed with a warm feeling: people do care for each other.

The next leg was a few miles shorter than planned. We intended to cross the Albermarle Sound to rejoin the Intracoastal Waterway and spend the night at the beginning of the Virginia Cut, but a coughing engine made us seek an anchorage while we still had ample space around us to figure things out. A change of fuel filters appeared to have fixed the problem. At dusk the boat was invaded by a swarm of insects as we had never seen before. At least they didn’t bite, but they took possession of the boat. They covered the boat with little dots of excrement that would turn an intense green, spinach soup-like substance when washed with water. And they just refused to move from their chosen spots, even if you touched them. The next day we tried to suck them with the vacuum cleaner but progress was too slow, so we just waited for them to die, which took about three days.

From then on it was less eventful, except that the weather remained stormy and we continued with intermittent engine problems. In three days we transited the Virginia Cut to the Elizabeth River, followed the river to the Chesapeake Bay, and sailed up the Bay to our new temporary home in Deltaville.