Ñandú

We decided to wander off the ICW in search of some sailing. Following the waterway through the Alligator River, with chances of spotting bears and gators was tempting, but we opted for a chance of turning the engines off and were beautifully rewarded. The Pamlico Sound is 20 miles wide and protected by the Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands. A strong breeze can generate a dreadful chop on its shallow waters, but we timed our sailing with a weather window that offered us fair winds and flat water.

Our best morning so far was when we left Wysocking Bay, halfway through the Sound. The alarm woke us up at 5am to a dead calm moonlit morning, celestial bodies reflecting on the mirror-like water. We were the only souls in several miles. We weighed anchor (easily, for once) and got under way when it was still dark. There was a dose of tension when we took a shortcut through a shoal, but it wouldn’t have been a great morning without some challenges, would it?

Out of the bay there was a gentle breeze, so we pointed the bows south-west, raised the sails, shut the engines off, turned Otto the autopilot on, trimmed the sails, and enjoyed a delicious breakfast while the sun rose to warm up the cockpit and the boat slid peacefully through perfectly flat waters at six knots in just five knots of wind. The only sounds were the swoosh of the water flowing under the hulls, and the occasional humming of the autopilot.

Best of all… nothing broke that day! Can’t say the same for the previous or following days, though. After three legs off the ICW we rejoined it at the Neuse River and followed it to the town of Beaufort.

Excitement returned to our lives, but the good kind of excitement, the one that goes together with the anxiety of facing new challenges.

But before getting into that, I’m sure you want to know the fate of those unfortunate brackets. Only an evil genius would have come up with such a simple and effective plot: my Yanmar contact said he didn’t have time to paint the pieces, so he kindly and unsuspectingly sent a can of paint together with the brackets. The paint indeed spilled and made enough of a mess that UPS decided the whole contents was unrecoverable and threw the package away. For sure the brackets were intact, and I was ready to fish for them myself knowing that they couldn’t be too far, but UPS refused to reveal the coordinates of their grave.

Fortunately, the Yanmar boys assigned high priority to the task of manufacturing yet another pair of brackets for these desperate souls, and a couple of days later we finally had shiny new parts. Unpainted. With no can of paint in the package. But very welcome.

I installed the bottom brackets version 2.0 as soon as I received them. If you recall, we made it to Portsmouth with version 1 brackets, one of them broken and repaired. Well… shockingly, the other one came out broken! It must have happened at the last minute, when we were docking. Good thing we waited (and waited some more) for the new brackets.

That same morning we cast off and headed to the uncharted waters of the Intracoastal Waterway. Okay, okay, very well charted waters, but entirely unknown to us. According to Wikipedia, “the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is a 3,000-mile (4,800 km) inland waterway along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the United States. […] Some sections of the waterway consist of natural inlets, saltwater rivers, bays, and sounds, while others are artificial canals. It provides a navigable route along its length without many of the hazards of travel on the open sea.”

It officially starts precisely at Portsmouth. The first 15 miles involve passing through one lock and underneath eleven bridges. Of those eleven bridges:

• Only two are high enough to present no challenge.
• Two have a fixed height of 65 feet (which could be less, depending on the water level). The tip of the antenna at the top of our mast is 63 feet above the water. From deck level, there’s no way to judge whether the boat will fit or not. In fact, when it’s that close it always seems it will not fit.
• Four of them are opening railroad bridges that are usually in the open position… except, it seems, when Ñandú is coming. We had to wait almost one hour circling around with other boats while they were working on the second railroad bridge, in the closed position.
• The other three are highway bridges that open on demand or every 30 minutes, except that they won’t open during rush hour traffic. One of those is in the community of Great Bridge, and is appropriately called Great Bridge Bridge.

On top of that, the ICW is quite narrow, and even when you see water to both sides, if you deviate a bit from the center you risk running aground or hitting submerged obstacles. Things can get hectic when boats pile up in that narrow waterway waiting for a bridge or lock to open. Then you have to know and follow the radio protocol to request openings. On one lift bridge the operator lifted the bridge only partially and then announced “bridge is open to 80 feet”. The instant we were about to pass underneath it I figured I should have double checked… (“what if she said 60 and I heard 80?”) but by then our mast did the check for us: it was 80… or something larger than 63 anyway. Whew.

The lock, which had us the most anxious because we were completely new to that experience, was surprinsingly smooth. Just wait for the lock to open, proceed through the gate, approach the rubber-padded wall, handle the dock lines to the attendant who will pass them around a pile and return them to you, tend your lines while the water level drops (about two feet), chat with your neighbors, wait for the exit gate to open, retrieve lines, continue.

Those 15 miles with no distractions allowed had enough challenges for one day. Exhausted and ready to go to bed, my loyal Android phone, always providing those bits of unsolicited information, notified me that Tidewater marina (from where we left that morning) was a mere 22-minute car ride. Exactly what I needed to know to top off my sense of accomplishment, thank you.

The next day we continued through the Virginia Cut until it opened to the North River in North Carolina: still a narrow and challenging waterway, but with a much wilder landscape and only three bridges for the whole day. We are now tucked in a secluded anchorage waiting out the winds of a passing cold front.

Strong winds the first night at Willoughby Bay helped set the anchor so well that it took us more than one hour to dislodge it from the thick mud at the bottom of that anchorage. We moved a short distance to Portsmouth, where we docked between the monohull Mañana and the multihull Today, perhaps a reflection of their respective cruising speeds. While waiting for the brackets we went through a long list of things to fix, maintain and improve (including long overdue items of personal maintenance I will spare you the details of). Stuff seems to break or fail at a faster rate we can fix them, but at least we feel we made a dent in that list.

I changed the port engine’s oil and filter, this time using far fewer paper towels and latex gloves. Not exactly an achievement given the amount I used the first time, but it definitely counts as progress. When I’m down there in the tight, dirty and smelly engine room fiddling with an arcane contraption of metal, tubes, fluids and wires is when I miss my days as a software engineer, but it’s mostly because back then I knew what I was doing.

Waiting for parts is not very adventurous, so there’s not much else to report from the front. We have no complaints regarding the lack of excitement, except that the chilly mornings remind us that we’d better be making progress towards lower latitudes.

A significant number of readers requested a map with our route. (Significant number is an euphemism for one, although, with my readership, any number above zero is significant). Yielding to popular demand I added a link: click on map at the top of this page.

Breaking news!!! 

I was about to submit this post, with some doubts after Kathy reviewed it and found it dull, when things got suddenly exciting. In the wrong way. Or rather, in the usual way: the brackets are doing it again, in the most impossible plot! I’m going to change the title of this blog from Cruising Adventures to Alternator Brackets Misadventures.

Here’s the new episode: since they finally shipped the new brackets, I had been obsessively following the package progress on the UPS tracking page, to the point of checking in Google Maps how far away they were. Bound Brook, NJ, 344 miles. Edison, NJ, 337 miles. Last night they were almost here, in Richmond, VA, 97 miles away. Early this morning the page said it was in the delivery truck! We even filled up the water tanks because it was possible we could get out of here early afternoon. I kept refreshing the UPS page waiting for that gratifying “delivered” message before going to the marina office to pick the package up. Instead, what I got was the following horrifying message: “Your package was damaged in transit. All merchandise discarded.” No, I’m not making that one up. We are talking about two pieces made of steel, this time half an inch thick. The whole point was to make them virtually indestructible, and I’m sure they were. I’ll reveal exactly what happened in my next post to give you time to come up with a plausible story explaining how the package could have gotten damaged to the point that the UPS guys deemed the contents unrecoverable. I dare you.

For now, it’s back to waiting. At least we’ll get to follow the elections with no distractions. Tremendous!

While waiting for another set of brackets to be manufactured for us by the Yanmar boys, we got the broken one repaired by a local welder. The friendly but lax way of doing business gave us a taste of a laid back Delaware that reminded us of some countries south of the border: “How much is it going to be?”. “I don’t know, 40 or 50 bucks, I guess”.

When we came back to pick up the bracket the welder proudly presented the piece to us claiming that it was “as strong as before”. We had to reexplain that it broke because it wasn’t strong enough. “Can you make it stronger?”. “I guess, if you want”, he said.

Lewes is a lovely town and Lewesians are very friendly. During our longer than anticipated stay we made new friends, and also shared several meals with old friends that moved to Delaware 12 years ago. They kindly lent us a car, and Bob supervised my first ever oil and filter change.

Since the Yanmar people were taking their time (waiting for the boss to come back from vacation), we took our chances and decided to sail through open seas to the Chesapeake Bay with the repaired and reinforced bracket in the port engine and the original one in the starboard engine. They didn’t fail on us, which was fortunate because we really made good use of both engines.

We departed early morning when the forecast called for moderate winds, even though the wind direction was not going to be ideal. Well… the forecast wasn’t quite right. What was supposed to be a 25-hour passage ended up being a 35-hour washing machine cycle. Instead of 15 knots we had sustained winds of 20 and sometimes 24 knots, always straight on the nose. Making progress in those conditions was painfully slow, under sail or engine, and life in the cockpit was brutal with all that beating against the waves.

To make matters worse, Oliver made it very clear he wasn’t happy. He’d stagger down to the port head (i.e., bathroom) where we keep his litter box. He’d then stagger back through the companionway emitting a loud meow with the most annoying pitch he’s capable of, while looking at us with an expression that unmistakably meant “How in the world do you expect me to pee if I can barely keep my balance?” After a few repetitions of the same scene we moved the litter box to our head in the starboard hull. The starboard head, being aft, is more stable than the port head which is almost all the way forward. Judging from Oliver’s change of mood, that seemed to have made the trick. He then discovered that the captain’s seat was a great place to spend the rest of the night.

By sunrise it wasn’t even clear we would make it to our destination before the second night. With no safe harbor in the Maryland coast, a bad forecast for the next night, and the unappealing option of making landfall at night, we run both engines almost full throttle for the rest of the way. We dropped the anchor in Willoughby Bay, VA, right when the sun was setting.