I had to spend October in Alaska, while the boat and Jenny languished
in the surprisingly downtrodden Portsmouth, VA.

We arrived in Portsmouth to a marina with about 70% of the slips
empty. It had the definite feel of a place that had seen better days. A
walk around the nearby area revealed a small downtown area which was
somewhat ok, surrounded by what looked to be a pretty dangerous bunch of
neighborhoods. Abandoned buildings, lots of people hanging around
outside stores with bars on the windows. I’ve been in some rough
neighborhoods in my time, and this looked to be another one of them.
Definitely not in the brochure for the marina!

An internet check of the crime stats for the city revealed that it was
in the bottom 4% of US cities for violent and property crime. Bummer.
So, we decided that we’d have to rent a car and try to confine our
pedestrian activities to the decent enough downtown area. Jenny was
certainly never comfortable there.

The marina turned out to be a pretty decent facility after all, with a
good staff. It was connected with a yard, and we scheduled a haulout for
a bit of maintenance. I had to drop a rudder and replace a bearing (see
‘the boat yard diaries’ for the back story), replace our shaft seal, and
also paint the bottom with some more useless antifouling.

I’m sorry to report that the yard was without a doubt the least
professional operation we have encountered in any of our somewhat
extensive travels. We’ve hauled out in a few places in Mexico, Ecuador,
and Panama (not to mention CA, WA, FL, and RI, and the clowns at Ocean
Marine were the biggest boneheads we’ve ever encountered.

Here’s how it went, briefly.

The travelift bay is 90 degrees to the river current. The wind was
about 25 knots, so the only way anybody can hope to get a boat in there
is to stuff it in at a fairly high speed. This is our standard docking
procedure with our unruly beast anyway (thanks to twin rudders nowhere
near the prop), so it wasn’t really a problem.

Anyway, despite the conditions, the travelift crew consisted of an
operator (who handled no lines, but did scream loudly to slow down
repeatedly) and a single other guy who seemed to be in his first week on
the job. He had no idea what he was doing. We got into the slip fine,
but we couldn’t get the line guy to do anything about getting our dock
lines secured. So, we sat against the metal lifting gear of the lift
while bobbing up and down against it. To make matters worse, the guy
tried to move the lift while this was happening, and the gear was
slamming into the boat the whole time, taking some chunks of our new
Awlgrip paint along the way. Jenny and I were handling the cables of the
lift bare-handed trying to minimize the damage while our buddy running
the show kept on plowing on merrily. It was just a ridiculous situation
all around.

Finally, we did get out of the water. It turned out that they didn’t
have any stands tall enough for us, so they had to put a bunch of
precariously stacked blocks under them to reach the hull. They also had
her set pitched up at the bow by about 10 degrees. Prepare for liftoff!
Not a pretty picture. I went and told the yard manager that he had to
fix the paint damage for free, and after a bit of arguing, he agreed to
do just that. Unfortunately, Awlgrip doesn’t repair well, so it is visible.

As an aside, I accidentally told the owner of the business that his
staff totally sucked. He was in the marina office while I was telling
the story to the dock hands there. We had a proper crew when we
launched! I felt a little bad about ratting out the guys at the yard,
but he obviously needed to hear some feedback.

Ocean Marine has since been sold, so hopefully the new management will
straighten it out.

We moved into the Sheraton for a few nights. That part was quite nice.
Jenny enjoyed her first high speed internet in a very long time, and
Baxter of course enjoyed sleeping on the hotel bed. A good time was had
by all. Until we looked at the NHC website. Joaquin was churning off the
Bahamas, and a few of the models showed it running right over VA.

Now, hurricanes are nothing to trifle with, but we were in a really
hard spot on this one. We obviously couldn’t stay on the hard with the
blocking situation. The boat felt like it was going to fall over in any
breeze over 20 knots. I even kicked around renting an excavator to dig
a pit for the keel, but the yard wouldn’t hear of that. Finally, with a
few consecutive model runs showing the storm likely making landfall on
top of us, we reluctantly made the decision to rush the work to
completion and put the boat back into the water. It was a tough choice.
Either face absolutely certain damage on the hard, or risk losing the boat
completely if the worst case scenario unfolded with her in the water,
but with a better chance of surviving an indirect hit? We had nowhere to go,
nowhere to hide. The ICW is too shallow and the bridges too low for us
to run inland for shelter, so we were going to have to ride it out in a
marina that I didn’t think was going to still be there with a large amount
of storm surge. Not a happy time for us. I took a trip with the
neighbors to West Marine, and we each bought some extra line to web the
boats into their slips.

Jenny’s mum and stepdad were visiting from Germany during this time, and we
all made a plan to ditch the coast with our most important belongings,
take a road trip inland, and hope that we still had a home to come back
to when it was all over.

Fortunately, Joaquin made a turn offshore and we were spared. The
Bahamas sure took a beating, though. What an awful storm.

Finally, it was time to leave. We had to wait a bit for weather, and
ultimately had a nice sail around Hatteras to Charleston. Our new friend
Tim Savage joined us. He campaigns a Tripp 41 at a very high level of
ocean racing, and he was keen to take a ride on our boat. For my part, I
was happy to have a racing skipper on the boat, figuring correctly that
I would be honor bound to get off my butt and set the spinnaker for once
with him around. Also, there aren’t very many folks around who I trust
to manage RS alone with the chute flying, but I knew this guy would be
fine. I slept very well with the old girl under his care. In the end, we
had some very good sailing for 12 hours or so, and then it turned into
primarily a motorsailing ride, we wanted to keep the speed up to arrive
in Charleston before dark.

We did get to set the new code zero that I scored for $800 out of San
Diego, and it flew just about perfectly. We had lost our mylar zero off
of Halifax (delamination), and a new one was to run something close to
ten thousand dollars. I just couldn’t do it. So, I found a used Carbon
GPL #1 that looked like it would fit the bill, and had Ullman fit the
old torque rope into the luff. So, I would up with an almost new sail
for just over a grand! It’s not quite as girthy as a true zero, but
close enough for cruising. I couldn’t be happier to not have to write
that check.

Our stay in Charleston wound up being almost 2 weeks long due to some
very stubborn strong winds. We could have made the trip anytime, but we
like Charleston anyway, and took the time to take a road trip down to FL
to purchase a vehicle and have it waiting for us at our arrival.

We finally got sick of waiting and took off with the wind still
blowing hard, but it was from a good direction. We got some decent
surfing in under reduced sail, hitting over 15 knots a couple of times.
We did 300 miles through the water in a day and a half, so it was a
pretty good run.

Now, we’re in Florida for the winter, and so far are loving the place.
Just the right temperature and friendly neighbors. We will be here until
early spring, and then will start moving north again. The plan is
currently to sail from Newfoundland to Ireland in late July, so we will
position the boat somewhere further up the coast prior to making that trip.

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