E-City to Buck Island South Anchorage. Distance: 26 nm/Time 5 hours
So, I ended up spending a week in E-City. It was a great time.
The weather was just about perfect (except for rain the second day), the location was very convenient, and I got my battery charger and solenoid replaced and my bicycle repaired. I also got to spend time with Jon and Trisha Bartel which was very nice.
While my location tied up to the seawall (they use the term “bulkhead” around here for some reason) was very convenient and protected to all but easterly winds, eventually the winds started to pick up and clock around to the east. That meant that there was a fair amount of fetch from the Pasquotank River, and sure enough, my boat started rocking and bumping up against the wall. I had to put out more fenders, but even then the rocking motion of the boat would sort of spit out the fender board every so often, causing the boat to bang directly against the wall. Not good! By Thursday, I didn’t think it prudent to leave the immediate area of the boat because when that happened, I needed to be right there to put things right before any damage occurred to the boat. This was happening with winds out of the northeast at only about 8 knots. Friday’s forecast was for winds to be 13 knots gusting to 20! I was not looking forward to that.
The problem was that I still hadn’t received my 2nd Emergency Bypass solenoid. As I posted awhile back, I finally determined that the electrical issue (my house lithium batteries not being charged by the engine) it wasn’t the common wiring between my DC-to-DC charger and Emergency Bypass solenod that was the problem, but that they were both coincidentally bad! I had ordered replacements for both, and replaced them both on Wednesday, and initially they both seemed to work fine.
However, after testing the Emergency Bypass by using my lithium batteries to run my windlass, I inadvertently left the switch in the On position. I simply forgot to turn it off, although had I remembered, I wouldn’t have thought it a big deal since no power was running through it. (I had turned off my windlass and wasn’t trying to start my engine using the house batteries.) But, what I didn’t realize is that the solenoid operated by means of an electro magnet-that current is going to it whenever the switch is on. It was only a “temporary duty” solenoid, used for automobile starters where power is applied only for very short periods of time. It wasn’t designed to have the switch on all the time.
So, about 10 minutes after testing the windlass, I began to smell electrical burning in the boat. I immediately checked the port cockpit locker where I had just done all the work, and sure enough, the solenoid was smoking. Big time! I shut it off and the smoking seemed to ebb, but it was way too hot to even touch! It eventually cooled down and stopped smoking. I am very glad that I hadn’t left the boat! (Although when troubleshooting later, I discovered that the switch’s circuit breaker had blown, effectively shutting off the switch before I did, so the safety system did appear to work.)
I called Nicholay to ask him what could have caused that, and that’s when he told me it was probably because the solenoid was rated for intermittent use rather than continuous use. Since in other installations he had used these mainly for an emergency starting function, those solenoids could be non-continuous use. But since I was planning to also run my windlass off my lithium when my engine was off, we decided I should replace it with a continuous use solenoid, which I promptly ordered. It would arrive sometime Thursday. So, while I would have liked to have left E-City on Thursday, I had to wait for the continuous use solenoid, which Jon was planning to deliver to me Friday morning on his way to work.
After getting an updated weather forecast Thursday night, I was starting to stress out. The winds were effectively going to be twice their force1 on Friday that they had been on Thursday, meaning there was a decent chance I would be unable to prevent damage to my boat. I was also worried that once the winds picked up, I might not be able to get off the dock–that I’d be basically pinned against it. These fears weren’t hyperbole, as I had seen this very thing happen to boats in Oriental that had tied up to the outside of the seawall, just across from my boat. A number of them got stuck there when the southwesterly winds and waves picked up and had experienced significant damage to their boats. Suddenly, E-City didn’t seem so idyllic! Funny how just a change in the wind direction can affect so much.
The forecast allowed a very small window, both Friday and Saturday mornings–from sunup to about 8 am–where the winds would only be about 5 knots and basically off the nose of the boat. This would be the time when I could pry myself off the wall and get out to an anchorage somewhere. But, since Jon wouldn’t be bringing me the solenoid until he was on his way to work Friday morning (and since I wanted to have that installed before I left), I figured I would be staying through Friday and would have to leave first thing Saturday morning. That would mean constant attention to the boat and fenders all day Friday to keep it from being damaged in the 13 gusting to 20 knots of wind (and probably 2-foot seas). So much for one last run to the Food Lion to provision two miles away!
This all made me very nervous Thursday evening, so I decided to put out all the fenders that I could before bed in the hopes that would help me not be too nervous to sleep. After that was done, I decided to go even a step further and prep my boat for departure. That meant lowering my solar panels, positioning my big white ball fender (which I had never used) by the stern to use when prying myself off the wall2, centering my mizzen boom so it wouldn’t get caught up on something, and putting back into the port cockpit locker a bunch of items I had been keeping on deck so I could install the solenoid. I felt if there was any chance of getting off in the morning, I would jump at it rather than sit and get trashed against the wall all day3. And there wouldn’t be time to do all these things in the morning. If I ended up not being able to make that window, I would just have to undo everything I had just done, but hey, that’s cruising! 🙁
With having done everything possible to prep for the next day, I went to bed. And slept like shit anyway.
I woke up the next morning at 6 am and as forecast, the winds were off the nose of the boat at about five knots. This would be perfect for getting the boat off the wall. The problem was that Jon said he would show up between 7:30 am and 8 am to drop off the solenoid, so I couldn’t leave until then. And 8 am is when the winds were forecast to be about 10 knots and off the side of the boat, making it impossible to get off the dock until the next morning. I decided I would do everything I could to ready to the boat to depart, and if Jon and the solenoid arrived while the wind was still conducive, I would depart. If not, I would just have to stay another day and do my best to protect the boat from the wall.
So, around 7 am I started the engine to warm it up, tested forward and reverse gears, got all my navionics on and set up, and all the other things that I do when getting underway. That took till about 7:30 am. No Jon, yet. The winds were starting to pick up, though. Perhaps six knots and just a bit off the starboard (i.e., river, windward) side of the nose. It was going to be close! I ran through my departure plan for managing the dock lines and fenders in my head a number of times, and thought I would ask Jon to tend a line if he had time. 7:45 am, and no Jon, yet. The engine was warmed up and ready to go. And the winds were now about seven knots and off my starboard bow. Not much time left. 8:00 am and no Jon! Then, just a minute or two after 8:00, he pulled into the parking lot. He agreed to help me launch, and after stowing the solenoid and giving him a quick briefing, I handed him the stern line, untied the bow line and tossed it on deck, then jumped aboard Serendipity and took the helm. In the end, I was able to milk it off the wall4 without needing to use the big fender or have Jon do anything with the line, so he eventually tossed it aboard, and took a photo as we pulled away.
Whew! I was very glad for Jon’s help. (Even though I didn’t end up needing it, his tending the line would have been invaluable had the departure gone another way.) I was also thankful to have gotten away from that wall before the winds picked up (which they certainly did over the next few hours).
Now the task was to see if I could make it to Buck Island South anchorage just south of Coinjock before the winds got too strong.
With the winds forecast to be strong out of the northeast for the next few days, it was the only anchorage around (other than one very close to E-City) that had protection from the right direction. I did not want to try to transit Currituck Sound in strong winds; I had learned my lesson about that place the week prior! (See “Anchorage from Hell” for details.) And, I didn’t want to spend $150 per night at the Coinjock marina, so Buck Island would be it. While I would be bucking a headwind component (especially after turning north) I thought the sea state would be tolerable enough to get there and tucked in before the winds picked up a lot in the afternoon/evening. (It would only be a five-hour trip.)
Things started out a bit frustrating. As I pointed Serendipity down the Pasquotank River and engaged the autopilot, the helm started moving back and forth erratically and then aimed the boat right at the Coast Guard base! I had to disengage the autopilot and bring the heading back. This went on a number of times before I decided to turn it off, let it rest for awhile, then turn it back on. (This had happened before, and cycling the power had always helped.) In the meantime, I had a lot of deck cleanup to perform. Lines, fenders, fender boards, putting the solar panels back up, pulling the mizzen mast over to unblock the solar panels, etc. We appeared to be the only ones in the whole Pasquotank (at least as far as the eyes could see), so I just frictioned down the helm and went about my business, checking the heading every few minutes. The boat tracked surprisingly well!
After five minutes or so, I re-engaged the autopilot and gave it another try, but the same thing: very erratic and intolerable behavior. It had a mind of its own! This was not good. Being single-handed, it would be extremely difficult to manage without an autopilot. I could do the ICW since I was on the helm most of the time, anyway, but offshore would be impossible. And, I certainly could not afford a new $6000 autopilot. Come on, Baby! I know you can do it! I turned it off again, waited about 20 minutes this time–until I had completed all the post-docking cleanup–then turned it back on. And it worked fine. Another whew! Oh, and the battery charger was working fine, too! Yippee!
While it might have just barely been possible to sail down the Pasquotank close-hauled, I just didn’t want to deal with it. I had been too stressed out with too little sleep over the previous 24 hours, and didn’t want to have to deal with getting the sails down as I rounded north into the strong winds and a place with the largest fetch. So, I just motored the entire time.
The seas were fine; the worst I saw was about 2 feet as I rounded the bend north. But once I got in the lee of Buck Island, they came back down to foot even though the winds had picked up to 13 knots gusting to 20.
The reviews on this anchorage had only two bad things to say: There were a lot of crab pots, and the midges could be atrocious! I was hoping that the strong winds would take care of the midges, and I’d just have to keep a sharp lookout for the crab pots.5
Sure enough, there were some crab pots in the anchorage, but because the anchorage was huge, and there was no one else there, it wasn’t hard to find a spot that was up close to land and clear of crab pots. Or so I thought!
With the winds forecast over the next few days to be gusting up to 35 knots at times, I decided to use a lot of rode–100 feet of chain–which would give me about a 10:1 scope, which should be plenty. So, I went through my normal procedure of dropping the anchor in the selected spot, setting my anchor alarm on my phone, letting out 75 feet of chain as the wind blew my boat backwards, then scrambling to attach the snubber before too much force got on the bow roller and windlass, then letting out the final 25 feet of snubber/chain. (Because the winds were so strong, I at least didn’t have to run back and forth putting the boat in and out of reverse to back away from the anchor as the chain deployed. But, I now went back to the cockpit to give the boat a burst in reverse at 2000 rpm or so to ensure we weren’t dragging. It was then, as I was entering that cockpit, that I saw it: a crab pot about 10 feet away right off the side of the boat! Where had that come from?!? Son of a bitch. It was within my radius of motion, meaning that as the winds shifted, I would go right over the top of it. Now, it’s one thing to be moving forward and have a line slide harmlessly down your bow, under your keel, and off the back of the boat, but that same line, floating around under the boat over a period of days…well, it was way too risky. That meant I was going to have to weigh anchor and move closer to shore, then reset the anchor. Not a huge deal, but because I’m inherently lazy, it pissed me off. I even contemplated for a moment jumping into the water with a knife and cutting the pot free, but realized that would be unethical.
So, now I had to switch to the weighing-anchor routine, which meant using the engine and all the other stuff. And, as I started pulling in the chain, I saw that it was covered with gooey mud. Damn, again! I didn’t want all that in the anchor locker, smelling up the boat, so I had to run back, take the boat out of gear, then go below to open my seacock and turn on the deckwash pump to rinse off the chain as it came aboard. (Okay, so I’m very glad that I took the time to rig up that system back in Florida, and very glad that it actually works great!) Being lazy, and realizing that instead of completely weighing anchor, I could take in 25 feet of chain and probably still have adequate scope for the conditions, I did that, leaving 75 feet of chain out with the snubber re-attached. Then I went back to the cockpit to take the boat out of gear, and son-of-a-bitch, that crab pot was exactly where it had been when I had 100 feet of chain out! WTF! How could that be! Now I really wanted to grab a knife and teach that crab pot a lesson! Maybe I was just tired. It didn’t make sense, but regardless I realized that the only good solution would be to completely weigh anchor, move another 100 feet toward shore, then reset everything. So, that’s that’s what I did (looking very carefully for other crab pots this time!) and finally ended up getting a solid set with 100 feet of chain and no crab pots in the radius of motion.
While the anchorage was nothing to look it–it was a dreary day after all, and it was a big, open area–It did feel safer than being pinned against that wall in E-City!
We got hit with a little bit of rain in the evening, but other than that, the rest of the day was uneventful. I did wake up once about 4 am to some halyard clanging, so decided to go up on deck with bungee cords to tie off the offending lines. Then, as the moon broke through the clouds momentarily, I noticed that another ketch had joined me sometime in the night, anchored about 1/4 mile away They were gone in the morning.
- That square of the speed thing again. ↩︎
- There is a technique which I’ve used twice fairly effectively to get off a wall or parallel dock. It involves tying a very short stern line on the dock/wall side, loosing all other lines, then reversing the boat. As the boat moves backwards, the point that the line is tied to the boat acts as a pivot, hopefully swinging the bow away from the dock/wall. In Fernandino Beach, I had used this technique and was able to get the bow about 35 degrees off the dock while reversing. Then, you put the boat in forward, heading straight out on that heading (so the stern doesn’t swing into the dock) and release the stern line. In Fernandino Beach, because of the design of the dock, I was able to use two normal fenders to protect the hull near the stern as it was pried against the wall. At E-City, because of the bulkhead’s design, I was going to need something larger, an so pulled out and inflated a huge while ball fender which I kept aboard just for such cases. I ended up not needing it this time, though. ↩︎
- There is an old nautical superstition that a journey should never start on Friday. This was not only Friday, but Friday the 13th! But, I felt it would be worse luck to be pinned against that concrete wall for 24 hours! ↩︎
- However, I did experience the same thing that I had when leaving Oriental: Sometimes the transmission didn’t want to go into forward gear. It had to be a very deliberate, pull-right-to-the-stop up to get forward to engage. And there was no comfortable “clunk” like there was when putting it into reverse (like there used to be). I definitely needed to look into this. ↩︎
- I didn’t mention this before about the crab pots, but I’m really not sure they pose a huge threat to me. The danger, of course, is getting the line (which is between the trap on the ocean floor and the small buoy on the surface) caught in one’s propeller or rudder, necessitating diving under the boat to untangle it or cut it away. For some boats, namely those with a fin keel and exposed propellor, this is a real danger. But for a boat like mine, with a full keel and the prop located in a small cavity in between the keel and the rudder, it was much less likely that anything would get caught in those vital areas. Nonetheless, if something were to get caught, it is a real pain (and could be dangerous), so when I felt like it, I avoided them. When I was too busy (or lazy) I didn’t worry about them. ↩︎