Distance: 31 nm/Time: 5.5 hrs
I’d been noticing for some time that my refrigerator/freezer hasn’t been operating optimally. It wasn’t cooling as well as it has, and it would require defrosting more often. I had had it checked two years ago shortly after moving onto my boat, and the service technician then had to add a bit of freon to it, saying that I probably had a slow leak and would need to add freon from time to time. It seemed like that time had come.
Knowing that I wanted to see at least one more place in the Chesapeake before heading back south, and that Deltaville, the next town north, was known for a being a very boat-friendly community, I decided to see if there were any marine HVAC/refrigerator companies there. That led me to Zimmermans Marine, a boat yard in Fishing Bay on the south side of Deltaville.
It was a boat yard that had very good reviews and an anchorage right next to it. So I called to see if they could help me, intending to head up there on Friday, October 4th. They said that they did have a refrigeration guy, but he wasn’t going to be at work until the following Monday. However, I was free to tie up at their dock (for free) until then. DEAL! That would give me a chance to see Deltaville and do all the other ashore things while spending four days in a slip for free! They provided me with water and electricity and even had showers, which is a bit unusual for a boat yard. They didn’t have laundry, but the marina adjacent to them did, and for a small fee, I was able to avail myself of them.
One of the things I wanted to do since I had water was to finally wash all the midge fly bodies off my sails. If you remember, I had accumulated these the day I left the Buck Island anchorage way back south of Coinjock and didn’t have a chance to wash them off the boat until I spent a day at Tidewater Marina (waiting for a bottom cleaner who never showed up). I took advantage of being there to give the boat a good washing to get rid of all the dead midges (although the stains are still there).
However, I was very disappointed, the day I sailed to Put In Creek, to find when I unfurled the sails for the first time since Buck Island, that the damn midges had found their way into my flaked main and mizzen sails and their little dead bodies were all over them. Had I known this, I could have hosed them off when at Tidewater, but now, at least, I would have a chance to do it at Zimmermans.
So, I waited for a calm morning when I could hoist the sails and spent a couple of hours hosing them off. Just like the boat itself, the bodies are gone, but the stains remain. đ And here was the part that really pissed me off: When hosing them off the sails, the hundreds of dead bugs then ended up all over the boat, so I had to clean the entire boat again! (As will be seen, bugs of one sort or another have been the bane of my serenity since Buck Island!)
The trip from Put In Creek to Fishing Bay was uneventful. I motored the entire way due to calm winds and made good time with a following current. In fact, about the only thing of interest was this cool lighthouse about halfway there:
Once there, I broke out my bicycle and used it so see a lot of the town, go grocery shopping, visit the maritime museum, and other places. A nice surprise when arriving to the marina that Friday was that Ray and Dana Dunn, fellow DIYC yacht club members who I had run into at Oriental, were returning south from the northern Chesapeake and just happened to be anchoring in Fishing Bay, within site of Zimmermans that same afternoon! We arrived within a couple hours of each other, so they dinghied over to Zimmermans, and we walked into the town and had a nice dinner at the Delta Pie pizzaria! (They left early the next morning planning to stay at Put In Creek.)
Another thing I wanted to do while in Deltaville was get the bottom cleaned. This seemed to be getting harder and harder to get done. After a week of trying, I was ultimately stood up by the one guy in Norfolk I could get to agree to clean the bottom, so now it had already been a month since it had been done. Ray and Dana reported that the further north they had gotten, the harder it had been to find a bottom cleaner, and the more expensive the service had cost. Their recent quote up in the northern Chesapeake was for $7 per foot of hull length! (I had been paying $2/foot in Florida. That’s $76 vs. $266! Just to spend 40 minutes cleaning the bottom!) And, they had waited over a week for the company to show up (but they never did). In addition to paying the actual cleaning fee, divers wouldn’t typically come out to a boat an anchor, meaning that I would have to get a slip in a marina any time I wanted the bottom cleaned. That would add at least another $100-$200 to the cost. Having a clean bottom was going to start adding up!
The solution was to clean it myself, as many cruisers do. I had tried this in Norfolk and realized that without a way to breather underwater, this was totally impractical. Snorkeling down to the bottom of my 6-foot-deep hull, kicking to stay down and hold myself into position, I would have time for about three swipes before I’d have to go back to the surface. After 10 minutes I was exhausted and had accomplished almost nothing. I realized the time had come to order a hookah rig.1
After a lot of research and contemplation, I decided to go with Blu3’s lithium-powered Nemo system for $1100. It is the basic system and only comes with a 10-foot hose, but that’s designed to keep the non-certified diver safe. (You don’t get any decompression problems at depths 10 feet or less.) I figured this length would let me easily clean my hull and allow some shallow diving, as well. The battery lasts 60-90 minutes, which is more than adequate for my purposes. And at $1100, it would pay for itself within a year, if not six months. So, I ordered one through Amazon.
In the meantime, I sort of wanted to start with a clean slate, so to speak, and so arranged to have a diver in Deltaville (highly recommended by Deltaville’s Facebook page users) come up and give it a good cleaning before I started doing it myself. Paul Murray did an excellent job. He obviously knew what he was going, and the cleaning was very interactive, he going down to look clean certain things, then popping back up to report on them to me. His was the most expensive cleaning for me yet ($155), but also the most thorough. He also let me know that I have about a year left on my bottom paint, which was very good news.
In the end, I stayed at Zimmermans for five free days, because the refrigeration guy who saw me on Monday wanted to come back and check on it Tuesday to see if he had added enough freon. So they gave me Monday night, and because I was expecting the hookah that Tuesday afternoon, Zimmerman’s was kind enough to let me stay that night as well! (I’m not sure they would have been as generous if it hadn’t been the off-season, but regardless, in Florida, there isn’t a boat yard that would not have charged me $400-$600 for that stay.)
In fact, the only bad thing about the visit was an infestation of biting gnats, also called biting midges, or no-see-ums. I had picked these up my last day of anchoring in Put In Creek. (Seems like I always get the bugs on the last day of an anchorage!) Extremely annoying because they are invisible and don’t make a noise (at least that I can hear). They just bite. A lot. And were quite resistant to deet (and completely resistant to non-deet insecticides). Out of desperation, I bought a 3-pack of bug bombs (foggers) to set off in my boat. This required the cabin to be shut up for at least 2-hours after starting the fogging, then aired-out for two hours afterwards. One can should have easily been enough for my cabin, and sure enough, after having to stay out of my boat for 4 hours, that night the cabin seemed free of them. But the next day, they were right back again. I’m not sure if it didn’t really kill them, or they just lived around the boat yard, or what. But, knowing how badly I had been sleeping for about four days because of these little bastards, I decided to try it again the next day, except this time I used the remaining two cans, and let it do its thing for three hours. Again, that night seemed bug free. But, yep, they were back again the next day! I was leaving the next morning, so decided to wait until I got back down to Norfolk to try anything else because I knew–having spent a week at anchor there–that there were no biting gnats. Long story short, I bought another three pack of fogging cans in Norfolk and decided to use them all at once, let the fog sit for FOUR hours this time (with a 3-hour air-out), and this time it finally did the trick!
Boy, with the midges, then the fruit flies, then the biting gnats, this has been the month for bugs on Serendipity!
I ended up getting quite a bit of exercise while in Deltaville–more than I bargained for, actually. Town was 1.5-2 miles away (depending on where you were going). Unlike Oriental (which was about the same size) things in Deltaville were not at centrally located. Having my bike once again proved very helpful. I ended up walking into town and back once, biking there and back many times, and one day doing both as I locked my bike up at West Marine then came out to discover that I had left the key to the lock on the boat, so had to walk the three miles to the boat and back, just to then turn around and bike back. All the exercise, combined with some sleepless nights because of the bugs, and late bedtimes due to the fumigation, caused me to end up being very fatigued by the time I was ready to leave.
During my visit to Deltaville, the temperatures had continued to slowly drop, and the forecast over the next week looked like the same trend. I decided that I did not want to get caught so far north once the weather turned, and even though I would miss “the turning of the leaves” in the Chesapeake, I decided that it was time to head back south. There was always next year. I decided to leave the Chesapeake and set my sights on Norfolk for my next stop.
- A hookah rig is a type of “Surface Supplied Air” (SSA) system which allows the user to breath underwater. They typically consist of an air compressor above water which attaches to an air hose of varying lengths at the end of which is a scuba-type regulator. This allows the user to breathe underwater without the need for scuba tanks (or a scuba certification) or the need to constantly fill those tanks. Some compressors are gasoline-powered and some are battery powered. Some sit on the boat, and some sit in a little floatie and follow the diver around. âŠī¸