Norfolk, VA to Put In Creek Anchorage, Mobjack Bay, VA. Distance: 37 nm/Time: 9 hours
I spent the remainder of the week checking out more sites in Portsmouth and Norfolk, getting Covid and flu shots, trying out the capabilities of Instacart while cruising (awesome!), and trying desperately to find someone to clean my bottom. (Well, Serendipity’s bottom, actually.)
It had been three weeks since it had been cleaned, and I thought I had detected a vibration on the leg here that might indicate a propeller fouled with barnacles. So, I really wanted it cleaned (or at least checked out) before I continued motoring north. One of the only two companies that did cleanings at the adjacent marina was three weeks out on their appointments, and the other guy continued to blow me off for a week. I finally realized that I was going to have to do it myself.
Cleaning the boat’s bottom myself is something that I knew I was going to have to start doing sooner or later. This is both because of the cost (transients typically get charged $3/foot to have their hull cleaned, which equates to $114 for me), and because of the very thing I was experiencing: trying to arrange to get it done can be difficult.
Cleaning a boat’s hull is hard work in and of itself, but it is made much easier if one has an underwater breathing device (either scuba gear or a hookah rig). I had neither, nor could afford either. So, I had decided that I would start doing the cleanings once I was down in the tropics–where the water was warm and clear–and I would just make it part of my daily routine, you know, wake up, jump in the water, wipe off a 7th of the hull1, then repeat every day.
But, it was clear that I was going to have to at least snorkel down and check on the prop now, and clean it the best I could if it were fouled. I knew the water would be cold (I think it’s 70 degrees, and I also do not have a wet suit), but you got to do what you got to do. So, after some involuntary hypothermic gasps, I got used to the water and dove down the four feet or so to my prop. The water was very cloudy, but once within about a foot of it, I could see it fairly well. There were some small barnacles on it, but nothing really significant. It took me about 10 minutes (and about 8 dives) to get most of them off the best I could, not really knowing what I was doing. Since I was already in the water, I thought I would see how bad the hull itself was, so moved along the boat’s length. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was covered mostly in just the slime with an occasional small barnacle on it. I got a Scotch Guard pad and was able to easily wipe the slime off. I knew with one of the scrapers I had, I could dislodge the barnacles without too much problem. It was just such a huge surface area, though. An almost six-foot deep, full keel has a lot of square footage. I realized I was too tired to continue, but felt confident that I could get the entire hull done over a week or so of daily effort, but decided to wait until my next anchorage to do it.
In the meantime, I saw more of the local sights, including the WWII battleship, Wisconsin. The cool thing about this area is how nautically-oriented that it is. You’d think that a place like Florida would be boat friendly, but I’m learning how boat unfriendly Florida actually is. In Florida, if you park your dinghy at a random spot, you run the risk of it being confiscated (which has happened to me). It’s like if it doesn’t say that you can, you can’t. Up here (and basically since arriving at Beaufort, NC) it’s more like if it doesn’t say you can’t, you can. So, there were many places in downtown Norfolk that I could take my dinghy directly to and tie off, and nobody would question it. Very cool. So, I was able to dinghy across the river and tie off right next to the Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin was interesting, but probably would have been more so for me if I’d never gone to see the Alabama in Mobile (same “Iowa Class” of battleships–the last and biggest every produced by the U.S.). The Alabama had much more of the ship open to visitors, and to me, preserved better what life aboard was like during WWII. The Wisconsin had been pulled out of mothballs and used all the way up to the Gulf War, and so had received a bunch of upgrades over the years so was a mixture of modern and WWII. Either way, it was still fun to experience such an awesome machine. And I got a cool photo of Serendipity at anchor across the river through one of the high-quality binoculars with which the ship was equipped.
The last day I pulled into the Tidewater marina to finally clean the midge corpses and stains off the boat, and all the other things that need to be done when going ashore.2 I’m really trying to save money, so only wanted to spend one night. I weighed anchor and shuffled over to the marina right when they opened at 9 am to get an early start. I finally finished it all at sundown!
As you know, I’ve been wanting to get to the Chesapeake for months now, and it was finally only a two-hour motor away. My target was a supposedly very nice anchorage up a tributary in Mobjack Bay, a small bay about 20 miles into the Chesapeake.
The weather had been prohibiting me from doing that for almost a week due to strong NE winds. But now the forecast called for Thursday having very light winds out of the SE (perfect), but then Friday turning nasty again with bands of tropical storm Helene coming through. So I woke up early Thursday morning to a nice, clean boat and a sunny and calm morning. I pulled off the dock right on time at 9:00 am, timed so I’d turn north into the Chesapeake right as the wind was forecast to increase from 5-6 knots to 10-13 so that I could sail the remaining 2/3 of the trip.
This trip was a bit different, though, in that it would be the first time that I’d be towing my dinghy behind me. I didn’t want to go to the trouble of stowing it on the deck again, especially since I really enjoyed its functionality (and fun), and so planned to use it a lot moving forward. But, towing dinghies can be tricky, with many experienced cruisers swearing off every doing so after having bad experiences (e.g., when unforecast weather popped up creating a sea state that caused the dinghy to flip over causing the loss of the dinghy). But these sailors typically had bigger boats and built-in davits to just hoist their dinghies out of the water and suspend them behind their boats. They didn’t have to go through the 2-hour ordeal of hoisting it on and securing it to the small foredeck each time. The forecast called for seas only 1′ high and light winds, so I decided to chance it. I did take the vast majority of cruisers’ advice about towing a dinghy, though, and that was at least removing the outboard motor and fuel tank so as to not loose those if the dinghy should flip. Stowing the motor was a pain, but a compromise that seemed reasonable.
So, with my dinghy behind me, I set out past Norfolk harbor towards the Chesapeake.
It seemed to be towing fine…until I got up to cruising speed, and then it started weaving back and forth. It seemed like the bow was plowing a bit, so I decided to stop and put the fuel tank back in hoping that would bring the bow up a bit. (It sits in the back.) That seemed to do the trick, so off we went.
And then the autopilot started acting up again. Crazy, jerky motions, then full throw on the wheel taking me 90 degrees off course. I fiddled with it again as I motored out of the Elizabeth River
and past the Norfolk Navy Base (with about 20 huge ships)
and Norfolk International Terminal (huge container ships)
but nothing seemed to work for about two hours this time, and then it went back to normal. I’ve definitely got to figure out what’s going on with it.
Right at about the same time that the autopilot finally decided to start working, I officially entered the CHESAPEAKE BAY! (loud cheers)
Just before turning north, I had a nice surprise: I got to see a submarine coming into Norfolk. I had to take a photo through my binoculars because it was at a distance, but very cool.
As I rounded the bend and started heading north, right on schedule…the wind wasn’t. It never did pick up much beyond 7-8 knots (and sometimes much less), but I was still able to sail on a broad reach with a full Genoa, Mizzen, and Main at about 4 knots. I had plenty of time to get to the anchorage, so just kicked back and enjoyed the lovely day.
Although there was one not-very-enjoyable moment: finding out when I hoisted the sails that those damned midges had somehow and for some reason, worked their way into my flaked sails (which were inside my sail bag)! Had I known that, I could have hosed them off when I washed my boat at the marina. But, here they were, dead and staining my sails, with no good way to get them off until I pulled into another marina. [sigh]
After about five hours of very peaceful sailing, the wind died down, and so I needed to motor to make it to the marina before night fall. Mobjack Bay itself didn’t particularly interesting, but once I turned up the East River tributary, it got very pretty and different from anything I have experienced so far. I know that Virginia is considered a southern state, but it really felt like I was up north. The smells, the trees, the houses–all seemed like northeast. This was rural country, so the properties were all spread out. It was just very peaceful. As was the anchorage. It was too late to get any photos by the time I arrived, and tomorrow I’ll be hunkering down for the Tropical Storm Helene bands that will be coming through, but Saturday I plan to post some photos of the area, and perhaps the little village of Mathews, about two miles from the anchorage.
- The fouling of a hull involves a series of biomes that all feed off each other, starting with a thin coat of slime that can be easily and quickly wiped off with a sponge or rag. If the hull is kept free of that, nothing else can get a foothold. If not, eventually the hull ends up with a thick layer barnacles and oysters that takes a jackhammer to get off! ↩︎
- Groceries, laundry, shower, charge batteries, top off fresh water tanks, top off diesel tank, top off gasoline jerry cans, top off diesel jerry cans, top off freshwater jerry cans, flush the deck wash system with freshwater, charge all the power tool batteries, empty the trash, empty composting toilet, wash the dinghy, flush the dinghy’s outboard engine with fresh water, etc. ↩︎