Great Friends

A good friend is one who will drive an hour and a half to pick you up and this is what Jennifer did for us. We recently enjoyed a lovely stay with our friends Jennifer and Kane and their five year old twins, Kate and William. It made a nice change from the boat for a few days and to sleep in a real bed and be driven around all of the Nakahara’s favourite places, including a visit to Milky Way Farm for home-made ice cream was great. The Nakahara’s live in a beautiful, heavily wooded and historic corner of Pennsylvania where wild deer frequent the garden which is also home to woodpeckers, bluejays, chipmunks and squirrels. It is a special treat to stay in the home of friends and this was a lovely visit for us.



Happy hour on the Hudson:

We are lucky to have also found new friends in America as we have travelled. Boating people are wonderful people who share common interests and work to help each other out every day. People have been so generous with their time, resources and friendship. We did receive an exceptionally warm welcome this week, as we arrived at the dock of the Castleton on Hudson Boat Club. A large group was standing on the dock shouting “welcome” and “you made it!” which was great except that we couldn’t remember where we had met these folks before. We tied up and completed the paperwork and then went to say “hello” to the ‘welcoming party’. The group, by this time, had realized that we weren’t the friends that they thought they were waving to but they explained this to us over several cold beers and by the time we left we were like old friends anyway.

Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York

Our time in Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York reads like a catalogue of galleries, museums and tourist sights but even if we each only learned one thing from each place we would all be richer for it. The list goes like this:

In Washington, DC, we visited the Library of Congress, Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Museums of Art; Air and Space; Natural History; American Indian; American History; National Portrait Gallery; Freer Gallery and saw Capitol Hill, The Mall, White House and Washington Monument.

In the city of Philadelphia we walked along Elfreth’s Alley where the houses and cobbled streets date from the early 1700’s. We went to the Ben Franklin Museum; Liberty Bell; and Independence Hall. We visited Valley Forge National Park; toured the winter headquarters of George Washington and finished the day with Shoo Fly Pie at the Memorial Chapel Cabin Café.

In New York we went to the Frick Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum of Art and Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition; shopping at Macy’s (that’s cultural!); a Chuck Brown concert at Battery Park; open-air movie night at Bryant Park; a Soo Bae cello concert at the Schimmel Centre; dinner at Wo Hop’s in Chinatown; a yoga class in Times Square; the Magic Flute with the New York City Opera, and like all good tourists managed to get lost in Central Park more than once.

Big Seas

The Chesapeake Bay treated us well. We only had one occasion when a storm front approached and within twenty minutes the water had bucked up into short sharp waves. At this point we decided to turn into a small harbour that we had just passed. The waves surged us across the sand bar and into a quiet bay where we immediately ran aground. Running aground in the Chesapeake area just means that you have settled into the soft bottom and with a bit of manoevering we were free and soon safely anchored for the night. The next morning we left early to catch the high tide at the mouth of St Jerome Creek but the fog was thick and made it hard even to find the channel markers in the creek let alone the sand bar. The waves were 1-2 feet but the conditions didn’t seem too bad. John was just adjusting the speed when he noticed that the computer seemed to be playing up. He had just said “the last thing we need is for the computer to die” because we couldn’t see a thing. The little green boat on the screen was pointing at the shore. I restarted the computer and in that time the St Jerome Creek markers had come back into view. John had done a 180 without realizing it. We decided that it would be safer to go back up the creek and leave the Chesapeake for another day.

Subsequent journeys on the Chesapeake Bay were in glassy conditions. We could come back here and sail for a whole season someday, as we barely scratched the surface of the western shore and the eastern side is reputed to be every bit as charming.

The Delaware Bay is the most reverred stretch on the entire Intracoastal Waterway. Winds and tides can easily make for a miserable day as there are few places to shelter once commited to the run. We were fortunate to have a beautiful day as we left Havre de Grace at the top of the Chesapeake, and to have the tide with us as we moved through the C & D Canal. The conditions were still in our favour when we reached the Delaware River so we decided to push on even though it was getting late in the day. We sailed a compass course down the bay and approached the lights of Cape May just after dark. Entering an unfamiliar harbour in the dark is never easy. Soon a Christmas tree of lights was approaching us and honking. A guy was standing amid the blinding lights shouting for us to pass him on his port side. ‘He’ was a barge laying out a mile-long stretch of pipeline in the black water. The kids kept watch as unlit bridgeheads, jetties and signs leapt at us from the darkness on the final four mile run to the port of Cape May. After twelve hours of motoring and a distance of over 90 miles we were delighted to drop anchor and toast our triumph over the Delaware Bay.

In the next few days we traversed a completely different landscape when we did the Intracoastal Waterway between Cape May and Manasquan Inlet just north of Atlantic City. This is a pretty stretch where the waterway winds through a series of rivers, creeks and swampy shallows. The channel is well marked and by traveling on a rising tide we had few problems.

A series of cold fronts has been moving over the east coast so we needed a window of fine weather for the 25 mile run along the outside of the New Jersey coast. It was a grey morning with 1-2 foot waves and a slight swell as we set off. Alice and Lloyd slept for the first couple of hours of what turned out to be a fairly rough trip. The conditions weren’t bad but the sea was certainly lumpy. Nothing could dampen the thrill of sailing into New York, past the Statue of Liberty and the magnificent city-scape of Manhattan.

Henry I Nygard Regatta

Here, you will see Alice and Lloyd on parade with Ship 361 and Ship 759 at the opening of the Henry I Nygard Sea Scout Regatta which took place at Camp Brown on the Potomac River, 22-25 May 2009.

We anchored 'Pearl' near Camp Brown and went ashore by dinghy.


We were given a tremendously warm welcome by the Scouts and their leaders. Alice and Loyd participated in many events. Their group was particularly successful in the Scuttlebutt Competition and the Galley Competition and we look forward to sharing some new ideas with the troops back home.

The weather was gorgeous and the whole weekend was a great experience. Many thanks to all the people who made this Regatta possible and to Alonzo Rodriguez for the photographs.

Chesapeake Bay

From the Dismal Swamp we moved on in convoy to Norfolk City on the Elizabeth River. The river is wide, and lined with aircraft carriers and naval vessels and is spanned by huge industrial-looking bridges, that had to open for us.

We motored out of Norfolk at 6am hoping to have a look at the Chesapeake Bay and carry on if it wasn’t too wild. The forecast sounded okay but it had been rough enough to turn boats back the day before. It didn’t seem bad as we left the Elizabeth River and was fine on the run up to Horn Harbour which was 30 miles away and our first possible port but the water was calm and we were having a good run so we pushed on. And on, for 13 hours, until we reached the Potomac River 90 miles from Norfolk. In the afternoon, the water calmed to a millpond. The scene was surreal. The satin-finish water appeared to be level with the gunwhales and there was no dividing line between the sea and the sky. A fleet of fishing vessels swept across our bow in the late afternoon heading for the Cockrell Creek Fish Processing plant on the Great Wicomico River.

The Chesapeake offers beautiful boating and safe harbours. This a place that we could happily come back to in the future.

The Great Dismal Swamp

We had a lovely run up the beautiful Pasquatank River, through the South Mills lock and onto the Great Dismal Swamp where we pulled into the Welcome Centre’s free dock. We were heading back to ‘Pearl’ from a visit to the Park Headquarters and walk in the bush, planning to move on when a thunderstorm coincided with the arrival of other boats. Soon the boats were rafting up, three deep, alongside, in front and behind us, and it was clear that we weren’t going anywhere. We had looked forward to visiting the Dismal Swamp throughout the planning stages of the trip so we were not disappointed to be staying longer. The convivial atmosphere among the boaters more than made up for the rain and chilly temperatures.

The weather brightened by Monday afternoon so we put on our walking gear and set off along the towpath for icecreams at the village of South Mills four miles away. It proved to be a long walk so when we saw a boat in the lock we asked about the possibility of riding with them back to the Welcome Centre. Jocelyn and Ron on ‘Calisto III’ were happy to oblige. They warmed us up with freshly brewed coffee and their stories of cruising the Bahamas.

Elizabeth City

Albemarle Sound is a formidable body of water that gives some sailors a washing machine ride so we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves as we crossed the 20 mile stretch in calm conditions with the early morning sunshine glinting in our eyes. As we pulled into Elizabeth City a reception party of boaters was on hand to take our lines. The process of getting aft lines onto poles and forward lines onto the dock, with following waves that want to chase you straight up the middle of Main Street, is one that unites boaties. The city provides a free dock and Sam, the ‘official greeter’ was soon on hand to give us the lay of the land. At 4.30pm we were treated to wine and cheese, a welcome by the Mayor and the presentation of roses to the ladies, in the ‘Rose Buddies’ tradition.

After four days without having stepped on land, we spent a couple of days in Elizabeth City visiting the library, laundrymat, and local history museum. Some places get hold of you and make it hard to leave and so it was when it came time to cast off and the motor wouldn’t fire up. This was a first for us. John spent the best part of a day below decks trying to solve the problem. Lloyd, the local mechanic, diagnosed battery problems but wouldn’t accept any payment as he said “I haven’t lifted a wrench yet”. Jim from the ‘Linda Mae’ next door handed over a unit to jump start the motor; Sam, the town greeter, drove John to the garage to have the batteries tested (they were fine); and Don from ‘Impulse’ popped in with practical assistance. In the end some heavy duty cleaning of the battery terminals did the job.

By the time we were ready to leave, people were saying “you can’t leave now. We have the Annual Potato Festival coming up this weekend” so we stayed for the rubber ducky race, Black Beard pirate show, Farmers Market, street music and 1950s hydroplane races.

A couple of days later, when I asked Lloyd how he was getting on with his school work, he said “I’m mowing down the units like a lawnmower in the Elizabeth City Potato Festival ride-on mower races". Perhaps the unit on similes and metaphors was not lost on him. His English teacher will be pleased.