Sail to Cock Island
The best laid plans……
I had stuff packed pretty well the night before. The only things I wanted to get on the way over were bagels (so they’d at least start out fresh!) and ice (never can have too much of that!). I told Steve N., Lee and Nelson that I wanted to leave the docs by 9:00. So they all planned on arriving between 8 and 8:30. I arrived first, a bit after 8. Lee and Nelson arrived next, not much after I did. Steve arrived about 8:30 and we started packing stuff on the boat. That was the long part, and first lesson learned: try to do all that the night before if you want to leave early in the morning!
My marker, when heading back to Wormley Creek, is a large barber pole colored stack at the refinery near the docks. Great thing is that you can see it forever. Bad thing is you can see it forever. You feel like you’re not getting anywhere when you leave, because you can still see the tower. You feel like it’s taking forever getting back because you can see the tower. With the heat, and no wind, it was a very slow journey out of the York River.
And I got burned.
I’ve had a great farmer’s tan this summer, since I wear a t-shirt and shorts most of the time I hang around the boat. I wanted to get a bit more color, though, to look better in my daily work dress. So I wore a swimsuit under my clothes. I took off my t-shirt, put on some SPF 30 sunscreen, and hoped for a bit of color. The results was that I did get some color, and the color was red. Second lesson: spend a bit less time getting full sun exposure. Might look into one of those sunscreen shirts.
Hmmm…. need to see if there’s a way to include my tracks from the GPS on here.
When we got down to GrandView, in the Chesapeake Bay, we finally had a bit of wind. Nelson took over steering at that point.
As those who’ve read my other posts understand, I’m a bit nervous about hitting bottom with this boat, since I seem to do it so often. My rule of thumb is to try to stick to water that’s at the least 10′ deep.
The waters from the York River down to Hampton Roads contain alot of shallows quite a ways from the short, so I try to stick close to the channel where I know it’s deep. Well, Nelson grew up in this area; he knows the waters well. So I guess I should have trusted him. But he wanted to take the boat closer to shore than I did, to avoid making the trip longer than it needed to be. I was still concerned about the shallowness. We finally reached a compromise on the distance from shore to stay.
We lost the wind still several times until we reached the Elizabeth River. I wasn’t concerned for me – I like just spending time on the boat. But I was worried for Lee and Nelson, who had activities for the evening planned. Next lesson: let your passengers know that it’s a bit harder to predict your arrival time when you’re dependent on the weather to get where you want to go.
Coming into the Elizabeth River, we finally got a good breeze. Blowing about 10 knots, it was finally some nice sailing. It was only 1 hour of what ended up being a 9 hour trip. But at least we did get to sail in a sailboat.