We headed out from Rowayton on Tuesday morning, before work, heading east. For the next month or so, every bit of travel will have to be undone to get back to the main loop, so now we’re off on a really long side trip. We’d spent a bunch of time hearing stories from John/Joan about the trip to/from Maine, and Joan wrote us up a great doc with a bunch of their favorite spots. They tend to cruise longer days at 7kts, and, on weekdays, we tend to cruise short morning trips at 14kts, so their daily “hops” tend to match ours pretty well.

Our first stop was a small archipelago ~40nm away called The Thimbles. They’re all private islands, owned by rich folks who mostly put big houses on them. So, we parked right in the center of their islands and ran our generator on and off for 2 days.

The weather was bad on Wednesday, so we just stayed in place, and in the afternoon snuck in a quick dinghy tour of the islands while it rained on us and 2-3 foot swells threw us around when we ventured out of the protected center bit. It was a cool spot, with some neat islands that reminded us of some of our more tropical trips in the past.

Thursday, we headed over to Mystic, where there’s a ship restoration company plus museum that I’d remembered from living here as a kid. The entrance to the city has a bridge that you have to wait for, which only opens at 40 minutes past the hour, but there was a protest going on even in this tiny town right next to the bridge, so at least we got to watch that and honk as we went through.

While the museum buildings are closed due to C19, the grounds are all open, and you can wander around the top deck of several ships. Staying in their marina, they let you have the run of the grounds after hours, so it’s pretty cool to wander around with no one to bug you. There’s several large period-correct old ships around, undergoing restoration (just ignore that several of them have camouflaged radar domes hiding up in the masts), and while I’m not as much of a historical navy buff as my dad, it’s still hard to not be inspired looking at what mariners used to have to work with.

Mystic also had a nice restaurant with outdoor seating that we walked over for, and managed to sneak in a great meal in between rainy periods. We could get used to this outdoor eating everywhere for restaurants thing.

The next day, in the early afternoon, we walked around the museum while it was open, to chat with some of the volunteers about the ships. Weather was predicted to be fairly bad overnight, so we were going to be cheap and head to an anchorage just outside of Mystic to ride it out. Walking back to our boat to head out, the dockmaster caught us and offered us a good enough deal to stick around for another night that we took it, and the windy night was much easier attached to a dock.

In the morning, we crossed into Rhode Island, topped off on some cheap diesel at Point Judith, and headed into Narragansett Bay. As we left CT, we were heading into somewhat unknown territory with regards to quarantine periods. Some parts of RI had just announced that quarantine requirements were rescinded, but other parts were more unclear. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine had all not said anything about rescinding their requirements yet. So, we had no idea whether we’d be able to get diesel, groceries, or even water once we started into the other states. So, we’re in a mode where we want to keep all of our supplies as topped off as possible in case we do get stuck in a partial or even full 14 day quarantine period along the way.

We stopped for the night at Wickford, another favorite of John/Joan’s, and picked up a town mooring buoy just inside the breakwater. We were going to dinghy into town and try to get some dinner and a drink, but a weather warning popped up saying that a thunderstorm had changed direction and was moving into the area at 90kts, with up to 0.75 inch hailstones possible. So, instead we hunkered down on the boat on the buoy for the night. Fortunately, while it rained and blew like crazy for a short period, the storm didn’t really turn out to be that bad, and the sun even peeked out for a nice sunset after it moved on.

Later in the evening, unfortunately I noticed that the fridge didn’t feel very cold, and some quick temperature readings with a cheapo infrared thermometer confirmed that the fridge was at nearly 50 degrees. We poked around and apparently the cooling plate at the top had made nearly a solid inch of snow, with a quarter inch sheet of ice underneath the drip tray, all of which was nicely insulating the rest of the fridge from the cold generation. Looking like the situation was a little past a normal defrost, we chipped away at the ice and snow for a while, filling our kitchen sink with the results. We’d noticed that it was starting to smell a little bit in there, and this explained why. So, we unfortunately threw away a bunch of meat and dairy before it killed us, and went to bed.

After a lazy morning, the weather was looking good, and so I called around and found a hardware store with a fridge thermometer, so we dinghied into town and made a day of it. We ate lobster sandwiches at a restaurant on the water, walked out to the hardware store and picked up some stuff, and even stopped at a wine tasting room doing outdoor tastings, where we ended up restocking our wine supply a bit.

In fact, we lost track of time doing the wine tasting, and had to scurry back to the boat to head out. We were planning on taking advantage of an evening weather window to make it most of the way up Buzzard Bay to the town of Marion, but we definitely cut it a bit close, with the sun dropping below the horizon with us still 10 minutes out from the anchorage. We pulled into a wide open anchorage to the south of the town with some lingering light reflecting from the clouds, dropped a pile of chain, and called it a day.

In the morning, when we can see something, we’ll pull further into the town’s proper anchorage, behind an island, as the weather is supposed to get nastier in the afternoon/evening, so we’ll want to be protected. From there, we wait for another weather window to finish out Buzzard Bay and head through the Cape Cod Canal into, well, Cape Cod.

Late last week, my laptop had broken and decided to stop charging, so I’d been stuck using my desktop (a bit power-hungry when on anchor…)  Being on a moving boat, with repair shops all closed due to Coronavirus, there’s essentially no way to get a laptop repaired and back in my hands in a reasonable amount of time. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to just pick up a new Macbook, and whenever I can manage to finish a swap with Apple to get the old one repaired, we can sell it.  This forced us to make some awkward timing decisions, which were already awkward due to the upcoming tropical storm Arthur.

The next major segment of our journey involves two big hops: from the C+D Canal, you get dumped out onto the Delaware River/Bay, which is a pretty big “river” with a large tidal swing. From the exit to the canal, it’s about 65 miles out to Cape May, which is the southern tip of New Jersey, where the river meets the Atlantic Ocean. So, you have to time that to go with the tide or you have a long day ahead of you.

Once you get to Cape May, you have two choices to get north: the New Jersey ICW, or going up the “outside” and running the open Ocean the whole way up. The ICW has been incredibly poorly-maintained, so even with a 4 foot draft like we have, it sounds like a questionable journey at this point, worse so than the Dismal Swamp. However, the outside run is a solid 125 miles up to Sandy Hook. So, that’s a long day. You can theoretically break it up by stopping in Atlantic City, but even that involves a bit of ICW.

So, having day jobs, you can imagine that we’re trying to plan these two hops for a weekend — one day to get out to Cape May, and then a day (or two) to bomb all the way up NJ to Sandy Hook, and then it’s smooth short-hop sailing through NYC to CT. We knew were going to miss the window of the 16-17th weekend for this, since we didn’t want to hurry our way through the Chesapeake. However, tropical storm Arthur is spinning up and is planning to make the middle of this week rather lively, which isn’t leaving us with a lot of options.

When push came to shove, we decided to receive the new laptop in Delaware City, which is just north of the east end of the C+D canal, on the Delaware River, on Monday morning (the soonest it could get shipped). So, after a nice day and night hanging out in the Chesapeake City anchorage, we headed the rest of the way through the canal (which was very boring), and put in at the Delaware City Marina, where we filled up with diesel for the upcoming big legs, emptied the holding tank, and had a lovely 6-foot-away brunch with some friends of ours who live in Philly and drove down to see us.

This morning, when the laptop arrived, we had to make a call on a plan, and the weather forecast had taken a bit of a turn for the worse. Tuesday through Saturday was now forecast to be windy and/or rainy, solid. We asked nicely and the marina owner gave us a discounted weekly rate to spend the week here, so we’re going to just wait out the storm. If all goes well, over the Memorial Day weekend, we’ll hopefully jump down to Cape May on either Saturday or Sunday (depending on weather), and then bomb all the way up New Jersey on Sunday and/or Monday. So, our next update will hopefully be an all clear report from the anchorage inside the nook at Sandy Hook next week. Or some adventure stories about why we’re not there. One way or the other…

The next day, our friend Peter joined us for the week. He had been out east on a work trip when everything locked down, and he ended up just staying with his mom outside of DC while things blew over. Two months later, he was still there, and desired rescue. They’d been really good about quarantining, and essentially hadn’t left the house the whole time, so we felt safe having him aboard. Ask us in a few days if that was a good decision or if we’re struggling to breathe. His mom dropped him off at the boat in the afternoon, bid him a sad goodbye, and he moved into the front bedroom (or, as we had been treating it, the quarantine-changing-room and pantry.)

The restaurant right at the marina was actually quite excellent, and it was raining on and off, so we were feeling pretty lazy. So, we had a great takeout meal, followed by a nice evening playing games and planning out a rough sketch of the week.

We’d planned out spending a couple nights on the Miles River, on the east side of the Chesapeake. There’s a bunch of various little rivers/inlets feeding it, all with various anchorages. As will be the theme of the week, though, we had some pretty stiff winds expected for the next couple nights, so we found a nice east-facing anchorage (we were expecting a westerly wind) at Long Haul Creek, and set up shop for the night.

It was a pretty little spot that we’d found on Navionics. The anchorage we were aiming at, however, was super shallow (it’s further up the inlet straight into the above picture), so we backed out to the center of the bay there and set up shop for the night. The wind turned out to not be so bad, and we had a pretty calm evening and overnight here. I set the anchor alarm up on a super tight circle (since we didn’t have much drifting room until hitting docks and shallows), so some overnight current changes made for some quick wake-up-and-assess moments, but they all turned out to be okay.

The next day, we went a little bit north into a more open bay by Drum Point, expecting to spend the night there. It turned out to not be that pretty, but the anchor set up well and we had tons of wide open room to circle around and/or drag in the expected wind that night, so we were excited about an uninterrupted evening of sleep. Unfortunately, after setting up anchor and getting to work, we quickly discovered that the cell reception there was useless. Phones had zero reception, and the giant antenna was able to get just enough to hold audio calls, but really not enough to do much else. We struggled for a couple hours until we had a break in meetings in the afternoon to head to another spot.

That turned out to be a giant mistake. The wind was expected to pick up overnight, but it came a little early. Re-entering the main channel, we immediately were in the worst seas of our boating lives. 4+ foot irregular waves with 6 foot randoms, directly from the beam (right into the side of the boat — the worst angle for a boat to take waves from), forcing us to go back and forth at alternating 45/135 degree angles to the waves (causes much less rocking and instability than taking them directly from the side). Waves were regularly bouncing off the hull and splashing over the roof of the bimini (~15 feet off the ground). Hannah and Peter tied down everything they could, but one big rogue wave swept us badly and tossed pretty much everything from the kitchen shelving onto the floor. Amazingly, nothing broke, and the wood floor just has a few battle dings. We had to eat that pineapple pretty soon after that, though…

We were originally headed for an anchorage just southwest of the Kent Narrows bridge, to avoid the wind, but after a couple hours of battling the terrible seas, we were pretty drained and didn’t want a crappy anchoring session followed by a long stressful night of shallow windy madness in the anchorage (there’s a pattern of everything being shallow and narrow on the Chesapeake). We decided to call a couple marinas right at the narrows, and one had an opening, Harris Point Marina, so we took them up on it.

The narrows township area blocked a bunch of the wind, and we got a lucky gap just as we went to anchor, but the marina was the tightest/shallowest/scariest we’ve ever entered as well. The depth alarm was constantly tagging less than 3 feet under the middle of the boat the whole way to our slip, and we had to back into the slip because it was less than one boat length between the slip entrance and a muddy shore, so you couldn’t turn around, and if you had the props facing the shore you’d run aground (since boats are deepest at the back side). The slip was only about one foot wider than the boat, so I basically backed the boat kinda into the slip and then Hannah and Peter helped bounce us the rest of the way back to the dock. We quickly got lines on everything, and then cheered and broke into the liquor. That was a hell of a day.

Peter actually grew up in the area, so he had bits of local knowledge. When he realized where we were going to spend the night, he got super excited, because there was a restaurant that he and his mom used to love going to once in a while, the Harris Crab House. So, of course, we got takeout, and Peter, with a bottomless stomach, decided to get pretty much everything on the menu, so we ate like kings for the evening.

The next day, the winds had died down and we were expecting a few days of calm weather to enjoy. After sleeping in, we headed not too far north to a nice-looking spot at Hart’s Point. It’s a little inlet with a marina inside, and a shallow spot with several anchorages marked on Navionics with good reviews. We set up at one of the anchorages with a bunch of reviews, and didn’t really think too hard about it, but as the sun went down realized that, on the north end of our anchor swing, we were pretty near the middle of the channel. Fortunately, only two boats came by all evening, but we felt a little bad about it. Lesson learned.

We’d found a nice looking spot on the Sassafras River for the next day, so we wandered up there in the morning. We had another fun incident of checking internet like a half mile from our anchorage spot, it looking good, setting up anchor, and realizing the internet is unworkably bad. We then moved north 3/4 of a mile and had great internet. At least that anchorage was also solid, with plenty of swing room, and still quite a pretty spot, so it worked out.

We ended up spending two nights here, because it was way better than our original plan’s next spot looked like it would be. We had a great sunset dinghy ride way up the river to Fredericktown together, saw lots of wildlife, and by and large had a lovely couple of days there with mild weather.

All good things come to an end, and we headed up to Chesapeake City for our last night as a group. There’s a man-made canal that connects the Chesapeake Bay with the Delaware River, the C+D Canal. About 1/3 of the way down the canal is this little “city”, which is one of those moment-in-time places. Cute little 2 by 2 block “downtown” area, big grassy park with open mic gazebo by the water, ice cream shop, the works. There’s a free first-come-first-serve dock for a few boats, with a 24-hour limit, so we spent one night there, and got a delicious take-out meal at the Inn on the water, which was definitely the happening place to be on a Friday night. Boats coming in and out all night, chock full of people partying. It was a bit different from the people working the Inn, who all had masks, and had the most pristine organization we’d yet seen for distancing, one way people-movement, and order pickup.

In the evening, after dinner, I did my usual engine checks, and noticed some coolant leaking under the starboard motor. Some quick checks later, and I found that it was actually the exact same failure as we’d had on the port motor several weeks prior, a leaking coolant water pump. Fortunately, I’d gotten two new ones when the last one failed (since things tend to fail in pairs), so I had one ready to go. Peter was a champ and helped me out with the change for several hours. It all went fairly uneventfully.

In the morning, Peter took an Uber to the airport and headed home, and we moved to the center of the inlet to the anchorage to spend one more night there.

In between high school and college, I took a year off (read: I was told to take a year off to get my shit together) and spent the summer portion of that gap year in the tiny town of Bettles, AK. 100-something miles northwest of Fairbanks, north of the Artic circle, the town carried a full time population of ~75 people, most of whom were native alaskans, with most of the non-natives running away to warmer climates in the winter. Everybody knew everyone else, and even those of us one-summer seasonal folk, by the end of the summer, knew everyone and they all knew us. It was pretty rough leaving that community that fall.

Our journey up to Oriental was uneventful, and we put in at the Oriental Inn and Marina. The dockmaster was a super nice jolly guy and very proud of his supplies of hand sanitizer for customers to use. Oriental felt like a bit of a remnant of that Bettles feeling. It was an order of magnitude larger, population-wise, but the “main drag” was a single-digit number of commercial buildings, people were sitting on park benches watching the cars go by, families walked together to the two restaurants in town, both of which were serving take-out dinners, everyone waved to each other and stopped to chat (many not 6 feet away), etc.

We had a weather hole of 2 days of rain that planned for Oriental. When we arrived, we picked up our new anchor bridle, grabbed some more spares and supplies while we had a good marine store around, got some fresh groceries, and mostly hung out and worked. The next day brought us some pretty absurd rain (still not as bad as Surf City was), and we just holed ourselves up inside. After the rain stopped, we ordered some takeout dinner that was tasty, and had a nice 45 minute walk around the town together while our dinner was made. We got in a couple rounds of Gloomhaven and went to bed.

Another day of rain passed with us doing projects and research. Our bow thruster has been nearly useless the entire trip, and I’d done enough testing over the past couple weeks to determine that the thruster and wiring were fine, actually our batteries were just dying. They’re over 4 years old, were a low end brand to begin with (bought by the previous owners of the boat), and had been abused by dying alternators and some broken charging relays over the past few years. I’d been trying to decide for a week or so whether to go crazy and buy a whole new smart 4-stage externally-regulated alternator setup, a nice Lithium house bank, and dc-dc chargers to charge the start banks.

After looking at prices and complexity of trying to land this project in the midst of Coronavirus, I finally decided to pass and just go with a new high-end AGM bank. I started setting up plans to pick up four new Lifeline 3100T start batteries for our engine and thruster banks and four 6CT house batteries, which will increase our house capacity from 380 Ah to 600, a nice bump, and they’ll fit in all of the current (somewhat hodgepodge) battery cases and boxes, since getting new battery boxes shipped right now is a nonstarter. I can clean it all up later in the trip once I can get some shipments lined up. So now we’re trying to line up a spot to meet those eight batteries at in the next couple weeks, then we get to figure out how to recycle 8 used batteries while looping as well… A problem for another day.

On Sunday morning, we departed for a 4 hour trip up to Belhaven, NC. Hannah had been talking this town up for weeks, under the impression people had been talking about it constantly on the Great Loop Facebook group. Later, I realized that there had just been the owner of the Belhaven Marina posting different pictures once a week, like a good social media coordinator, and the trick had totally worked on her. The town was essentially totally shut down, and we stayed on the cheaper town dock (sorry Belhaven Marina), despite a sketchy 5 foot depth entrance. But we had another day of nasty weather to avoid, so we hung out for two nights.

Our main highlight of Belhaven was that the dockmaster suggested one place to order a nice takeout meal, Spoon River, so we did. When normally open, it looked like it would be a quite swanky restaurant, but as it was, when we showed up to pick up our meal, the owner seemed thrilled to have some customers, and generously gave us a bottle of wine with our dinner and a bundle of peonies (her husband is a florist.) We took the meal back to the boat, and it was delicious. It’s unclear if anything else is worth going back for in Belhaven, but that dinner was. It turned out to be 2 full dinners (for two) and a lunch (6-ish meal portions). I hope they make it through the recession and we can come back there again someday.

Hannah started a new job this week, so we’re going to try to be a little more conservative with our transit stages for a few days while she gets her feet wet at the new gig. Hannah spent Monday inside while it rained for her first day at work, then was inspired to bake a pie, which we happily consumed alongside our rapidly-booming peonies.

We headed out early this morning, with me driving most of the time while Hannah resumed her usual nonstop meeting schedule, to the next possible stop, an anchorage at the southern tip of the Alligator River. The weather report in Belhaven said it’d be somewhat windy today, but it apparently changes drastically when you go 30 miles east, and we came out of the channel into a 20-25 kt southerly wind. So, our first usage of the new Mantus anchor bridle was under duress, and it worked great. We anchored in 7 ft of water, put out almost 100 ft of chain (we didn’t wanna move and we had plenty of room to swing), and went in to work for the day.

As it turns out, we are a long way from anything here. It looks like Belhaven is actually the closest anything-resembling-civilization, and that’s back nearly 40 miles west of us. The whole day, my cell phone was showing either no signal or a bar or two of 1x. But it proved that our cell antenna was working well, because we were both able to be on conference calls all day, often with video chat.

We spent the afternoon getting regaled by nearly nonstop fighter jet passes, presumably from the Norfolk base to the northwest. The wind eventually died down after sunset, and we’re enjoying a pretty calm evening, though the fighters keep passing overhead.

Our plan for the next week involves making our way up to Elizabeth City by Saturday night, and going through the Dismal Swamp Canal on Sunday. It’s a supposedly very pretty alternate ICW route, but it’s maintained at only 6 feet of depth the whole way and is pretty notorious for bumping your boat with sunken logs and such. We’ll see if the risk is worth it or not, if we end up needing to get our props pulled off in Norfolk.

• 

• 

Friday, we did our now-usual routine of waking up early and heading northward up the ICW, this time heading to to Titusville. This had been a planned stop for a couple weeks, aiming for a weekend day to see the Kennedy Space Center, so we got a spot in the city marina for a few days.

We had an uneventful glassy morning cruise up, and upon arriving in the marina, were greeted by several manatees swimming around, and our first in-person fellow great loopers, Larry and Mary Bailey (the link is to their travel blog). They were super friendly, and we ended up spending a bunch of our stay in town hanging out with them and a couple of their friends that came down to visit as well.

After working Friday, in the evening we had some drinks with the Baileys and then we had a late appointment at an escape room a few miles down the road, so we unloaded the bikes and headed inland to find some dinner. Titusville has a cute little downtown area, but as soon as you get outside of that, it feels like you’ve been teleported back in time. Aging half-abandoned strip malls (and indoor malls), sketchy diners, the works. We ended up picking a pizza place in the mall where the escape room was and had a great cheap meal before heading to the room.

The escape rooms were interesting. It sounded like the owner basically bought plans for them off someone in Vegas that sells escape room plans, and then just built them. One of the rooms was “The Hangover”-themed, and required a nontrivial amount of trivia from the movie to get through, which we required hints for. We got through that one and since the night was still young we did another Harry Potter-themed room that was pretty good, with some neat new tricks, aside from one super-tenuous connection in the last area of the room that even the owner couldn’t really describe how anyone was supposed to understand. Oops.

Saturday was the main event for us — the Kennedy Space Center. I’d been once, ~25 years ago with my family, and Hannah had never been, so we were pretty excited. I’ve been a space dork my whole life, so the color that this added to all the stories that I’d grown up reading about was just beyond awesome. As a pretty incredibly unpatriotic person in the current environment, it was still an awe-inspiring tour de force of the era back when America was actually great. This juxtaposed with the sadness of having them sell off daily tickets to astronaut lunches at the museum, because there’s so little else for astronauts to do these days. In any event, before I get stuck on a rant, the museum was incredible. I teared up more in one day than I have in the last decade combined. If you are even slightly intrigued by space, engineering, or US history, you’ll have a great time.

We got back to the boat, and were invited back onto the Bailey’s boat again for cocktails and snacks, and ended up heading in with them all for a night on the town. We ate a pile of seafood, hit up a wine bar, drank at a great brewery, and finished off at a dive bar. Look at us being all social.

After the night of heavy drinking, waking up early the next morning was rough, but it was supposed to be worth it. As it turns out, SpaceX had a rocket launch scheduled for 9:22AM, and so we couldn’t not go see it. Saturday, I posted on the looper Facebook group and asked what the best place to see the launch would be. Most people suggested just watching from the marina, but Ferrell & Tamara Shaffer (link to their Facebook blog) responded that they were at anchor just southeast of us at the closest spot boaters could get to the launch, and invited us to come join them. So, we gathered the troops and trundled out of the marina at sunup and went over to join them.

We rafted up on them with about 45 minutes to go until launch, chatted for a while, ate breakfast, and then gathered on the bow for the countdown. SpaceX did its usual great livestream leading up to launch — “5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, Liftoff! Wait, abort! We have an abort.” Apparently some sensor measuring the force of the rockets as they build up to launch thrust detected an anomaly and auto-scrubbed the launch right at T-0. So, that was disappointing, but what can you do? It was a pretty morning anyway, and we got to meet a second group of loopers. We dropped everyone off at the marina, said goodbyes, and continued our journey north.

This segment of the ICW was a little wacky. It was a very-dredged section, so any deviation from the channel got real shallow, real fast. There are regularly-spaced “spoil areas”, where they dumped the sand from the dredging back in the early 1900s, which had turned into tiny tropical islands in the intervening decades. There were lots of boaters out there today, fishing from the little islands and hanging out under tents in portable chairs. We had to take one long cut (the top picture) that was packed solid on both sides of the channel with people fishing from either the shore or tiny fishing boats in the shallows.

We’re also seeing dolphins and porpoises all over the place. It’s pretty crazy compared to the northwest, where if you see a little pod in a weekend you’re lucky. Everywhere we go, as long as we’re doing ~6-7kts, they swim over and play in either the bow or side wake to catch a free ride for a bit.

We ended up anchoring for the night in New Smyrna, a cute little town where the only things open on Sunday are the brewery (even the smallest towns have a microbrewery these days — what a time to be alive) and a little knick knack shop, so we didn’t do much other than walk around and get a beer before heading back to the boat for dinner. We’re anchored in a tight little spot between 2 boats on one axis and a sandbar and a crab pot on the other axis, but amazingly it seems to be holding quite well in what otherwise appears to be loose sand. We’ll see if we get woken up in the middle of the night by the anchor alarm that I have set on a super tight circle…

After being holed up at a windy Nettles Island for three days, and finally free of set-in-stone scheduled destinations, we were ready to get moving. Our next two plans were:

1. Get up to Titusville by the weekend to hit up the Kennedy Space Center.
2. Get up to Jacksonville the following weekend to then rent a car and drive down to Disney/Universal with Hannah’s brother and a friend of ours.

Early this week is also when COVID-19 officially transitioned from “Seattle’s kinda screwed” to “the country/world is on the exponential infection curve now.” We’d been assuming for a few weeks that many of our desired activities would need curtailing, but it took a while for businesses to finish playing virus chicken with each other and actually start closing. I put the kibosh on the Disney plan 48 hrs before Disney actually closed themselves, but I had some hope that, at a museum at least, we could more or less determine our own desired level of infection risk by how many things we touched/how many people we got near, so for the moment, we held onto the Kennedy plan and proceeded toward Titusville.

Our first stop after leaving Nettles Island was Vero Beach. We didn’t really have plans to do anything there, but on working days, it’s hard for us to make too much forward progress. Wake up early, try to get somewhere by 10:30am or so, then fire up the computer and work for the day. On the southern ICW, where you spend much of your time going 6kts, that doesn’t allow for a lot of daily distance. So, we found a nice looking anchorage on Navionics and headed up that way. The anchorage turned out to already have 2 boats in the best spots, spaced just perfectly to not really fit a third in between, so we set anchor ~100 feet east of the ICW channel and monitored to see how bad of an idea it would be.

It turned out to be a pretty great spot. A few boats waked us pretty good, but that was pretty expected. In the late afternoon, Hannah finished up her work for the day and wanted to try out the dinghy. Everywhere we’d been so far, we had backed into Marina slips, so we hadn’t actually had an opportunity to try it out since transporting from the west coast yet. So we put the boat in the water, the motor turned right on (a great sign, since the battery hadn’t been charged in ~3 months), and Hannah went out for a quick spin. She started idling away from the boat toward the channel, and then … frantic arm motions, then a cell phone call. It won’t throttle up at all, it’s stuck in idle. Damn. She tootled back to the mothership, and I started diagnosing.

Somehow, on the 3 week voyage across the country, salt had managed to find its way everywhere on our boat. We had most things cleaned as soon as it got to the dock in Ft. Lauderdale, but some things, like the dinghy, apparently escaped that cleaning. The shift lever had gotten tons of salt outside and in, blocking the shift mechanism and rusting some of the pivots. Fully dismantling everything, scraping off a lot of salt and corroded metal, and reassembling it fortunately completely cured the issue, and late in the evening we declared success. We were originally going to go ashore and try out an escape room, but the dinghy issues had removed our motivation, so we sat back to enjoy the evening.

The sunset looked promising, so I got out the drone, charged the batteries, got everything set up, went to take off and … red warning, can’t take off. Turns out, there’s an airport inland and our anchorage is right in the approach path to one of the runways. Damn #2 for the day. I called it, put everything away, and decided it was beer:45. So I grabbed a beer and settled in. Hannah went to take a shower, and immediately returned with the bad news that the water pump wasn’t working. Damn #3. Don’t they always come in 3s?

Our water pump had been not behaving super well even while we were still in Anacortes, and had gotten worse since starting the Loop, so we knew this day was coming. I was just hoping that it wouldn’t be, you know, today. So, I spent a few minutes tinkering, and decided to just give up, grab all the tools, and swap the damn thing out. An hour later, we had water again! But this pump wasn’t turning off some of the time when water pressure ramped up. I’m hoping it’s just learning, since it’s an “intelligent” pump, but in the meantime, sometimes we have to power cycle it to get it to stop running…

The next morning, we moved again. Next stop was Melbourne, which the book generously described as, “there’s not much to do here, but it has a great anchorage.” Hannah found an escape room here too, so that was our next intended activity. We got up to the anchorage, which was a roughly half-mile-square of 8 foot deep water to the east of the ICW channel with no other boats, and dropped anchor… and dragged it all over creation. We tried a few different directions, and couldn’t get it to set up strong anywhere. Fortunately, we were over a thousand feet from any even vaguely worrying water, but we really needed to get to work, so we set up an anchor alarm and started working.

For the next 5 hours, once an hour I would hear the anchor alarm go off, move it over another 100 ft, and go back to work. In the late afternoon, I got tired of this, and we found another better-sounding anchorage in Cocoa, another 15nm north. We pulled up the anchor and discovered several cubic feet of seaweed taking up permanent residence on the anchor and chain, explaining the earlier difficulties, but we decided to move anyway.

This section of the ICW fortunately has several 25mph speed zones for us to take advantage of, so we got up to Cocoa in an hour and set a great anchor in some sticky mud just SE of town, next to ~30 other anchored boats, west of the channel, just outside of the under-construction marina. The sunset looked exciting again, so I, not learning my lesson from last time, got the drone ready to go, went to take off, and … no takeoff allowed. Another airport. As my dad always says, he with weak mind has strong legs, so I put everything back away.

Later on, we took the now-working-great dinghy ashore after dark, tying up at a boat launch and hoping no one stole it (and immediately buying a 15ft locking chain on Amazon), and hit up a local escape room. The escape room was a serial-killer basement themed mission with some mostly-non-tech-based puzzles, which was fun. We knocked it out with 22:51 left, which is pretty great for us. We dingied back to the boat in the pitch dark and called it a night.

The only set-in-stone date on our trip for the next several months is having to be in DC for the March 6-8 weekend for a funeral. A couple months ago, with that date in mind, and expecting that we’d want to deal with some stuff on the boat before heading too far north, we guessed randomly, picked West Palm Beach to fly out of (~50 miles north of Ft. Lauderdale), and bought plane tickets.

Fast forward to being on the boat, and we think that guess is going to work out pretty well. We have the second round of canvas repairs that will be done either Friday or Monday (contractor-speak for “maybe Monday, probably Tuesday”) as the long-pull work item right now. Knowing we’re here until then, we have been taking the opportunity to catch up on all the boat prep that we missed out on in January when we had to send the boat out on 48 hrs notice.

With Sunday spent doing basic provisioning, the weekdays are our first trial of working full time from a boat on the other side of the country while trying to organize shipments, start planning travel, find/book future marinas, and do maintenance.

Monday, we had the pallet full of several hundred pounds of supplies from home arrive, and spent the entire afternoon unpacking and organizing. I stayed up late and installed a new chartplotter (navigation computer/display) and radar to replace our ancient ones. Despite wearing full protective gear and heavily using a vacuum to eat up a bunch of fiberglass, I’m still assuming I took another chunk out of my expected lifespan. Amazingly, I also managed to sell the old units, which I assumed would be nearly worthless, on Craigslist and eBay for 900$ in under a day.

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Tuesday, the couch pallets arrived, and we had an exciting afternoon of frantically getting the existing couch out of the boat and getting the new couch on board with literally seconds to spare before the sky opened up. Once everything was installed and cleaned up, we utilized our rental F150 to its fullest, bringing a completely overflowing truck of old couch, pallets, and other misc junk to the dump before returning it in the evening.

Tech-wise, working on the boat has been going fairly well during the day. I picked up a second unlimited SIM card from an AT&T reseller (NoLimitData), stuck it in the second modem on the Cradlepoint router, and enabled intelligent trunking (with the existing unlimited Verizon card), so the router splits our traffic between the two connections. The results, at night at least, have been great (see picture). Midday, when the networks are congested, with the two connections sharing load, we’re at least barely noticing that we’re not on a cable modem, so we can’t ask for much more than that. I still can’t wait for StarLink next year…

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Today, after work, I started digging into a few nagging problems we noticed on the boat on our quick trip up to Vancouver. A few of the switches on the flybridge helm had stopped doing anything, including the horn, and there were some issues with the trim tab sensors on the NMEA 2000 network. After messing around with the trim tab sensors for way too long, I finally just unplugged the device, plugged it back in, and quickly tried a fresh re-calibrate before the computer finished initializing it. Boom, all fixed. On to the electrical. I chased one of the issues down to a wire pulling out of a previous crimp connection, another of the issues down to loose spade connectors, and then fully debugged the horn down to it being a hardware issue. I pulled the horn off the boat and popped it open to check it out, only to be met with a horn element full of rust and spider webs/poop. So, a replacement is on its way from Amazon now.

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In general, though, things are coming together. More storage/organization supplies are arriving from Amazon by the day, so our living spaces are pretty usable now, especially with the new storage in the couches. The ghetto-rigged A/C unit is doing a decent job, though with it being 88F and quite humid today, it was struggling to keep the inside below around 75, but that’s fine for working. On the fun side, we’ve been soaking a tiny 1 quart oak barrel for a few days to get it ready for aging cocktails, and tonight we declared victory and filled it up with a bunch of Negroni. In a couple weeks, that’s going to be delicious.

Tomorrow, we plan to actually unload the bikes and take some rides around town — hit up an escape room, maybe head over to the beach, etc. We have a pile of Amazon packages coming in the next 2 days with more storage/organization supplies (and some boat parts…), so that’ll take up plenty of time, but we’re hoping to be able to relax for our first weekend of the trip.