Author: Caitlin Lefroy

Pat’s Pics! (aka Caitie’s Mom)

by  on  in Bahamas, OpTrop, Sunny days, Sunsets • 0 Comments

SO, we were pretty distracted with our engine “issue” (physically and emotionally), then we jumped right into hosting Caitie’s parents (Pat n’ Steve) – we frankly haven’t been taking many pics nor caring about blog updates.  We’ve been feeling a bit guilty, but alas…

The good news is, Caitie’s mom Pat took almost a thousand photos, and before we dropped them off at the airport I asked if we could snag a few for the old bloggity blog.  Thank god she said “no problem mon!” because otherwise we wouldn’t have much to post…

We had such a great time visiting with Pat & Steve, and finally had some PERFECT weather.  We miss you guys already!  annnnnd thanks for being on top of the photos 😉

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Eye See Dubya (ICW) – the good, the bad, and the ugly

by  on  in Deep thoughts, Destinations, ICW • 0 Comments

Don’t worry – Bahamas photos aplenty are coming your way soon!

But in the mean time, before we totally let the turquoise waters wash away our memories of the past couple of months, here are a few highlights and lowlights of our trip from Norfolk, Virginia to Miami, Florida.

Most deceiving waterway name:  Dismal Swamp Canal, Virginia

This short stretch right after Norfolk was some of the most picturesque waterway we saw the whole way down.  It captured the feeling of autumn more than the Hudson and Erie Canal combined.

Least serene anchorage: Mile Hammock Bay, North Carolina

100% humidity, tornardo warnings in the SE, rainbows amongt torrential downpours, army helicopters and black ops officers doing dinghy drills on the “don’t even think about going to land” restricted zone, and the circus show of too many snowbirds learning to set anchors with strong wind in bad holding.

Best site for sore eyes (/cold bones):  Saint John’s Yacht Harbor, South Carolina

After a long and cold stretch through North Carolina, the spectacular shower facilities at St John’s, coupled with the timing of a Thanksgiving break with family, warmed us up both physically and in spirits, which were low and needing some warmth.

Best reason to slog through the marshes of Georgia: Cumberland Island, GA

Easily one of our most cherished memories is this nature preserve and all round magical place.  We hope it will stay undeveloped and preserved for future generations.

Best place to learn the art of keeping a sailboat in one place without an anchor: Southern Florida 

Paraphrasing a sailing quote, anybody can make a boat move, but it takes some skill to keep one in the same spot.  Try doing that with a couple knots of current pushing you towards a bascule bridge that doesn’t open for 15 minutes, coupled with the hoards of motor boats and jet skis that blast by you, and then do it every few miles for a couple of days.  OR sail outside and skip it!

Best reward for making the 1095 mile trek: Key Biscayne

Although we were obviously keen to go to the Bahamas, I’ll admit it:  it was really nice in Key Biscayne (just south of Miami).  It was hot.  The water was beautiful and turquoise.  We had a great anchor spot in well-protected No Name Harbour, and the town of Key Biscayne has all the upscale amenities you could want, plus hilarious golf carts driving on roads beside luxury vehicles.

 

SHRIMP N GRITS

by  on  in Destinations, Rainy Days, Sitting at anchor, South Carolina • 0 Comments

WE MADE IT TO CHARLESTON!

After waiting out one day of torrential rain in an anchorage near the Isle of Palms, we decided to brave the fog and head into town (also, our meal morale was plummeting quickly with our empty pantry).  We headed out around 7am and were unsure if we would be able to make it through the lift bridges, potentially busy harbor and shallow areas* with such low visibility, but luckily for us it cleared just enough to help us through.

*we waited for the full 6ft high tide to transit this stretch of the ICW, and still only had a few feet of water under the keel at spots.  We’re getting so used to this shallow water business that a 12 foot depth is now considered “big water” for us.

We didn’t get any shots of the Charleston Harbor, but it looked something like this:

(ok not quite that bad, but definitely not much better)

After a challenging high-current docking (Mark is killin’ it lately with the tricky docking scenarios), we celebrated finally making it to CHARLESTON – culinary capitol of the south, and our temporary boat home for the American Thanksgiving week.  We borrowed our beautiful marina’s courtesy car and checked out the downtown strip on King St (which we LOVED), complete with a proper Southern meal of Chicken Biscuit, Ribs, Collared Greens, Hush Puppies, and other fried delicious things.

Blurry/happy photo.

And it was WARM!  Since I knew it was going to rain, I wore my foulie jacket, which led to many stares, since everyone else was dressed like a casual fall day in the South.  Which means a light layer over your tshirt?!  Let’s hope this may be the end of the Arctic Explorer phase of our blog photos…

Now we’re excited to spend some time with Mark’s family in South Carolina, eat lots of Thanksgiving food, use modern plumbing exclusively, and catch up on all of the internet (and friends/fam) we’ve been missing lately.

PS the following two pics are not from Charleston at all, but we had to get at least one dolphin shot in, and I had been pretty crabby lately due to the weather, so it felt appropriate.

H.O.V.A.

 

Day in the Life: What do we DO all the time?

by  on  in Deep thoughts, OpTrop • 1 Comment

Preface: Many people have asked us “what will you DO with all your time on this trip?”. It turns out, planning where we are going and how we will get there takes up a lot of it.

Here is our Buzzfeed Top 10 (ok, 13) list of “What we do”:

1) Wake up, check weather (NOAA marine forecast, passageweather.com, “civilian” wunderground), make coffee.

2) Check engine, bilge, rigging, fuel, etc. Put on sweatpants.

3) Check iPad charted route on Navionics app, make sure we can make it (considering we slept in an extra half hour and now only have 9 hours of daylight to go).

4) Pull up muddy anchor chain and get under way. Read Active Captain reviews about our prospective anchorage/marina and make judgements about the people reviewing them (“He said the ice cream was expensive, but a large portion, so overall a good value”).

5) Wipe sea spray off face and bungee down ipad after large wave breaks. Check NOAA forecast again to make sure the weather is not building.

6) Make lunch. Determine if it’s a light weather afternoon (beer with sandwiches?) or a heavy one with a tricky harbor to navigate later (no sandwich, no beer, just Cliff Bar)

7) Take turns steering and snoozing, watching out for other boats (“is that tug boat moving?” / “I think it’s actually a lighthouse”). Also, crab traps. Perhaps boaters should consider boycotting those delicious little crab cakes considering the pots are basically booby-trapping the entire Chesapeake bay.

8) Start checking your watch, boat speed and chartplotter ETA compulsively at 3pm, knowing that you have a 2 hour window to make it in to harbor, find a spot to anchor and get all sorted out before it gets dark.

9) Turn on engine and speed up, growing increasingly hungry, cold and anxious to arrive on time. Realize you’re now going against the current and have slowed down 1 knot. Rev up.

10) Spend 20 minutes motoring around at a walking pace, arguing over which spot to anchor in (“when is low tide again? depth sounder reads 5 feet…”). Commit to one, set the anchor, and crack a beer. Use a coozie (to keep your hands warm). Enjoy the sunset for about 10 minutes then realize it’s now early November and freezing cold – go down below and make the early bird special.

11) Check weather again before 8:30pm bedtime, plot out tomorrow’s route and anticipated anchorage/marina and get a good nights sleep.

12) Wake up to howling wind at 1am. Check NOAA weather. Check anchor. Check landmarks around you. Convince yourself you’re not slipping. Go back to bed. (Still wake up frequently to check all those things again)

13) Finally fall asleep as the weather calms. Wake up to a gorgeous sunny fall day on the Chesapeake Bay, knowing you’re headed south towards warmth and mai-tai’s.

Exploration Day in Solomons, MD

by  on  in Chesapeake Bay, Destinations, Maryland • 0 Comments

We are halfway down the Chesapeake Bay, and it feels GREAT!  We had an awesome two days in Rock Hall, MD, where we stayed at a lovely marina for a day of treat-yo-self showers and shore power, as well as a couple of extremely successful marine store visits.

We have a CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) stove on Tara, which is great as it is often seen as safer than propane for marine stoves, however it is nearly impossible to find places to exchange your empty tank.  We had run out of gas at the end of the Erie Canal, and had thus been relegated to outdoor cockpit cooking with a propane Coleman for the past few weeks.  This wasn’t so bad… except that we couldn’t cook underway, and it was getting friggin cold making morning coffees outside.

Luckily for us, we found a great marina store that stocked CNG tanks, so we are beyond happy to be cooking indoors again (this morning’s breakfast burritos and coffee never tasted so good).

We used our dock time well, addressing a bunch of our laundry list of small boat projects, including fixing a small leak in our inflatable dinghy (it was missing a crucial O-ring) and replacing a moldy water filter for our galley.  Small wins, but they feel great.

Our first long sail day down the Chesapeake was super calm, and we even broke out the autopilot for the first time since Lake Erie, freeing us up a little bit to enjoy the flocks of brown pelicans dive bombing for fish around us.

Now we are in Solomons, MD, a boating destination on the Chesapeake Bay, and rightfully so.  It’s a beautiful area, and there are more sailboats here than we have seen in one spot…ever.  We’re anchored up Back Creek, and are loving exploring town while we wait out some more unfavourable weather.

 

Today’s activities included a local maritime museum/aquarium, where we learned about some Chesapeake boating history and also, the Megalodon.

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IMG_9475 IMG_9477I do all the rowing around here*  (*JK – we’re equal opportunity rowers)

On a humorous note, despite the plethora of books, electronic devices, charts, etc. we have on this boat, we are really enjoying using vintage car-travel maps for big picture planning and visualization.  We were gifted some by Jim E. back in Mentor, OH, and then jumped on the opportunity to pick up some more at a cool thrift store in Brooklyn, NY.
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Since the wind has been so light, and often in the wrong direction so far for us in the Chesapeake, happy motoring is actually pretty relevant :)

 

LOCKTOBERfest / OPTROP’s Guide on how to transit an Erie Canal lock

by  on  in Erie Canal, New York State, Passage • 0 Comments

We’ve now transitted 35 locks of the New York State Canal System, through the Erie Canal from Buffalo to Albany, NY, and frankly we are quite happy to be done with elevation change for a while.Why are we so relieved to be out?  Because going through locks is tiring, tedious and dangerous (more so than we originally thought).  Effectively, your boat (along with a few others) will enter a cement chamber ~300 feet long x ~45 feet wide, with gates at either end that close you in, like a caged wild animal.  And like a caged animal, your sailboat will not happily sit still in the cage, but rather squirm around as the Lockmaster lets the water in or out, and you will try to hold it in place with boat hooks and the slimy, wet ropes that are attached to the cement walls (you’re going to want to watch out for the aqua spiders that hide on them too, too).  During this process, you try not to scrape or slime your boat and also avoid hitting the multi-million dollar power yachts beside you as the water swirls around.  It’s stressful, don’t let my smile fool you.We are happy to say we avoided any collisions or scrapes, but for anyone else planning a similar voyage, here are our 5 top tips for lock success:

5) Have a plan for how your boat can pull up nicely parallel to a very tall (or very short, depending on which way the water is going) cement wall.  Some power boats have bow-thrusters that do this for them very nicely, but we just used our one propellor (and its prop walk) and a very carefully timed slow down, docking technique with boat hooks, fenders and lines. We watched some entertaining docking events go down in locks among crews who had not planned how they were going to get alongside the wall (short story – lots of swearing, some mild boat/wall smashing, maybe some tears).

4) Have the right equipment for protecting your boat.  We used lots of fenders, and a DIY fender board for this.  Having some old lines that you don’t mind getting slimed from the walls are great too, as sometimes there are fixed lines or cables (versus attached at the top but free swinging below) and you can loop a line around these to hold yourself in place.  Just be careful not to get them caught as your boat is going up or down (same for your fenderboard!) or you’ll have a bad time.

3) Have the right equipment for your crew, which for us meant work gloves and boat hooks (or any sturdy long stick used to push off the wall).  The ropes that you grab onto spend most of their lives sitting in swamp water, growing all sorts of new slime forms and just waiting to slip out of your hands.  They’re disgusting, and you definitely don’t want to bite your nails after handling them.

2) Slow down when entering the lock.  There is a finite “runway” to these “landing strips” of cement, and you do not want to slam into the boat in front of you, or the metal gates at the other end.  Also, we’re learning very quickly that a 40 foot boat keeps a lot more momentum than the 27 footer we’re used to, and it’s not easy or safe to try and manually slow these boats down without a cleat (there are lots of rings, but these take an additional couple of seconds to thread a line through).  Although Mark has now nearly mastered our clockwise prop walk, it can be a bit unnerving to see your stern moving towards the boat tied beside you as you back up.

1) Pay careful attention while descending or ascending.  CONSTANT VIGILANCE.  Or you’ll hit your boat against the wall / your boat against someone else’s boat.  Since our boat is shaped like an almond and not like a rectangle (looking at you, house boats of the Erie Canal), we don’t have one nice long flat surface to line up against a wall, but instead will swing as the water swirls around us, unless we are in a constant state of push and pull to keep ourselves straight.

We loved the scenery, people and free docks we’ve encountered along the Erie Canal…but we are very happy to be heading out of our landlocked waterway and onto the Hudson River.

Small towns of the Erie Canal – our aquatic road trip of Upstate New York

by  on  in Destinations, Erie Canal, New York State • 2 Comments

We have almost been en route for a week now, and since we’ve entered the Erie Canal, our days have been filled with the quiet waterways, beautiful greenery and quaint canalside towns of upstate New York. The leaves are just starting to change, and although the evenings and mornings are chilly, the days heat up to sunscreen weather by lunchtime.

These have been our views for 7-10 hours a day lately:

Occasionally we transit a lock (we have ~35 to do to get all the way down to the Hudson River, more on those to come…), but otherwise we mostly motor along, taking it all in. Although it looks easy enough, it’s a very narrow and shallow channel (7-12 ft deep, and maybe 100 ft wide) and it takes steady concentration to avoid the various logs, shallow spots and curves the canal throws at us.
Each night we end up at a small town and tie up to one of their free docks (sometimes with free water, pump out and power too!). So far we’ve been to Holley, Fairport and Clyde, NY. These towns often have a lot of historical significant with the original Erie Canal (you can read more about that here) and we’ve enjoyed exploring these stops after our long motoring days.

Mark and Tara at the Fairport dock\

Fall flowers in full bloom / bicycle wheels to edge the gardens

We also have loved seeing the old canal barges and tugs that worked for the New York State Canal System, as well as the local boats who make this place their summertime home.


Canal selfie.  Canalfie.

Home sweet home!

Farewell Party!

by  on  in Ohio, OpTrop • 5 Comments

This afternoon we had a lovely surprise going away party courtesy of the Mentor Harbor Yachting Club “East Beach Party Squad”.

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Seriously, since we’ve been here over the past few weeks, we’ve made a lot of good friends.  The crew here has taken us in with open arms and we couldn’t be more grateful.  We’ve received loads of advice, encouragement, and enthusiasm and are getting started on the right foot (or keel, as it were).

Special thanks to Bob and Heather for organizing!

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Painting Daze

by  on  in Boat Projects, Boat Work, Ohio • 2 Comments

Painting starts with a power wash!  That was the easy part…

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Once the boat was out of the water, it was time for sanding (don’t worry, I -Caitie- health and safety-officer’d us into wearing appropriate respirators and safety gear), and a brief wipe down with thinner to prep for painting.  Finally, taping the water line, wrapping the prop and all of the other necessary precautions.

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Traditional anti-fouling paints are pretty toxic (that’s the whole idea…to prevent life from growing on the boat), and since we were going to do this ourselves, we chose a slightly more environmentally friendly version called Pettit Hydrocoat Eco, a “water-based, copper-free, self-polishing ablative antifouling paint“.  This is their top-of-the line new paint which will hopefully keep us growth-free for at least a year or two in the tropics.

 

We estimated that we would need about two gallons (~7.6L) to do our two coats, and at almost $250 per gallon, this paint quickly became known as Black Gold (to us).  Unfortunately it is also extremely viscous (Yes, we thinned it as per the instructions. Still.) and has thus generously provided a neck/shoulder/arm/back/full body workout neither of us knew we were missing out on, through a strenuous two-day painting process.

<Note: There are no pictures of the actual painting, because we were BUSY!  Dayummmmm>

 

Let me just say, for the record, that this was the least fun boat project we’ve done to date, if only because it was more physically taxing than anything else we’ve tackled.  But hey, could be worse – we could be at real jobs, right?  (EDIT – I’m sure there will be worse boat projects.  This wasn’t actually that bad.)

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Two coats over two days, and we’re tired!!   Frankly, we’re a little tipsy too…Celebration beers! haha