Movin' the Boat

The marine forecast leading up to this weekend was pretty encouraging but as it got closer to Saturday it deteriorated to 3-5' on the ocean. We decided to try and scamper across the bay to the ICW and then work our way north on the inland route.

Rented a car Friday night and got to Sunset Marina after dark but it was obvious that the deck we built had suffered some damage over the winter.

On Saturday we got out of the house in late morning because the forecast was for calmer seas in the afternoon. We had some problem getting off the dock at Spring Garden - someone came over and gave a push. That should have been an omen of things to come but it went unheeded.

As we were nearing the mouth of the Maurice we fired up the nav system and got the red 'No GPS' icon. I changed to the backup GPS but it didn't resolve the problem and eventually I ended up on the phone to Nobeltec. The tech verified that I had a good connection to the GPS and asked that I read the NEMA sentences to him. He told me that the GPS hadn't found enough satellites and advised that we wait and try again. That worked!

The rest of the trip on the ocean was glorious! Despite what the weather service predicted the bay and ocean were pretty much flat. We stopped around Wildwood and scattered my parents' ashes as per their wishes.

We'd built up a coating of cloudy salt water from the sea spray and as we we came into Little Egg Inlet decided to get out the hose to clean the windshield and ran it over to the windshield then poked it through an opening under the canvas at the top of the windshield. When no water came out Kevie headed down below to find a bucket to use instead of the hose. In the meantime the water started to come out of the hose and drenched some stuff on the upper deck including the nav system computer. Soon we had a blue screen and I shut down the computer.

We navigated the rest of the way in using the Lowrance GPS from the car with a marine navigation chip that we had purchased for just such an emergency. It worked fine.

When we stopped at Morrison's for gas we had a hell of a time getting to the dock and then leaving after we found out they were closed. The wind was blowing.

Things went no better when we got to Sunset. Not only did we fall off the slip but we ended up drifting into the marina towards land. Every time I tried to get turned around we'd get uncomfortably close to other boats and ended up blown onto the pilings of the empty slips closer in. So we tied off onto those pilings and prepared to spend the night then move the boat when the wind died down.

We'd been there for about 15 mins and had the idea to loop a rope around one of the pilings and pivot the boat around. This got us headed out and away from other boats in the marina so I tried again to back into the slip and made it after 2-3 tries. It was good to be at the dock!