Sail Beausoleil

Well, we just got back to Portsmouth after a trip up to Marblehead over the weekend to visit – who else – our sailing buddies up in the greatest little sailing harbor around. Or, as others put it – a drinking town with a sailing problem. We met my sister Janet and her husband Brad, and my nephew Matt at the Boston Yacht Club on Thursday night. This was their first trip to  Marblehead. After our trips out to Taos, NM, they owed us one. With all the other friends who showed up as well, we ended up being too many for the BYC’s Commodore’s Lounge, so we ended up in the Ward Room. We took them for a quick tour of Marblehead on Friday morning, showing them Old Town, Fort Sewell, and our old stomping grounds in Ocean Park neighborhood. Showed them our old house, which has been transformed into a little mansion on the water by the new owners, the McMahons.

Then we went back again to the BYC on Friday night to catch more friends whom we missed on Thursday. Saturday ended up being too breezy for a planned daysail, so we waited until Sunday, going with our friends David and Mary to sail a J105, which they’re considering to replace their J30, Mallorca. Let’s just say that sailing a J105 is a tad different than sailing a 26+ ton ketch called Beausoleil!!! Sunday evening we had a fantastic get-together at Jim and Donna’s house – thanks again, guys!

One of the reasons for the trip was to get our car out of storage (Thanks for that, Rick!) so we could take it with us to Key West this winter. So rather than flying back, we packed up the car and drove to Newport, RI on Monday to visit Paul and Sonya, whom we met in Key West last winter, and Cat – Shawna’s buddy from her GTE days. Then we drove to Upper Saddle River, NJ to meet Donna and Tom – old friends from our Connecticut days. We then drove on and made it back to Portsmouth, VA by Wednesday night.

On Thursday morning, our rigger came by to make some final measurements for the new rigging on Beausoleil. The old rigging was almost ten years old, had some components which were 30 years old, and it’s undersized for a boat this big, so we decided not to chance it on a circumnavigation and get it replaced. We’re also having a whole new suite of sails made up from Mack Sails. They’ll all be ready for the sail south in early November! We’ll post a blog entry on all that work – hopefully with pictures!

Well, back around July 9, we flew to Texas to visit with Shawna’s family for a week (her dad just had hip surgery), and then flew to Louisiana to visit my folks for a week. That was the plan, anyway…

We had a nice visit – even managed to use Facebook to setup an impromptu high school reunion in St. Martinville, LA. With only a couple days notice, we managed to snag more than 30 of my 1980 class of 138 – that’s better than some formal reunions!!! Thanks to my old classmate Leslie Renard Segura for rousing the troops! I hadn’t seen most of those guys since I moved away in 1985.

We flew back to Dallas on 7/24 to make our connecting flight back to Norfolk/Portsmouth. We were flying standby (Shawna’s sister DD works for one of the airlines), and we couldn’t make the last connecting flight that night, so we planned on catching a flight on Sunday. Remember Steinbeck’s little comment about the “best laid plans of mice and men”? Which “often go awry”?

So Shawna’s parents came to pick us up at the airport to spend the night with them, and on the way we drove by their old house (which they had been renting out) to check up on it. It was a disaster! The last tenants skipped out without paying their last month’s rent, and they basically trashed the place. Every room was filthy – year-old carpet was stained and ruined, the swimming pool looked like a genetic engineering experiment gone wild – just unbelievable. Since her parents were planning on selling it, we decided to help them out by staying and repairing the damage in order to put the house on the market.

It took a few weeks, but we managed to get it done. The pool was going to cost more to repair than its added value to the house, so we decided to demolish it. Let me tell you – gunnite is a heck of a lot harder than 4 inches of reinforce concrete slabwork! We also replaced the kitchen cabinets and appliances, re-surfaced the counter, painted every room in the house, replaced the carpeting, added some crown moulding, re-capped the driveway, and re-sodded the back yard. You know – just some minor stuff… Not bad for a couple of sailors, eh?

Ok – I admit it. We didn’t do all the work ourselves. Shawna’s sister helped, and her brother & sister-in-law, as well as her nephew. And her mom & dad helped too – even with a bum knee and hip between them! We got it finished by Sunday, August 29th and got it listed with a real estate agent…

Well, we finally made it! We’re in the Bahamas!

We cleared customs at the airport at Chub Cay, and grabbed a mooring at the Berry Islands Club on Fraser’s Hog Cay on the east end of Chub. We waited for a weather window before heading southeast to New Providence Island where Nassau is to overnight in West Bay before heading out to Staniel Cay on the Exumas. We should get there by Thursday, April 29. Now the adventure really begins…

You wouldn’t believe how many items you need to check and recheck before heading offshore and out of the country. Customs sticker so we can clear back into the US easily. Courtesy flag so we can fly the colors of Bermuda while we’re there. Checking fishing gear. Liferaft. Inflatable dinghy and outboard. Diesel fuel. Gasoline for the dinghy. Generator. Wind generator (just spent an hour up the mast yesterday replacing the blades/propellors on the damn thing). Food. Filters for the watermaker. Oil filters for the generator and for the engine. Spare parts for just about everything.

Sailing a boat offshore just about requires a degree in General Everything, with a Masters in Improvisation.

We’re heading to the Bahamas to spend the rest of April and all of May. We plan on seeing the Exumas, the Berry Islands, and the Abacos. Wish we had more time to see everything, but our insurance policy insists we be north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina by the start of hurricane season June 1.

Well, we’re beginning preparations for a side trip out to the Dry Tortugas with a bunch of fellow cruisers here at Key West Harbour Marina, and then it’s a trip across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. I know you all think we’ve been on vacation the past year and a half, but we’ve been working very hard – Shawna’s been consulting full-time, and I’ve been maintaining and upgrading Beausoleil so she’ll be ready. So it’s a well-earned vacation…

The Dry Tortugas are about 70 miles west of Key West, and only two people live there: a couple who manage the park as US Park Rangers.

We’ll spend about a month exploring the Bahamas – Nassau, the Abacos, Eleuthera, the Exumas. It’ll be a first for us – we’ve only been to the Bahamas once before, and it was just a quick three-day weekend by air.

More details to come…

I’ve now been on this water planet for 48 years. My only regret is that it took me almost 35 of those years to realize that being on the water with Shawna is where I belong. Yes, I grew up just a few miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, I grew up a half mile from Bayou Teche, and only a few miles from the Atchafalaya Basin swamps. Yes, I fished, swam and water-skied. But I took it for granted.

I guess I didn’t get it then – but I get it now. We began sailing in earnest while living in Connecticut. Shawna was working for GTE back then, and they wanted to transfer her back to Dallas after being in Connecticut for less than a year. I loved my job in Manhattan, but what cinched the decision to stay was a July 4th sail with my friend, Tom, on his little 27′ sailboat Veni Vidi. As fireworks were going off in almost every town along Long Island Sound, on both the Connecticut and New York shores, I looked at Shawna – and before I could get the words out of my mouth, she beat me to it: “There’s no way we’re moving back to Dallas. And not only are we staying, we’re buying a sailboat!”

So fast-forward a dozen years, and not only are we still sailing – we’re living our dream! The past year and a half on Beausoleil have been great! We’ve met hundreds of like-minded people while cruising up and down the East coast. We’ve made great friends – most who’ll be friends for years. The cruising mindset is different than the norm. In suburbia we can live for years next door to people and never get to know them. Cruising re-introduces one to the way humans used to live – in communities. A community isn’t a village, a town, or a city. A community is a collection of people who look out for one another. A community is where people appear, ready to help you out when you need it, without being asked. A community is a group of friends. And when you sail around the world, believe me – you need lots of friends!

Friends. Not “acquaintances”. One reason we haven’t been updating this website as often as we should is that we’ve both been re-connecting with old friends through Facebook. I’ve re-connected with old buddies from high school and college, like Avery – or “Bubba” as we all knew him back then. I used to run the PA system for his band. Or Greg – I literally haven’t seen him since we ran track together in high school, and I find out he’s now heading out to the Middle East for his current employer. Or Don, my old scoutmaster, whom we all really know as “Tuffy”.  As I type this, 28 different friends from my past have wished me a Happy Birthday – and it’s not even noon Eastern time yet!!!

While the cruising community has been ahead of the curve for years in building community, it seems that cyberspace, with websites like Facebook, is making good on the promise of the Internet. Those of us who were there in the early years of building up the Internet were a bit taken aback when it hit the big time commercially back in 1995 or so. Everyone was trying to make a buck. But capitalism also enables online communities like Facebook, and even other sites back in the old days of the Internet like AOL, or pre-Internet Prodity and CompuServe, to enable old friends to connect from thousands of miles away. At one time, when people asked my what I did for a living, I’d tell them that I built the “plumbing” that supported the Internet. Nowadays, I should really tell them that I was one of the fortunate thousands (now millions?) who helped to build the foundations of a world-wide community.

The weather forecast for communities is sunny skies, with a sprinkle of friends along the way. What a way to start a birthday!

My brother Glen is ahead of the curve. He created a New Orleans’ Saints “Datman” t-shirt back in the early 1980′s. Here’s a modern take on it, but it appears that the Saint’s IP lawyers went after that guy also. They’ve apparently forced them to take down the page, but this goes to a Google cache image of a “Datman” New Orleans Saints T-shirt. It may expire from their cache any day now…

Remember this little tidbit of info: What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet – even if you try to have it erased.

We picked up anchor at about half past noon on Tuesday, November 24, leaving the quiet South River,  a tributary of the Neuse River north of Beaufort, NC. The Neuse River empties into Pamlico Sound, inside Cape Hatteras. We motorsailed up the Neuse and into Adams Creek, following the Intra-Coastal Waterway into Beaufort. We didn’t stop there – we just continued out Beaufort Inlet and into Oslow Bay towards the Atlantic. I posted our last blog entry as we exited the inlet. Next stop: Florida!

The winds started out fairly light – about 8-10 knots from the northwest, so we motorsailed. We passed through Frying Pan Shoal off Cape Fear, NC at a little past 03:00 on Wednesday morning, 11/25. The shoal extends well out into the Atlantic – more than 30 nautical miles past the tip of Cape Fear. In times past, without modern electronics like depth sounders and GPS plotters, many a ship met its end near there…

Sometimes the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line, The Gulf Stream, which heads north in the Atlantic at about 3-4 knots, was something we wanted to avoid, so we generally stayed within 50 miles of the coast. It passes fairly close to Cape Fear – only a few miles from the end of Frying Pan Shoal.

By 11:30 Wednesday morning, the wind picked up to over 15 knots, so we reefed in our sails (that is, we shortened our main and mizzen sail to make them smaller, reducing their area in order to slow the boat down to keep it controllable as the wind continued to build). We were now about 57 nm due east of Charleston, NC. We continued on, passing Hilton Head Island,  Savannah GA, Jacksonville FL, St. Augustine FL, Cape Canaveral, Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Key Largo, and Islamorada.

We stood 3 hour watches during the day, and 4 hours at night. Shawna would go catch up on some sleep below, while I maintained watch in the cockpit. Then we’d switch off. We let Raymond do most of the steering (“Raymond” is our Raymarine autopilot). Shawna even cooked a Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, using our pressure cooker. This was our second Thanksgiving in a row under sail, and Shawna’s third in a row (she helped our friend, Jonathon Green, deliver his boat “Saskiana” to the Caribbean over Thanksgiving in 2007).

We saw dolphins, a school of dorado, a couple of turtles. Dolphins are always playing with the boat, surfing its bow and stern waves. On one watch, Shawna saw one jump clear out of the water across our bow! Was it a Delphinidae version of a dare?!!

We pulled into Boot Key Harbor in Marathon, Florida at a little past 2:00PM on Saturday, November 28. Just a little more than 750 nautical miles (almost 855 statute or land miles) in four days. We averaged about 7.4 knots (8.4 mph). It was mostly motorsailing, but occasionally when the winds were sufficient, we shut down the engine and enjoyed the quiet sounds off the hull of Beausoleil gliding through the waters of the Atlantic, the Straights of Florida, and Hawk Channel on the south side of the Florida Keys. Yes, it does take you to another time and another place. It’s why we’re here.

We leave today for an overnight stop in Bahia Honda (where we saw the hammerhead “Ol Moe” last year), and then on Sunday do our final daysail over to Key West where we’ll spend the winter.

Well, after spending the summer on the Chesapeake, we’re finally on our way to Key West!. We were delayed a bit as projects got behind schedule, but as I type this we’re exiting the channel at Beaufort, NC heading to the open ocean.

We had a new bimini awning installed in the cockpit, as well as a new dodger, a new stainless steel aft rail, a couple solar panels (thanks for the one, Bernie!), and had a new anchor roller fabricated so that we can launch and retrieve our 80lb anchor a bit more easily than before. We also replaced a faulty water heater, rebuilt our teak hatches, installed new stainless steel rubrail, and began re-varnishing our exterior teak brightwork. It’s been a busy summer! More details to come!