Where's the Warmth? Recap - Norfolk, VA to Charleston, SC

Ice...on the inside.

When we left Hayes, VA (which is just north of Yorktown) at the end of November, it was getting really cold at night and we had already succumbed to buying 2 small ceramic space heaters.  So, we left early on November 21st and by the second night we were anchored in the Alligator River in North Carolina, making about 80.5 nm that day.  We were trying to make good time because Bill had a flight out of Charleston on November 30th and we knew it would be close.

Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone is enjoying this wonderful day !

We are spending Christmas in Charleston, South Carolina (a repeat of Christmas of 2007 when we were on our first boat).  It is cold, very cold.  Hopefully we will be moving south to a warmer climate soon.

Colorful neighbors

A Dockside Neighbor

This is not our boat and ours will not look anything like this. The boys have been working on decorations for the inside;  we have paper snowflakes, paper chains, candy canes and a small tree (a REAL tree)  and a poinsettia plant. The boys have already finished wrapping their presents and have them under the tree. The boys are more than ready for Christmas!  We are making a quick trip to Connecticut this week to pick up some odds and ends we left and then we'll be back to Charleston to celebrate Christmas day.  We're sure Santa will find us here because 3 years ago we were here on our previous boat, Noka, and he found us!

Boats and Winter Do Not Mix

Our Big Floating Refrigerator

The kids think it's funny that they can see their breath inside the boat in the morning, I definitely do not. We typically wake up to a sub-50 degree "house" and it takes the heaters running full blast for a couple of hours to bring it up to a "toasty" 60-62 degrees. This is not fun. The condensation, the cold, the damp, everyday, it makes me wonder what the heck we are doing, aren't we supposed to be somewhere warm? Yet, once you are over the initial futility of ever being completely warm or dry, you learn you can control it a little and get it down to a manageable process. The night before we lay down newspaper under all of the hatches and windows to catch the drips.

Halloween in Charlottesville

Knight drawing dragon.

We spent Halloween at the University of Virginia with my sister Ami.  She is there getting her doctorate in Environmental Science (yeah for her!) and we are so happy to be living close to her for a little while. We don't get to see her very often!

What We've Been Up To Lately

 Heading out to have the boat hauled.

Short Captain

A not so fun trip... NC to VA

I am so far behind in updates to the blog because I can't get reception on my Mac at the boat; I have to go up to the marina office and camp out at a table or inside. Needless to say, with school having started that doesn't happen very often.


So this a quick recap of our trip from North Carolina to where we are now in Hayes, VA (near Yorktown & Jamestown).

Homeschool Prep

Homeschooling is a difficult but rewarding job. Difficult because of all the little things that it entails; putting the curriculum together, ordering materials, keeping track of the schedule, teaching, making sure the work gets done, tweaking the curriculum, etc. and it doesn't end at 5 and then you get to go home. Being on a boat can make it more difficult, after all, where do you get all that stuff sent? You don't have a home and address anymore.


There are as many ways to homeschool as there are people on the planet, and the right way for one is not necessarily right for the other. While there is a whole camp of people who "unschool" (what I call a student-led curriculum), I am at the other end of the spectrum, trying to cram in as much structured curriculum as possible in the hopes that I don't ruin my kids education by not teaching them enough. I also use an excellent book, The Well-Trained Mind, which is a guide on teaching a classical curriculum.

Of Rainbows and Waterspouts

Waiting in George Town

For anyone on a boat, weather is the most important thing to consider before you untie the dock lines or pull up the anchor.  You don't want to be out sailing when it's bad and you don't want to miss an opportunity of good weather, especially when you're trying to make time, like us.  But, 'tis the season of afternoon thunderstorms. So we waited in George Town, for the storms to clear.


We took a couple of days to get out of the Bahamas, trying to avoid squalls because of the hard rain and strong and squirrely wind they bring. We did manage to avoid most of them and afterword we saw some beautiful rainbows (we stopped counting how many) and some amazing views of the sky:  

                                                                                        

Ring of Fire

                     One of many

2 Water Spouts

The most amazing (and a little frightening) thing we saw:  waterspouts. Very glad they were  far away from us. 
A waterspout is basically a tornado over the water. Here is a view of two waterspouts coming out of the clouds as we made our way over the banks of the Bahamas.  Apparently they are very common in Florida and the  Caribbean in the summer months.  I'm not too anxious to be this close to one again.

We arrived in Fernandina Beach, Florida six days after leaving George Town.  That included 5 overnight passages - the most we've ever done.  I'm not a big fan of sailing at night. I mean, it can be cool, there are millions of stars in the sky, and if the seas are fairly flat, it can be a smooth ride. But what I don't like:  getting woken every few hours to stand outside in the humid, salty air getting sticky and damp, trying to figure out if the lights in the distance are a huge freighter on a collision course for you, and trying to occupy your mind for hours while you are anxiously awaiting your time to be up, so you can go back to sleep.  They are long hard nights for me, I was ready to jump ship a few times, but then I thought Bill might get mad at me for making him sail the boat all the way back by himself, so I didn't.

At night, I find my depth perception is reduced to about zero. I can't tell if a boat is a 100 yards or 5 miles away because there is nothing to reference it against. While you can determine which direction a ship is going by its lights, you can't be sure how fast it's going (but definitely faster than you) or how far away it is.  That's very scary.  But on our boat, we do have a way of knowing because we have a system called AIS (Automatic Identification System). AIS receives information from commercial ships within a radius up to 36nm around you and lets you know everything about the ship: it's dimensions, destination, course, speed, if you're going to collide, time until impact, etc.  I love it, everyone should have one, it's better than radar.   It works off the GPS system and it's constantly recalculating so you know within seconds of altering course if you have avoided disaster. It also has an alarm to let you know when there is a ship in your range. It definitely helps me sleep better knowing that we have it. Now, they need to make one of those for weather, so we can avoid storms!

This ship's stats: 486' long, 26' draft, 75' beam and speed of 15.5 kts. It passed 1nm off our port quarter. I don't like distances shorter than 1nm - so this was as close as it gets for me.

So we slogged on until we finally reached Florida. Our original plan was not to stop until we reached North Carolina, but that bit the dust when we realized that Bill didn't buy enough food for us to last more than four days (remember, it took us 6). Next time, I'm in charge of grocery shopping! So, we needed to stop at least for food, to clear customs and immigration and, more importantly, a shower and dinner.

Sunset in Fernandina

Homeward Bound....leaving George Town, Bahamas

by: Bill

Water under the hulls....

Well, most of you are wondering where we are and why there haven't been any updates to the blog.  Well, it has been taking a little longer than expected to get our "new" boat out of the Southern Bahamas and up to the states. We arrived in George Town, Exumas on the night of the 6th. We had her on a mooring and were planning to leave her there for the hurricane season (until the end of October) but changed our minds because there are lots of things we want to do with her this summer, and besides, she's our house now.   After about two days of cleaning up the mold (from the hot humid environment) and familiarizing and testing all the systems we were almost ready to leave. One thing left, scrub the bottom. The entire bottom looked like it had grown hair the size of egg noodles as well as scabs. Not sure if you know how long this takes but imagine two 44' long, 5' wide objects and having to scrape them using a paint scraper and scrub brush. Now imagine doing it all under water. Well, we moved the boat to the calmest place with a sandy bottom that we could find in Elizabeth Harbor, dropped the anchor and jumped in the water. Several hours later Catherine and I had the bottom looking clean shaven. We were now both exhausted and it was late in early evening so we found a place to anchor for the night and planned to leave in the morning.

    

An Island to Oneself

Cole's 4th grade field trip was a boat tour of the Thimble Islands in Stony Creek, CT.   I was lucky enough to be able to join them and I'm glad I did. I had heard of the islands before but had never been to see them.

They are not named for their size but for the thimbleberry, a type of black raspberry, that used to grow on them in abundance.

Time Out: A Trip To Morro Bay

We had it planned for weeks, and the execution was fairly flawless. It was a time consuming endeavor: we left at 4 a.m. EST on May 2nd and arrived at our destination (my sister's) at 9:00 p.m. PST; 20 hours of travel. Luckily there were no glitches, the only real inconvenience was that after arriving in LA and taking a bus to the train station to catch the train to San Luis Obispo,  it was standing room only!  It was a let down, but most of us were seated before the 5 1/2 hour ride was over. The boys actually preferred sitting on the luggage behind the seats.  It was a beautiful train ride along the coast!

Art Contest Entries: Save the Sound

The boys entered a statewide contest to draw a poster depicting what the Long Island Sound and its watershed means to them.  Both took on the theme of pollution, Cole's showing a clean environment and Cooper's showing what polluting can do to the animals that reside there (while I don't think the Sound has great white sharks or humpback whales, who knows for sure? ).  Winning posters get to appear in a Long Island Sound calendar.

        Cooper - age 6                                                              Cole - Age 10

Purge Time !

The box of shoes currently on the chopping block. Hopefully all will sell and I'll be on my way to disposing of excess clothes next.  There's a lot more to get rid of than I thought there would be.  After we sold our house in 2007, we had a really big garage sale/purge fest and only kept minimal stuff, or so we thought.  But now that we have our new home, a 44 foot catamaran, that we think we'll be on for a while, we have to

 get rid of more stuff so that we don't have to store it anywhere.  Every new purchase has to be carefully thought out, "do we need it?", "do we have something else that can do the same job?".  We must be weight misers!

Even though this new boat is longer than our old one, catamarans are more weight sensitive than monohulls, especially heavy steel ones.  One advantage of the cat is that is will be a much faster boat, but not if too much stuff is piled into it.  I'm only too happy to get rid of stuff that we don't need or is accumulating in bags and boxes under tables and in closets. We are in a rental, so our things have been out everywhere since we've been here, it makes it all too apparent just what we have and what we use. But it also makes it easier to get rid of.

We Have a New Home !

Our "new" St. Francis 44 catamaran. We finally found the perfect boat for us! It all happened rather fast, although we've been looking for a catamaran for about 2 years.  After two potential boats fell through for us, this one came through with almost perfect timing (our lease runs out in June).  In retrospect, we're glad the other two didn't pan out because this one will allow us to leave with minimal work, where the others had a lot of projects to be done. Not that we don't like projects, but when it eats up your time off, it's not always a cost effective solution.  Unfortunately we are not where the boat is, but we hope to be by summer time. We haven't actually figured out the details of where we'll keep her and when we'll go, but now that we have our new home, we are anxious to get aboard and make her our new home!

Art Lessons from a 6 Year Old

He is a good teacher, patient and kind to his mom who can't draw nearly as well as he does.  He has always loved to draw. From the first time he could hold a pencil (around age 2) he always held it the right way, not in a fist like a lot of kids.  Not a day goes by that he doesn't sit down to draw something.  If he watches a movie,  he stays up after to draw something he saw in it.  Whenever we go on a trip I have to be sure to pack pads of paper and colored pencils or he'll be drawing on

something in my purse.  He is very detail oriented and always draws something specific, like a humpback whale or a star nosed mole or a battle between the French and the British.  I wish I had that kind of talent and concentration.  This picture is of him showing me how to draw a sperm whale and giant squid.

Mystic Seaport.....always a lot of fun

The day was chilly but sunny. The seaport was not crowded and there were special activities going on for the kids who were on school vacation that week. I had forgotten how much there is to do there and how big it is.  We had a blast!

The Charles W. Morgan:  America's last surviving wooden whaling ship, currently under going a 3 year restoration.  Her maiden voyage

was in 1821.  In her 80 years of service, she made 37 voyages ranging in length from nine months to five years. Charles W. Morgan, in total, brought home 54,483 barrels of sperm whale oil and 152,934 pounds of whalebone. She sailed in the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans surviving ice and snow storms. She's been in Mystic Seaport since December 1941.