1.3 Year Trip from Norfolk, VA to Grenada and Back on a 31' Cape Dory

[TheSandPebbles]

Part I:
Shakedown cruise Norfolk VA, to Atlantic City, NJ & return.
6/10/2009: I received by truck SV Tryst, a Cape Dory 31 I purchased from my Uncle in Maine for $6,000. I had spent my last year as a Naval Officer with great wanderlust. I wanted to buy a good bluewater boat and sail the world. I was 26 years old, but my older uncle was tired, his dream of sailing had tarnished as he felt the burden of boat maintenance. The boat needed a deck repair due to water intrusion of the core. I had contacted him at the perfect time to ask about boat ownership, he revealed his beautiful boat was for sale and he was about to give up and donate it. I had her put on the hard in Dandy Haven marina not to far from my home in Norfolk. On 9/4/2009 she was launched. I had done a bottom job, serviced all the seacocks, painted the anchor, repacked the shaft, installed tri-anchor light at mast-head, serviced the engine, torn up the wet deck and replaced any bad balsa with hard foam core, and put her new name “Alexandra” on the side. The deck was faired smooth where the repairs were done, but I never did paint it until the end of my trip. I was following my own strict schedule and wanted no chance of being one of those boats that is stuck in the “getting ready” stage forever. I wanted to make sure we kept moving and got sailing.

From my slip at Ft Monroe I did a few sails in the Chesapeake, sometimes solo and with friends if I could find some to go along. I’d been sailing my whole life, sunfish, hobie cats, windsurfers, kite-surfers, a 420, but this was my first large sailboat. I had experience in Navigation from NROTC and working aboard a Guided Missile Destroyer for the Navy, acting as Officer of the Deck. At this point Alexandra had a hand-held GPS, a back-up cheaper one, a VHF, a radar, paper charts, and an ancient wind vane">Aries wind vane in the V-berth that needed installing (didn’t happen until Charleston.)

On 10/4/2009 at 2300 my friend Charles from Charleston and I set out to Atlantic City, NJ for a shakedown cruise. We had made our first attempt to leave 2 days before but due to sea sickness, dirty water tanks, and an awful septic smell, we had turned back. Now with flushed out septic tanks and scrubbed fresh water tanks we set out again, having decided we couldn’t give up that easily. We wanted to sail to Brooklyn, NY where my sister lived, but now we’d wasted 2 days and with his return flight home already set, we felt a closer destination would work better. 2 days later at night, the bright construction lights in the skyscrapers of Atlantic City guided us in.

In the next day we hand countless visits from dolphin pods, we also saw a whale, two sea turtles, and a Hammerhead shark.

We had been hand steering at the wheel in 2 hour watches. I took the last watch as a south wind blew right at my back. Alexandra was surfing down black swells at a good speed. I had no experience entering shallow inlets a warship wouldn’t fit through. My mistakes that would come to haunt me later were to trust GPS over buoys in small channels, and to try to enter at night instead of just heaving to off shore until light. So I was trusting my GPS unit’s waypoint I had entered for the middle of the inlet. The black and white display had a simple map of the land on it with markers where you should see bouys. I dropped the main as we neared and followed the GPS, not looking for the bouys. We were really close to entering now, we were heading for a point where the swells were breaking on the right side of the inlet. Goddamn, that doesn’t look right, it’s not breaking to the left and this looks like a damn sandbar. As we surfed down the first breaking swell I shouted to Charles over the wind, “Is this right!?” He wasn’t sure. The bow plowed through the swell and water washed over the deck, I turned the wheel so that went to port into a calmer part of the inlet. We were past the breakers and into the calm inlet. I look back on that night and think the bottom must have been just a couple feet under our keel and we were lucky not to run aground. 50 hours after departing we dropped anchor just north of the Coast Guard Station in Absecon inlet, 183nm away, a 3.7knt average.

The next morning we moved to the dock at the Aquarium.

We spent the next day sailing with my brother-in-law Floris, gambled some, and settled in for the night on the boat. On 10/8/2009 we left for Egg Harbor inlet to anchor and sleep. The next morning we set sail for Hampton, VA arriving safely 33 hours later in my slip.

[chef2sail]

Having lived 20 years in ocean city, nj and now a frequent traveler from Annapolis to Long Island most years I read you post with interest.

Stay at it. Maybe get a Navionics program on your phone / iPad or get a real chartplotter. It will help you with currents.

Inlets are the most dangerous of places. You can’t always read by watching the breakers. In NJ in many inlets the CG goes and moves the buoys every few weeks as the bottom bars shift.

Wondering which inlet you ran. I would only go in Cape May, Atlantic City, Manesquan, and sometimes Barnegat. The others are treacherous.

[TheSandPebbles]

Part II:

A month later I had sold all my possessions and moved out of my house onto the boat, I was ready to begin my trip. The plan was to sail offshore to my hometown of Charleston, SC where I would continue to work on the boat for a couple months before setting off for Florida and beyond.

It was mid October when my brother-in-law and I departed the Chesapeake and turned south. There was no steering gear, so we were taking 2 hour watches at the helm to steer. The beginning of the trip was rough, I remember going over the shoals off Hatteras where the current and winds were beating up high seas where the water became shallow. I worried we’d run aground even though the chart showed it should be deep enough. We sailed over the shoal and just like that the trouble was behind us.

Feeling exhausted and uncomfortable from the rough seas and cold weather, I studied the charts for an inlet to pull in to. It was night and I selected Bogue Inlet, NC. The chart showed enough depth to get in. This was a poor decision. We approached the inlet at night, and there was no way to see where the shifting sandbars were. Even in daylight it would have been a challenge. Before I knew it we were hard on a sandbar with cold waves pounding us on the beam. In the darkness I could see the inlet and the land. I tried to use the engine to point us back out to sea, but with the pounding waves there was no point. How stupid, run aground just for the draw of a hamburger and the thought of sleeping where the boat wouldn’t be wildly pitching.

I radioed the Coast Guard who turned me over to Sea Tow once they realized we were not in mortal danger. The Sea Tow boat came quickly and tossed me a line. I led the heavy line through the chock on the bow and back to a winch. The Sea Tow captain gunned his powerful boat and my winch promptly ripped out of the deck. “WAIT WAIT!!” I shouted over the crashing waves. I put the heavy line up on the bow cleat and with another pull we were off the sandbar. In no time at all we were in the ICW, tied up at a place called Dudley’s marina.

The next morning after some breakfast in town, we motored 10nm south to New River Inlet, NC. A fisherman advised me how to get out and assured me we could make it with my 5’ draft. We motored past the beach and into breakers and I was sure we were screwed, it hardly felt like a proper inlet at all. But, we made it. Later, as we crossed Frying Pan Shoals my hand-line caught a blue-fin tuna and we cooked it in the pot for dinner. Our last couple days were mostly light winds or none at all, and finally after 5 total days we pulled in to a slip in Charleston, SC.