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.
Linear Mode
Recent Discussions