Saturday morning was bright and sunny, with a good breeze, but the forecasts promised dire weather along the mid-Atlantic coast by late Sunday night, courtesy of Hurricane Dennis. The weather for the whole week sounded dismal. Our anchorage in Cape May wasn't the greatest; the harbor is too shallow to anchor in anywhere other than right next to the channel, so the wakes of passing boats really rolled us around, and we weren't too confident that our anchors would hold in the soupy mud bottom if things got stormy. Faced with the prospect of a rainy, rolly week, we opted to go while the going was good. Besides, the snap decision got us going before we had time to get nervous about it!
We pulled out of the harbor almost exactly at noon. While we lifted the anchors, the wind was blowing at an ideal 12 knots; as we motored out through the inlet, the wind was down to 5 knots, and as we cleared the jetties and prepared to hoist sail, the wind died completely. (Well, we needed to motor a while to recharge the batteries, we figured, so at least we weren't "wasting wind"!)
While I steered in the general direction of the Atlantic, Britt entered waypoints into our GPS. After the big-ship traffic lane markers off Cape Henlopen, the buoys were few and far between. We planned to steer by the compass between buoys, and keep a dead-reckoning course plotted on our charts so if something happened to our electronic navigation, we wouldn't be completely lost. With the marks often more than 20 miles apart, though, we were a lot more confident of finding them with the help of the "Geeps". And since we don't have an autopilot, we can't hold a perfect course. Although we usually lock down the wheel so that we only need to make minor course corrections, it still can and does swing around to entirely the wrong direction whenever it's left alone for more than a few minutes.
Some wind finally showed up around 3:00, but unfortunately it came from the south, so we were sailing upwind, slamming into the waves. The seas weren't enough to make us actually seasick, but we were both feeling a little uncomfortable. The wind finally shifted more westerly, which is what had been predicted, but it died out around 10 pm.
Our first waypoint went by around 7:30, just as it was starting to get dark. One reason we chose to leave when we did was that the moon was just past full, so soon it rose to illuminate our path. The waves sparkled in the moonlight, and although we were vigilant in our lookout for the lights that would indicate another boat or a big ship, we saw no other vessels all night.
We didn't bother with a formal watch schedule. Just after dark I took a nap -- that is, I lay down and tried to sleep. With the waves crashing against the hull, the boat bucking and rolling, the halyards slapping and the sails groaning, I felt like I was trying to sleep on a Disneyland E-ticket ride. But when you're tired enough, you can sleep through anything; when I hit the bed again around 3 am, I sacked out instantly.
Alone in the cockpit, motoring through the darkness in the middle of the night, I found myself feeling lonely. When contemplating this passage, I had worried about encountering big ships, but now that I was out there, I found myself scanning the horizon hoping to see their lights. It cheered me to see the flashing yellowish light of the Assateague lighthouse to the southeast around 2 am. It kept me company until Britt came up and took over at 3.
I took the sunrise shift, and was amazed at how quickly things warmed up even through the a hazy overcast. My shorts and t-shirt were in our room, where Britt was sleeping, so I just stripped off my warmer clothes and sailed au naturel. Nobody was within several miles, after all. Toward 9 am the fishing rod that Britt had set up with a lure and propped on the rail started bucking and buzzing as the line drag went off. Yikes! I wasn't sure what to do, but I locked the wheel and grabbed the rod and figured out which lever tightened up the line. I tried to reel the fish in, but I really had no idea of how to do it. Fortunately, I glanced down the companionway and saw Britt up and getting dressed, and yelled at him, "Get your butt up here, we have a fish!" He claimed the line drag going off had woken him, but it must have been a bit of a shock to wake up and find a naked screaming woman on deck. (The fish was a spotted bonito -- big and pretty fish, alas not such great eating.)
The next morning, while we were both on deck, Britt noticed a fin surfacing behind us in a distinct arc. A porpoise! Suddenly there were porpoises all around Windom; we must have seen several dozen groups (flocks? herds?) of them, all frolicing in the water and ignoring us completely. The next time we glanced at the chart, we noticed the area was called "Porpoise Flats" -- now we know why!
The sea and sky were the same leaden gray-green, and the wind was very light and directly behind us. We could have hoisted the sails, but we'd go only 1/3 the speed we could make motoring, and with the prospect of a storm that evening, we were anxious to make miles. But motoring was becoming a chore. During the night, the engine had started getting "fainting spells" again -- temporary power losses that we had first noticed on our shakedown cruise in Eastern Bay. Every so often since then, we'd experienced this problem, but switching fuel tanks seemed to "cure" it. Now, though, it was driving us bananas. After a few power-loss periods, we'd switch tanks, and things would be fine for 15 or 20 minutes. Then, the "fainting" would begin again, and we'd switch tanks. After 15 or 20 minutes, the RPM would drop, and it was back to the first tank.
The symptoms were consistent with not getting enough fuel to the engine, so we tried cleaning out the fuel tank vents. This seemed to fix things...for half an hour. Then it was back to the same old problem. When this happened the first time, we'd checked the fuel filter before and it hadn't looked too bad, but when we checked it now, we decided the filter was too gunked up. At around 3 in the afternoon, as we approached the shipping-lane buoys that marked the approach to the Chesapeake Bay, Britt cleaned one of the filters using gasoline from the dinghy's fuel tank.
After he replaced the filter, we switched tanks to use the newly cleaned filter...and the engine died. Not only that, we couldn't get it going again on either tank; the fuel line had gotten air in it and needed to be primed somehow, and wouldn't suck fuel at all. Britt went below to bleed the air from the fuel line using the hand lever on the fuel pump, but there was still too much resistance from the filter. He finally got it working by taking the ends off the fuel line we used for the dinghy outboard and using it to bypass our fuel pump, pumping the diesel by hand directly from the tank. After the engine ran for a while this way, the fuel pump was eventually able to overcome the filter's resistance, and Britt could reattach the main fuel line.
Meanwhile, I hoisted sail. By now we were approaching the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, and dozens of small fishing boats surrounded us. I steered us through the obstacles at a stately 2 knots. (Our knotmeter read 3.6, but the GPS told us the true story: we'd arrived in time to hit the ebb current, which sliced a large hunk off our speed.)
Fortunately, shortly after passing through the bridge, the engine was gulping diesel properly again. We still had eight miles to go, and it was nearly 5 pm; if we'd had to sail it at our snail's pace, we'd have arrived after dark, which we were not particularly keen on doing. Sailing at night in the wide open ocean is much easier than entering an unfamiliar harbor at night! We were also not enthusiastic about the prospect of anchoring under sail with a storm coming, since we depend on being able to back down under power to properly set the anchor. With our diesel going, we made it to the Hampton Flats anchorage between Fort Monroe and the Hampton-Norfolk Bridge-Tunnel. We set two anchors in anticipation of the predicted strong NE winds, but as we went to sleep, the air was still and the water was calm.
Things were entirely different when we woke up.