10/30/99 | Corrotoman

back on the rappahannock

I don't know if being a hundred or so miles south of Annapolis really makes a difference in the climate, but it seems a whole lot warmer down here on the Rappahannock. Maybe it's just the warm welcome we got from our friends Pete and Pam Wright, who invited us to visit them again at Stingray Point as we moved south. We docked Windom in the marina next to their 26-foot trimaran Amazing Grace, and enjoyed a great meal, warm showers, and their nice heated house.

After dinner, we walked down to Dave's dock. Dave is a friend of theirs who built a magnificent fishing dock; it's got a broad bench facing the water, myriad rod holders, and a cleaning table with a built-in yardstick for measuring that fish are of keeper size (although Dave is strictly a catch-and-release man). There's also a lovely compass rose carved into the wood, and, most importantly, a big light. The light, Pete told us, draws shrimp and minnows, and those in turn draw rockfish (striped bass). It was incredible -- the water was boiling with big fish, and every so often we could see them in the shallows, or jumping out of the water after something.

As we watched the fish, Dave walked down with his gear and began, laconically, to fish. He cast his line and reeled in a nice big rockfish, carefully extracted the hook and lure, stepped down to the water to return the fish, then went back to the end of the dock and cast again. And reeled in another fish. And another. It seemed to me that getting a fish on every cast sort of took all the fun out of it; if you won every time you played solitaire, what would be the point of playing? But Dave just kept methodically tossing in his lure, pulling in rockfish, and returning them to the water.

"How often do you come out and fish?"

"Three, four times a week."

"You just catch them until you get bored?"

He gave me a look that pitied me for clearly not knowing anything about fishing. "Don't never get bored."

on the air

We hadn't been at a dock in about a month, and we wanted to top off our batteries, so the first thing we did the next morning was plug in our shore power. As soon as we did -- boom, no shore power. After messing around with our cord, different power boxes on shore, and our charger, Britt finally took out the boat's shore power receptacle and looked at the wiring -- it was totally corroded. As one of the speakers at the Annapolis Boat Show's SSCA gathering said in his talk about boat electrics, "Corrosion Happens." You can't stop corrosion, you can only slow it down by good wiring practices, and sooner or later the moist salt air gets into everything. We called the West Marine in Deltaville -- the Wrights had loaned us a car in case we needed to head out there -- but they didn't have the part we needed, so we won't be able to fix our shore power system until we get to Hampton.

In the meantime, we had another big project to work on. We finished installing our new marine SSB radio, which also works as a ham radio. Installing the radio wasn't difficult, but figuring out how to make an antenna and an RF ground was. Most sailboat cruisers use an isolated section of backstay, but in order to do that we'd need to drop the mast, cut the rigging, and buy and install not-cheap insulators. For the ground plane, you're supposed to lay copper foil against the hull below the waterline such that it encloses an area of around 100 square feet, but because of the way our boat is constructed, this would be really difficult. Pete Wright gave us lots of good advice, and we had done a lot of reading and research as well. We ended up just connecting an un-isolated backstay as an antenna, thinking that the connections between it and the rest of the rigging are pretty small anyway. For a ground plane, we ran copper foil from the radio to the antenna tuner and then to our new equipment arch, which connects to the stanchions and lifelines. A friend of Pete had gotten a great signal by using his lifelines as an RF ground this way, and Pete explained that it really wasn't necessary to get metal right next to the water for a ground, just near the water. Although Britt and I still think this is all black magic, it must work, because Pete tested our rig on 40 meters and got a great signal report from a New Jersey ham station.

It's fun playing with our nifty new toy. We listened to the East Coast Waterway ham net, a man aboard a commercial ship which had just transited the Panama Canal, a Spanish language ham net, a little morse code, the BBC, and a couple of truckers apparently on CB. We also tuned in to the "Cruiseheimer's Net", which we had learned about while we were in Annapolis. It's a marine-band net for cruisers on the east coast, in the Bahamas, and the Caribbean, and many of the boats we heard check in were also on the VHF net in Annapolis. Our check-in was duly noted by the net control, a boat in Georgia, so we're confident our signal's strong and things are working.

corr-uh-TOE-mun

It was a glorious fall weekend, and Pete and Pam had decided they'd better take advantage of perhaps the last nice boating weekend to do an overnight trip over Friday and Saturday. Naturally, they told us, we were welcome to use their house and their car while they went off sailing. Naturally, we told them, we were coming along!

So around four in the afternoon, Windom and Amazing Grace set off in tandem up the Rappahannock, bound for the Corrotoman River. When we'd looked at the chart to see where we were going, we noticed it was quite some distance off. "Um, you guys, we won't get there before dark."

"That's ok, we never get there before dark!"

Of course we'd never sailed into a harbor after dark, but we figured that having someone else around would make the first time easier, and it did. We motored out into the Rappahannock, then made a token attempt at sailing in the extremely light breezes. After a few photo-ops, we decided that we'd rather get there before dawn the next morning, and both boats turned the motors back on.

Once the sun went down, the world changed around us. We follwed Amazing Grace's white stern light and exchanged course information over the VHF. There were no other boats to fool us with their lights other than one fast motorboat we saw near the north shore, so when we spotted the flashing red light at the entrance to the Corrotoman River we were good to go. Of course, we had a secret weapon.

One of our boat show purchases was navigation software, and we'd gotten ahold of a CD of charts for the Chesapeake as well. We'd bought a power/data cable for our GPS, so when we hooked everything together we had an amazing system. As the little icon representing our boat moved across the chart on the screen, Britt called out navigation information and course corrections to me, and I steered accordingly. If it weren't for little things like crab pots, GPS and chart inaccuracies, and of course other boats, we could hook up an autopilot to the computer and go to sleep while the boat steered itself. Of course, we don't have an autopilot, and I had my hands full dodging around crab pots in the dark. And we always keep a watch. But still, it's amazing to think that the technology exists (and is affordable!) to reduce navigation to click-and-drag.

After passing the flashing red, we aimed for the next lit mark and then found a nice spot to spend the night. Since our boat is larger, we anchored (Britt selected a spot on the computer and directed me toward it, and I blindly steered, a human autopilot, until we hit the magic coordinates) and they rafted to us. The men, ever optimistic, fished for a while, while we pessimistic women cooked an alternative dinner. Pessimism won out as only one small fish, not of keeper size, was caught.

We awoke the next morning to a uniform grey. We were entirely socked in with fog; no land was visible. We hosted a big pancake breakfast on Windom, then played with the new toys (radio and nav software) for a little while. When the fog lifted enough for us to see into Taylor Creek, the small and shallow tributary we were anchored by, I suggested we all take a dinghy ride in to explore. "Let's just take the boat," suggested Pete. Amazing Grace has an amazingly shallow draft, and lots more room for us to all lounge on, so we transferred over to their boat for our exploration of Taylor Creek.

We zigged and zagged through the stakes which served as markers, mostly guessing correctly as to where the channel was. We could have taken Windom in, at least into the main part of the creek, but it would have been a lot more nerve-wracking. Taylor Creek was quiet and pretty, with workboats and sailboats at various private docks in front of the houses which were mostly hidden in the trees.

Ali, Pete and Pam's dog, was getting more and more uncomfortable, so they decided they'd take her ashore on a cute little spit of land which stuck out into the creek. Then they demonstrated another advantage of their trimaran: Pete directed us all onto the starboard side in the cockpit, then deliberately ran the port ama (hull) aground. What a convenient way to get ashore! After Ali did her thing and we all explored the hillside, we gathered on the starboard aft section again. The port ama floated free, and we were in the water again.

We returned to our boat, pulled up the anchor, and headed back to the Rappahannock. The wind was light and from the east, so both boats tacked slowly eastward. But our nifty little electronic navigator told us we'd never make it before dark, and we weren't quite ready for another nighttime sail, so we cried uncle and motored back to Stingray Harbor marina. In the channel, we got in line with about a dozen other boats, all with the same idea, and we made it to our borrowed slip shortly before sunset. When Pete, Pam, and Ali got back -- well after dark -- we said our goodbyes, and the next morning we slid out of the marina, headed south again.