This may turn out to be a pretty short update; how can I possibly hope to entertain you with tales of our tedious refit operation? Until I think of a way, allow me to digress back to Adventure in Hilton Head where we left off last time. We wound up moping around that off-season resort-cum-marina for nearly three weeks waiting for the rebuilt transmission to be shipped back to us, which it was, finally, on the 26th of January. It was installed efficiently enough by the marina folks but when we started up the engine, well, it sounded funny to both of us. The engine at best is rather LOUD and produces quite a symphony of rhythmic vibrations and rattles, but they are what we’ve come to know as normal rhythmic vibrations and rattles. This time, however, there was definitely a new instrument in the percussion section. Worse, the sound seemed to emanate not from the engine itself, but aft of the engine in the vicinity of the prop and the strut that holds the prop shaft, both of which are located, most inconveniently, underneath the boat. In one exchanged glance we tacitly acknowledged all possible courses of action and none looked good. One, we ignore the noise and hope it goes away. Two, we assume the worst and have the boat hauled out (again!), at great expense, for obligatory repairs on site. Three, we hire a diver--cheaper but not cheap--to examine the prop and shaft with the boat in the water, and submit to the delay that might be involved in even locating a diver.
Silly us, we hadn’t deliberated long when we remembered that we had our own wet suits and could of course do our own diving. John’s Atlantic City diving experience was a bit too recent for his liking, so I was selected to do the deed. The water was not as cold as in New Jersey, or so John says, but it was cold just the same, so I put on my wet suit and John’s on top of it to be safe. I’d never worn a wet suit or fins before. This, I'm sure, was only too apparent as I bobbed around inanely, unable to overcome my buoyancy long enough to get my head and shoulders under the water at the same time. Eventually we thought to lower some anchor chain alongside the boat for me to climb down. After a few tries, I managed to get my whole body under the boat and examine the patient up close, and to my happy surprise, prop, shaft, and strut were all in perfect working order. Next, we took the boat out for a spin and listened carefully to the cacophony of engine noises for any further diagnostic clues. None were forthcoming; in fact, we were no longer sure what the engine had sounded like before, so long had it been since we’d heard it. We decided to follow Course of Action #1 afterall (ignoring it) and, er, so far so good.
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| The house from The Big Chill |
OK, get ready, here is the sole action sequence of this update: on January 29th, 1999, we actually left the Intracoastal Waterway and took Saros on her first offshore cruise since leaving New Jersey. We sailed from Beaulieu, GA, to St. Augustine, FL, in about 24 hours, with winds generally from the northeast and clear skies. Lest you think we managed such a short passage without any drama, however, allow me to correct that impression. To begin with, the navigational chart kit we’d been relying ever since entering the Waterway abruptly abandoned us at this point: it offered next to no information about depths and navigational aids along the Georgia coast, nor for the inlet, St. Catherine’s Sound, we were hoping to take back out to the ocean. We made every effort to find a local chart for the inlet, but there were only a few, small marinas in the area and none sold charts. We did spy a faded yellow chart, decades old, on the wall at one place and made some mental notes about key features of the inlet. (The futility of doing this was not lost on us: the sands at these inlets shift every week, let alone what must happen over years and decades.) So armed, we headed out cautiously into the ocean.
A short way off from shore, we encountered two large (45+ feet) cruising sailboats heading in. We hailed them on the VHF to ask if the depth out where they were would be sufficient for our deep keel. They assured us it was deep enough, but asked, concerned, if we hadn’t heard the weather forecast. Puzzled, we replied that we expected clear weather all the way to St. Augustine. Oh no, they returned, for some time they’d been listening to reports predicting high winds and heavy seas, and so they were heading straight in for port. We thanked them and continued on our way, feeling a bit reckless on several counts now. Naturally, we listened to the forecast again immediately, but in the same bland tone as the earlier reports we’d heard, it predicted an uneventful afternoon and evening.
If my narrative has been at all successful, you are now fully prepared to hear that we not only lost sight of the inlet markers and found ourselves hard aground in unfamiliar waters, but that at the same time a raging storm erupted, with howling winds and battering waves. No, to the detriment of the narrative but otherwise a very good thing, we made our way off shore without difficulty and the weather gave us no trouble whatsoever. To this day, we have no idea what weather forecast those two boats were following, and why anything less than a serious storm would worry boats of their size anyway. But as to the issue of sailing in inadequately charted waters, this is a daredevil feat at best, necessary in many parts of the world, perhaps, but always to be avoided on the southeast coast of the U.S. We were lucky in Georgia; we were not so lucky in Florida. Coming in the St. Augustine inlet, we had the best, most recent chart there is, but the sand shifts so frequently here that the inlet depths are intentionally omitted from the chart! Even the Coast Guard wouldn’t tell us over the radio whether the channel could accommodate a boat of our draft. We asked SeaTow for their opinion, and were told in carefully chosen language that we "should be okay" if we stuck close to the left hand side of the channel. We should have been, but unfortunately we weren’t; we hit bottom about a mile offshore. This incident, though it was over in a few seconds, was the scariest thing to happen to us on the trip thus far. We made it in to shore without hitting again, but quite a lot had crystallized for us in that frightening moment: charts can let you down, the shore is more dangerous than the ocean (we already knew that), the Coast Guard follows a strictly "tough love" credo, and, most of all, our keel was too deep.
St. Augustine is an interesting city. It really is the oldest city in North America, with a genuine Spanish fortress from the 16th century and a lot of very old Spanish buildings, all in surprisingly good shape. It is overwhelmed with tourists (at least from my perspective; I doubt the city officials feel this way) and touristy shops, but somehow the streets become clear at night and you can pretend you’re in Europe, sort of. We’ve found the townspeople friendly, on the whole, though the day we arrived one person managed to reveal what I suspect is an entrenched racism here. I had inquired in a local movie theater about where in the neighborhood I might shop for food, and I and a handful of other patrons were informed in a bellowing voice that there was a grocery around the corner but that it was "black." Startled, I searched my mind for an alternative reading of this information and John suggested, privately, that "black" might be a local term for "closed." It wasn’t. On further observation, we could see that there was indeed a fairly sharply demarcated separation by race (of which there seem to be only two) in this city. Clearly, St. Augustine’a strong suit is its early historical significance--that and the fact that it is home to the first Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. And not, for example, its possession of what may be the most treacherous inlet on Florida’s Atlantic coast.
After a week of sightseeing and some semi-serious discussion of trading in our boat for a shoal-draft model, preferably in steel, we found a boatyard and had the boat hauled. Since before we left in October, we’d planned to take a few weeks somewhere with a warm climate and do whatever was left to do to get Saros ready for some real bluewater cruising. Of course, we’d planned the refit for January, not March, but nevermind that. The list of completed, in-progress, and still-to-do projects is rather long and I won’t bore you with it here. One item, though, may be of interest: we are making preparations to chop off the bottom of the keel. In fact, we think we may be able to function safely with as much as a third of it removed. Anyone who knows anything about sailboats will assume, on reading this, that we’ve gone quite out of our minds and can’t possibly know what we’re doing. A third of a keel is a lot of iron, and that’s a lot of ballast. Ballast this low in the water is supposed to be a good thing: it counterbalances the rig and acts both to keep the boat from tipping and, should it tip anyway, to right it quickly. Also, it helps keep us on course by preventing leeway (sideways slippage away from the wind). We thought of all this, of course, but none of it changes the fact that we have an unusually deep keel and one which constitutes an unusually large portion (47%, to be precise) of the boat’s total displacement, leaving us with a fair amount of room for adjustment. Nevertheless, we aren’t quite so sure of ourselves that we would make such a move without expert consultation. So, we’ve hired a naval architect and are now eagerly awaiting the results of his calculations.
The plan: a few weeks’ more work in St. Augustine, then on to the Florida Keys and the Caribbean!
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