Bridges and Locks - Coinjock to Portsmouth

Since I'm fairly new to this whole cruising gig, I wasn't sure quite what to expect for this leg of our journey.  It was all ICW and it had a few new potential challenges.  I've only had limited experience with bridges, most of which have been on-demand and not scheduled openings and I've never dealt with a lock before.  But all of that was ahead of us on this leg of the journey, so I had planned on a fairly short 45nm hop from Coinjock to just south of Norfolk.

We left Coinjock around 8am and were once again motoring up "The Ditch" (ICW).  I think the local osprey have decided that the ICW channel markers are their own version of government subsidized housing.  It seemed that just about every mark had an osprey nest on it with an osprey protecting her eggs.

Osprey with chicks living on a marker.  They seem to prefer the red ones.

As we continued motoring, the chart showed a bend in the river, outside the ICW channel, with a bunch of marked shipwrecks.

8 shipwrecks on the chart.

And, indeed you could see some of them from the boat.  One does wonder how so many boats met their end in this little elbow of water.

Broken boats all in a row.

Around noon, we made it to the first of the bridges that we needed to have opened that open on a fixed schedule.  The North Landing swing bridge opens on every half hour, and so naturally we arrived just a few minutes too late to make the opening.  This ended up giving me plenty of practice at station-keeping while we waited for the bridge.  Fortunately the ICW doesn't have a strong current and so this is pretty easy in a catamaran.  In fact, we ended up having lunch while waiting for the bridge.  Once the bridge opened and we were on our way, we figured out that we wouldn't be able to make the next opening of the next bridge on our route, so we throttled back to a speed that got us to the next bridge about 5 minutes before the following opening.

After the first two bridges, next was the Great Bridge and Great Bridge Lock.  The bridge opens in sequence with the lock since they are only a few hundred feet apart.  We had to wait for a few minutes, but pretty soon the bridge opened.

The Great Bridge opening up to let us through.

We then made our way to the lock.  We deployed fenders, found our boat poles, and setup a bow and stern dock line so we could take a ride in the lock. When we motored into the lock, one of the lock operators looped our lines around a couple of the big bollards on the shore and threw them back to us.  The idea is to keep your boat parallel to the lock wall without quite touching while the water raises or lowers.  There was only one other boat in the lock with us, Goose, as you can see below.

The Great Bridge Lock.

I admit I was a little nervous about the lock since I had never done it before and had heard of people having issues when locking, but it really was no big deal.  I imagine I might think differently if this were the Panama Canal and I was surrounded by big ships.

We were making good enough time that we decided to see how far we could get and ended up making it to Norfolk and had to go through the Gilmerton bridge.  I guess we got lucky that a barge was coming through the other way as I've heard this bridge doesn't open, except by reservation, during rush hours.

Gilmerton Bridge.  120ft clearance...I think we'll fit.

Passing through Norfolk and Portsmouth, you can really see these are big ship towns including a naval yard.

Norfolk waterside industry.

Naval Ship Yard.

An aircraft carrier can sure make you feel small.

We ended up at one of the free town docks in Portsmouth.  They are right downtown and convenient walking distance to a number of restaurants and stores.  The only downsides are the lack of marina amenities (water, power, bathhouse) and the fact that the dock is awash at high tide, but it is definitely nice for the price.  I'd recommend it for a short stay if you are in the area.

Rover tied up at the north Portsmouth free dock.

After the day's excitement, we decided to have dinner at one of the local sports bars as a celebration of making it through all the bridges and locks and ending up at a nice place to spend the night (and not having to pay for marina dockage).  I hear the weather is supposed to turn bad tomorrow, so we might be here an extra day if it sounds rough to travel.  Guess we will see if the weather guessers are right.

Departing Florida

Well, it was finally time.  We are reasonably prepared and the clock is ticking down on the amount of time we could spend in Florida without incurring substantial penalties, so it was time to move on to Georgia.

Since my wife hasn't spent much time on the boat and it has been over a year since she was out sailing, we decided to again get the aid of a captain for the first leg of the trip.  This would allow her to remember things forgotten as well as learn the differences with our larger boat.

Before we left the marina, we stopped by the free pump-out station.  We haven't been using the on-board heads in the boat because of the month-long engine issue and the fact I would like to replace the hoses.  But I have been running some fresh water through them to hopefully clean out the system a bit and it seemed like a good time to learn how to use a pump out.  I maneuvered the boat from the slip to the pump out and my wife, who didn't see my docking practice sessions, said she was impressed with my maneuvering abilities.  Yea!

A couple things I've heard or learned about the pump out I figure I'll share here since I can't be the only one that has never done it.  First, I was told when opening the pump out access on the boat, do so slowly and don't stand directly over it.  Apparently if a tank is very full the vent can become blocked and further use pressurizes the system.  You don't want to be standing over that geyser when it goes off.  Fortunately we didn't have this issue.  The second tip is that some of the pumps, including the one we were trying to use, need to be primed.  To prime the pump you turn on the pump, open the valve at the end, and dunk it in the water until it seems to start sucking up seawater and then you can put the hose over the open access and pump out the tank.  Oh my...I just realized...many bloggers say you are not a real cruising blog until you post about waste systems...so I guess this makes me legit now. ;-)  Anyway, enough of that subject.

Our track from Palm Coast to Jacksonville

We departed the Hammock Beach Yacht Harbor marina around 8 am under cold grey skies.  This was to be the theme of the morning.  Motoring up the ICW was just as it has been in the past...kinda like driving down a highway...only you are averaging 8 miles an hour.  This reminds me of what our bareboat/catamaran instructor once said about scheduling a sailing trip:

"To figure out how long a trip will take by sailboat, calculate how long it would take to walk there and then add a day."

St Augustine.

 Since we had the captain/instructor on board to help my wife get comfortable with the boat, I let them and went in the cabin to do a little work and see what kind of signals I could find using the Wirie.  Since it was cold, I also fired up the generator and turned on the heat in the salon so it could act as a "warming hut" for them when they needed a break.  I was occasionally able to find an open WiFi hotspot and connect to the internet.  I think the longest connection was about a half an hour or so.  And I periodically relieved my wife and the instructor/captain at the helm so they could warm up.

Bridge of Lions and a Tall Ship.

In St Augustine we stopped to pick up some fuel at Camachee Cove Marina. It was interesting getting into the marina as there was a moderate current crossing the fairly narrow entrance.  Just like a plane, we crabbed the boat into the current until we broke through to the calm water.  We stopped there for fuel since my recently acquired SeaTow membership gave us a $0.10 discount on fuel and we never have figured out exactly how much was in the metal tank (apparently, also like airplanes, boat gas gauges are notoriously inaccurate).  The clouds started breaking up about this time and we found blue sky, but it was still rather cold...at least for Florida.  After refueling, we continued our trek up the ICW towards our destination of Palm Cove Marina in Jacksonville Beach.

You can see the current at the base of the marker pole...naturally we are heading into the current.  I think we averaged about 7.5 knots on this trip with values anywhere from 4 to almost 10.

A few hours later we arrived in Jacksonville Beach.  As reported by other cruisers on ActiveCaptain, the channel into Palm Cove is not terribly deep or wide.  I think we saw just under 6 feet of depth.  They had a small dredge out working on it when we arrived, so I suspect it will be deeper soon...at least for a little while. Fuel was pretty cheap here, so we topped off our tanks and filled a couple jerry jugs and tied up at the end dock for the evening.  The next day we will make our way from Jacksonville to Brunswick Georgia.

Later that evening, we were presented with one of the most spectacular sunsets we've seen, so we will leave you with more pictures from that.

Practice, Frustration, Practice, Practice

Sorry about the sparse posts recently, but it has been a very busy week. My wife finally came back to Florida so we could move the boat on to Georgia before the Florida tax man (envision grim reaper with a bank vault) comes to pay us a visit.

If you've read much of my ramblings, you know that my wife and I have fairly limited experience when it comes to boats large enough to live aboard.  Quite frankly, maneuvering a 38 foot long by almost 21.5 foot wide boat (that I've sunk that much money in...no pun intended) has had me a bit nervous.  But as I've mentioned before, we need to move the boat.  Now that the engines are both finally back together, I scheduled a lesson with the sole intention of practicing docking.

I had the captain we hired to help us move the boat from Daytona to Palm Coast come over one morning so we could spend a couple hours practicing before I had to go to work.  We started off doing touch and goes against a face dock and that went very well.  I then practiced maneuvering into a slip at the far end of the marina and that went OK too.  Then, about the time we went to practice at my assigned slip, some wind kicked up a bit and everything went downhill pretty fast.

The wind would keep blowing the bow of the boat around while I was backing in and I just wasn't "getting" how to bring the boat up to the upwind dock.  I was getting rather frustrated. We ended up stopping the lesson about that point and I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing.  I can land a small airplane on a runway the locals call "the bike path" in a 15 knot cross wind, but I couldn't seem to get the boat where I wanted in half that amount of wind.

After thinking about it a bit, it donned on me that the physics of what I was trying to do was pretty much impossible.  I don't have bow thrusters on the boat so any cross wind will blow the bow and there isn't really anything I, or anyone else, can do to stop it. This made me feel a bit better...but in the end I still need to know how to put a boat on a dock in more challenging situations, so I scheduled another lesson. Unfortunately the first captain wasn't available, but he did hook me up with another captain that could help.  As it turned out, this was actually a good thing.  Getting a second perspective on the situation helped me realize the error in my approach to the problem. I think it helped that this new captain was also a pilot so he could put things in flying terms that made a couple concepts "click faster" for me.

During this second lesson, the wind even cooperated a bit.  It was blowing about the same speed but the opposite direction...which replicated the issue I had at my slip over at an empty slip at the far end of the marina.  So, I was able to spend a fair amount of time maneuvering the boat and overcoming what had frustrated me a few days earlier.

I now have a much better "feel" for how the boat will react in different conditions.  As with many things, all it takes is practice...and I'm working on it.  I feel much better about maneuvering the boat when we take off for Georgia in a few days.