…ON A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL CRUISE

Distance traveled: 51 nautical miles
Travel time: 7 hours, 46 minutes

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the most scenic boating venues you could ask for.  However, being a large open body of water, a decent wind over a long distance and period of time will kick up significant waves and swells.  That was the case today, as we faced probably 3-3.5 foot swells from the ENE.  That’s not too bad if you can keep them behind you, but first today we had to run east out of Deltaville, Virginia before we turned south toward our destination.

This was probably the toughest trip we’ve taken on Sabrina, as far as getting tossed around.  It took us well over an hour to get far enough east to make that turn south.  The feature image on this post is our track today.  Note the stair-step path we took on the northern part of the trip.  That’s because we absolutely could not have taken those swells directly across our bow – the roll would have been more than we could tolerate.  As it was, anytime we were headed due east we were bouncing up and down.  Lesson learned: we were not prepared for that much of a rough ride.  We didn’t have everything inside the living area completely secured, so things got tossed around a bit.  It looks like the worst damage was one plate that fell on the floor and broke.  We were fortunate to be running with our friends Neal and Margretta on C’est la Vie.  If we’d been on our own we certainly would have turned back to Deltaville, and windy weather would have kept us there for several more days.

Tonight we are in Portsmouth, Virginia at Tidewater Yacht Marina.  It’s located at mile marker 0 on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), and we are docked next to C’est la Vie.  We joined Neal and Margretta for an early dinner and an adult beverage, and Kitty and I were settled on board Sabrina in time to see most of the second half of the Saints game.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is not good, so we’ll stay in Portsmouth through tomorrow night.  We’ll use any breaks in the weather to see a bit of Olde Towne Portsmouth, an historic neighborhood with good restaurants.  We’ll continue our trip on Tuesday – planning to make the 45 nm trip to Coinjock, NC including our first trip through a lock.

The trip from this point forward will be an entirely different type of boating for Kitty and me.  We’re used to running on the Chesapeake and on wide rivers like the Magothy.  The ICW is a chain of mostly narrow rivers and canals, so waves will not be a factor.  We always prefer to stay in marinas when we can, but there will be places where the distances between marinas are too great and we will need to anchor out. Kitty will have much more time to focus on her nature photography.  There are crossings of the Neuse River and the Albemarle Sound ahead of us, and we will need to use weather windows for those crossings.  But otherwise, weather (high winds at least) will be less of a factor in our travel.  Between now and just before Thanksgiving, we should be on the move almost every day.

-Kenny