Return to Seasons

Yesterday, from New London to Manhasset, started out lovely, but turned into a beast.

Right on schedule, we all raised our sails, dropped our moorings, and headed down the Thames into Long Island Sound. There was not much wind, but what there was of it had already shifted around to NNW. We – Bear, Jade, and Jabiroo II – all motor-sailed, kept in contact on the VHF, and fought the current on what was an exceptionally warm night, in the low 50s.

By 2am, with the genoa out and a double-reefed main, I finally turned off the engine. Over the next couple hours, our speed increased from the low 5s to the low 7s as the wind increased and the adverse current slacked. By 4am, I was starting to feel a little out of control and took the prudent measure of swapping the genoa for the staysail. That dropped my speed back into the mid-5s, but I felt a lot more comfortable, especially knowing that more breeze was on its way.
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I am writing this from the Thames River in New London, Connecticut, on a mooring just a hundred yards or so from Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor rail line. I made it in from Newport a little before five yesterday afternoon after a wild ride over.

The Amtrak train going by in New London through the glass of our cockpit enclosure, salt-stained because of the rough trip over from Newport.

After the catastrophic failure of our marine diesel engine – a phrase that mechanics we talked to used with regularity – we had no idea whether we would be able to get a re-power in time to go south for Margaret’s sabbatical as we planned. Not only were we unsure of whether we could afford to replace the engine, we had no idea how long a re-power would take.

The destruction of our engine happened on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, so it was unlikely we were going to get answers until Tuesday, which was, at that point, three long days away. I did make some calls to friends in the area who gave us recommendations for mechanics and yards. Almost everyone in Rockland seemed to recommend Pat Ricci at Thomaston Boat Works, a Volvo dealer. On Sunday morning I gave him a call, just thinking I would be leaving a message. But Pat picked up and kindly spent fifteen minutes telling me what were going to be some of the obstacles in the installation – footprint, space, transmission and our prop, etc. – and priced out a new Volvo install for us. With some 17k for the engine, he thought the total would be around 21-22k. He also thought someone would be able to do the re-power in a matter of a few weeks, if we could just find someone who was not overly committed. But Pat was backed up with work until at least November. I was grateful for the information.

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Yesterday, while coming down Buzzards Bay, I spent some time looking at models for later in the week and over the weekend. It seemed like I could make a run down the Jersey coast if I could just get to the western part of the sound by Thursday. Knowing that really motivated me to put the miles in, because before that I had little reason to hurry west.

As I was checking the long-range weather, Buzzards Bay was a bit choppy with 12+ out of the west. With those sorts of conditions, I had been imagining that Rhode Island Sound would not be all that fun. But all I needed was a little incentive to get me to push through, and the possibility of getting to the Chesapeake by next weekend was more than enough.
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First off, I should say that I am writing this while underway on my cell phone using voice to text. So there may be some grammatical errors and things; hopefully you can just overlooked them.

I dropped Margaret off at the dock this morning. She is headed to an artist residency in Quebec, but is first driving down to Annapolis to pick up her car. It’s pretty ironic that she is going to be in Annapolis later this afternoon and that’s where I’ll be trying to get to for the next week to 10 days or more.

I am currently heading south in Buzzards Bay. There’s about 12 knots of wind out of the west northwest. And the sun is out warming the cockpit.
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Since folks have been asking about how we lost our Yanmar 3JH4E, what we replaced it, and how the process went, we thought we would detail some of our experiences in a series of blog posts. This is the first.

Margaret had left me at the laundromat a few hours before. She was heading off to an artist residency for two weeks in Georgia, and I was going to take Bear south from Rockland, Maine, to the Chesapeake. We figured we would next see each other in Solomons, where my folks were coming to meet us for a couple days.
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Nearly everyone has heard of Cruisers Forum. Like a lot of people, I used to spend a lot of time on the site. Then we bought Bear, and I slowly realized how irrelevant and useless most of the information on there was. After maybe a year of owning Bear, I had stopped visiting Cruisers Forum, except when it turned up in a Google search. Cruisers Forum had done a great job of fueling my dreams, but it did not do much to help me live them.

Jeff aboard our dinghy in Maine 2018

Back when I owned my Catalina 22, I was looking for a dinghy for my first big trip, what became a three-week trip to the Chesapeake with a buddy of mine. But I was also hoping that the dinghy would last me through the purchase of a “real” cruising boat, which I hoped to do in five to seven years. Naturally, I went to Cruisers Forum to ask some questions about the West Marine dinghy, which I was considering buying.

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