Waiting on Nicole


We find ourselves in Hampton VA, having a slightly less eventful week than last. Though, still in boat life you get a "surprise" on the daily, this time a seam in our mainsail opened up, fortunately Jim Miller of Doyle Sails in Portsmouth was able to help us get it fixed. Our mainsail is original 1999 so well past its useful life, thus on the hunt for a replacement - knew this was coming just hoped for a year out of the old girl. 

We got a bit of sailing in this week, Deltaville to Norfolk, Norfolk to Hampton then a day sail in the bay. We got to push some mud on our way back to our slip in Hampton, so now have been softly aground in Tenacious - a right of passage for any boat. A overland day trip to Williamsburg left us wanting - it seems we had very found memories from our last visit in 2008, this time around more of a ghost town than a vibrant colonial immersion. Maybe a covid hangover. 

So now the wait for weather... Nicole has been named moving over the Northern Bahamas and then projected up the US East Coast. The delay to get our main sail fixed gave us an opportunity to assess, glad we are still in Virginia. We are in good company with at least 100 other boats waiting this one out before trying to make any southing. Maybe next week?

We set up our Iridium Go, this will allow us to receive weather while at sea as well as communicate via text or phone. One very cool feature is that it will automatically provide our position to Predictwind that then is accessible for anyone to see our position as well as current weather conditions in our area. Link: https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/SV-Tenacious/



Comments

  1. Chris and Mark LignoulNovember 13, 2022 at 6:00 PM

    Well, of course the one year you guys are ready to go the weather gods decide to send a late season hurricane your way! I think it might be safe now. Safe travels my friends...Hugs, Chris

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cruising The Bahamas with Friends

Image
For the past week we have been traveling with our seemingly life long great friends on board, ok only 30 years but you get the picture. The Bahamas in winter are a bit tough when planning a week adventure, weather and tide are a huge factor as well as distances between useful ports for arriving or departing guests. Accidentally, or with great luck it seemed to all work out as we were able to meet in Nassau, get out 36 hours later make our way through the Exumas to Staniel Cay where our friends departed about 30 minutes before a strong cold front arrived that left us at anchor with 30 knots of wind and 12 hours of torrential rain. During the week - nothing but blue skies and relatively light winds. We were able to stop at Allens for a visit to the pre-historic iguanas, Highborne for some fuel and grocery, Warderick Wells for hiking, snorkeling and wildlife before arriving in Staniel for some swimming pigs, snorkeling and an afternoon at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club to celebrate Rae’s birt...
Read more

Sailing the Bahamas

Image
The Bahamas provide a great training ground for working on sailing skills, whether knocking off the rust, learning new skills or learning a new to us boat, well for us all of the above. The winds generally have an east component while the islands roughly run in a NW/SE direction so there is always a sailing angle. We have been sailing on the banks the past month, thus seas are 1-3 ft chop so very stable and easy conditions.  We have never used a spinnaker or asymmetrical spinnaker on any of our previous sail boats. Tenacious came with an asymmetrical spinnaker. We had brought this on deck in Annapolis to see if we had the bits and pieces required. We had a nice down wind run in the past week that gave us the perfect sub 10 knot winds to give the spinnaker a try. We were able to make 4-5 knots with an apparent wind of 6-8 knots. The sail was reasonable easy to handle with a sock to pull down/dose the sail. The sail is big and all 3 crew members were fully engaged to manage her....
Read more

All the Places We Have Been

Image
 Well it has been a while, apologies, we are in Georgetown now, arriving on March 7, 2023 to the Mecca of Bahamas cruising. Georgetown has a fabulous, large, well protected harbor and a substantial local support network built up around the cruising community, which first started coming here in the 1960's. We passed through in 2009 as well, very little has changed - a few more resorts but for the most part, same beach bars, cruiser volleyball and a lost of boats. Georgetown is also referred to as chicken harbor, because the sailing gets much more difficult/more open ocean exposer/fewer anchorages/longer distances, very few people leave until it is time to go back to the U.S. in April/May.  Let's roll back the clock three weeks though, we found ourselves in Oven Rock on Great Guana Cay, hiking into a fresh water cave - plenty of bats. Fishing was pretty poor.  A stop at Black Point Great Guana on our way north for some provisions and some hiking to some very nice ocean side...
Read more