The Start of Another Great Adventure!
Tuesday 3rd - Saturday 6th October 2023
It has been more that 2 years since we returned from our last year afloat. In 2020 we had hoped to travel down the east coast of the USA, then work our way to the Caribbean and possibly over to Europe the following year. However, these were the plans before Covid took hold, and as things turned out, we ended up not leaving the USA, but cruising all the way to the south of Florida. The Dry Tortugas marked our furthest point of travel before we meandered back up the coast. We had a great time, with plenty of excitement and lots of good memories, but we found it a different, more solitary, experience cruising during the pandemic. On our return to New England we both ended up going back to work at Framingham State University for one additional year, before finally retiring in May last year.
Our plan now is to try again to get down to the Caribbean. We envisage taking the boat to Morehead City, NC as a staging point for a departure to the US Virgin Islands. Gloria will return home for a few weeks and Mike will be joined by three friends for the long offshore passage to the USVI (more on that later). Once we get there, Gloria will fly out to St Thomas to rejoin the boat and we will spend the following 7 months cruising the Eastern Caribbean. It takes such a lot of effort to get the boat down there, that we plan to haul out in Grenada for the summer of 2024 and then return after hurricane season. We hope to spend a further 7 months cruising, working our way back up the island chain and eventually back to the US and our home port of East Greenwich.
I think most people, when they picture cruising in the Caribbean, envisage clear blue water, idyllic beaches and cocktails at sunset, and it certainly can be like that. But actually getting there takes a lot of planning and hard work. Over the past year we have been working through a seemingly endless list of boat jobs, trying to ensure that Cotinga remains in good shape. We have updated our satellite communication systems and bought subscriptions to a variety of weather forecasting tools and services. We had to replace our life raft because it was over 20 years old and it was no longer possible to get it inspected and re-packed. We have booked a dock in Morehead City, NC and scheduled our haul out and storage down in Grenada for next year. We needed to change insurance companies so that we have coverage for the areas we wish to visit, and that turned out to be a tortuous and expensive process. Over the past few weeks we have been shuttling down clothes and supplies, ready to move aboard. As our departure date approached, friends asked us if we were ready. I think the honest answer to that would be “No”, but on Tuesday it was time to go … regardless of whether we felt ready.
Gloria’s brother Rod kindly offered to help us get the boat to North Carolina. Our plan was to sail offshore direct for Norfolk, VA and then follow the Intra Coastal Waterway (ICW) down to Morehead City. We left our car at Rod and Sue’s house and Sue drove us down to East Greenwich. We brought Cotinga into the dock, loaded up our remaining gear and spent the night on the dock ready for an early morning departure. We had been studying the weather forecasts carefully, and had identified a 3-day window where conditions should be reasonable. However, it also looked like the winds would be light and we would have to do a lot of motoring. We left East Greenwich Yacht Club, RI at 8am on Wednesday and motored down Narragansett Bay on smooth seas, under a cloudless sky. We opted not to stay overnight at Block Island, but to press on so that we had a little time extra time to reach our destination before the predicted bad weather arrived on Saturday. The first day was smooth motoring, capped off by a tremendous sunset. Wednesday night the winds remained light and the seas were fairly comfortable, but it felt really cold with a heavy dew soaking everything. A beautiful sunrise on Thursday was followed by more motor-sailing and a gradual increase in swell from the east. By mid afternoon the winds had picked up enough that we were actually able to sail for a couple of hours, before they eased off and we once again resumed motor-sailing. The seas continued to increase during the day on Thursday, with a large, moderate period swell from the east, that we assume came from tropical storm Philippe. By Thursday night Cotinga was rolling a lot and, although it was a warmer evening, it was a pretty uncomfortable night. Dawn arrived on Friday morning with glassy seas and 4-7 foot swells. We were lucky to avoid a couple of squalls and finally rounded Cape Charles into Chesapeake Bay in the middle of the afternoon. It took us several hours to make our way up to Norfolk and we finally dropped anchor just off Hospital Point, shortly after dark. It had taken us 59 hours to cover ~ 400 nautical miles. We were all tired, but delighted to have completed the passage with no major issues. We viewed this as a shake-down cruise and we were pleased that everything seemed to work as expected. Our only breakage was trivial but messy. A 1-pint glass jar of honey broke and deposited the contents all over the bottom shelf of the kitchen cabinets. What a mess!
We are going to spend a couple of days in Norfolk / Portsmouth before heading south.
You can track our position at the following web page
https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Cotinga/
Mike
N 36 50.654, W 76 17.984
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