If you don’t know about the Seven Seas Cruising Association, now’s the time to discover the benefits of membership. Michael and I joined while we were still in California, preparing Sea Venture for her adventure. We may have met some of you at the Oakland Boat Show when we manned the SSCA booth.

We had so much to learn. We’d come from years of coastal or dinghy sailing but had never done any real offshore cruising — certainly not with only ourselves in charge. What to take? How to outfit an ocean-going vessel? What about insurance? Anchoring? What equipment works best? What should we avoid? What about navigation, charts, radios? (Michael had these down, but yours truly? I could navigate from buoy to buoy, but that was it.) And then, my favorites: the adventure stories written by folk who’d been there, done that. We gleaned so much from the SSCA bulletins and from meeting SSCA cruising members.

It’s time to pass forward some of those blessings. No, we haven’t swallowed the anchor. We’ll still go cruising, especially when we need to hightail it out of the way of hurricanes, but we remember how wonderful it was to enter a strange port and find a friend or to have someone who’d been there point us in the right direction.

Beaufort is a lovely town, full of history and delightful folk. But it’s not the easiest place for provisioning or for catching a flight to elsewhere. So. When we’re here, we’ll try to help with that. Just give us a shout, preferably by email, and we’ll try to be there to catch your lines or offer what assistance we can.

Jot us a note at svseaventure at gmail dot com. We’ll be waiting to hear from you!

SSCA Website

Also, if any of you update your world on Facebook, come say hey at

Normandie on Facebook

]]> http://seaventure.us/2012/04/10/new-ssca-cruising-station-beaufort-nc/feed/ 0 svseaventure Image CS Logo NEW http://seaventure.us/2012/03/27/the-bow-thruster-arrived-and-now-theres-a-recall/ http://seaventure.us/2012/03/27/the-bow-thruster-arrived-and-now-theres-a-recall/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:16:32 +0000 Normandie http://seaventure.us/?p=1225 ]]> I must say, once the Lewmar head honcho in England got involved, folk jumped. We received the new motor within days (all the way from England) with only minimal damage. Do not, let me repeat, do not allow a vendor to ship something with any heft via UPS. We’ll fix this one ourselves, but really… And this one had been crated.

But, the day we received the motor, we got a recall notice for the part we’d already installed. Is someone trying to tell us something? Is this because we slid toward the dark side and are becoming a motor boat with auxiliary sails instead of a sailboat with an auxiliary engine?

Something to ponder.

More later.

As you see, the tunnel is in, the props (before they were primed or painted with anti-fouling) are set in place, and we’re ready for the new thruster motor to arrive to take the place of the damaged one above. I do hope we won’t have to warn folk not to use the marine supplier of said damaged thruster — who had told us it would be shipped by truck, but who tossed it into a flimsy box and sent it UPS. I hope that very soon the new thruster (first ordered on December 30) will arrive so that SV can get back in the water before that new bottom paint gets so old that we have to redo it.

If this isn’t an exercise in patience, I don’t know what is. Smiling here. Thinking happy thoughts. Glad Someone has our back. Glory!

Michael reminds her that he’s trying and that as soon as she’s waterborne again, we’ll massage her brightwork and make her shine.

In the meantime, we’re installing a bow thruster. Yes, we’ve fallen that far. No longer do we proclaim that as real sailors we will rely solely on good seamanship to slither into marinas. Understand, please, that here I use the royal “we” because all graceful slithering has been the job of Captain Michael. I’m the lasso artist who tosses the line and grabs the cleat. No, we do not jump down onto docks in an attempt to maim ourselves.  Michael handles Sea Venture with professionalism, using skills perfected when he flew off aircraft carriers. He’s good. But sometimes the wind and the current force us to stay away from an unyielding dock, a trick we can’t employ as readily here as we could in our cruising days because good anchorages with enough deep water are few and far between. Here we’ll be motoring more as we travel up and down the ICW and will be staying in more marinas. We won’t have the luxury of waiting for the wind to die or the current to cooperate.

Hence, the new toy.

This is the tunnel. The thruster arrived damaged, so we’re awaiting a replacement. There’s always something. I should never have prayed for patience.

And as we wait, look at what confronted us this morning. You can’t ask for much better than this, balmy temperatures included.

Come on over to my writing blog and take a look at Torre DeRoche’s new book. It’s a hoot.

Until the “chance of a thunderstorm or two” turned into something else in the wee hours of Monday last. Some suggest that a waterspout came through the area. All we know is that three boats dragged anchor. An 80 footer broke loose and went into the reeds. A few sailboats ended up with torn headsails. At the nearby airport, a hangar disintegrated while nearby small planes remained untouched. And Sea Venture’s stern lines pulled a cleat through what must have been rotting boards.

Which meant that our hefty lady went swinging. Her spring lines kept her from going forward, but nothing kept the stern in place. She bounced against a center piling, obviously more than once. Either she or that now bouncy piling (was it rotten too?) attacked a big sport fisher next door. We’re just now getting damage assessment by the insurance company.

At least she didn’t sink. At least her damaged rigging didn’t pull down the mizzen mast. She has a shattered solar panel now and an outboard that survived all those years in Mexico and Central America but came home to drown. (The piling broke the motor mount from the stern. We don’t know how it missed the Monitor.) Her gorgeously crafted boarding ladder is bent and broken. Stanchions are bent. Several chainplates need to be replaced. All aft standing rigging is either frayed from the rubbing or bent and broken. Her barbecue lost its support. The bimini is bent, broken, and torn. Some of her gorgeous teak cracked.

There’s work ahead. Lots of it. Perhaps we should consider this a blessing for the depressed marine economy. Think how many people will find employment now. Ah me. I’m glad we serve a big God, who wasn’t taken by surprise and who has all the answers we need — and all the provision. We’ll be back out there someday, wherever out there takes us.

Sea Venture has a parking space. Poor lovely lady must feel slightly out of place among the sport fishing vessels, gleaming and pampered, that surround her. She won’t blend.

She’s happiest at anchor in some remote and lovely spot, but sometimes life intervenes, and she, like the rest of us, doesn’t get what she wants. This is one of those times.

We, her owners, have placed her in the care of dock lines and fenders in Beaufort, NC, a 20-minute drive from home. I know, I know. She’s been our main home for so many years, she must feel an element of jealousy. But at least we’re lightening her load. Michael has made countless trips, removing all the tools, including welder and wood-working machinery, that took up most of the forward cabin. Extra clothing, bedding, towels have come out of hiding. And books. Oh, my, two full boxes of novels from the aft cabin sit in a guest bedroom here at Sleepy Creek. (Along with bags and boxes and files and…and…and stuff that must be sorted and tossed or stashed or, perhaps, returned to cupboards on board once we clean and air and do a little cosmetic work after all those sea miles.)

We’ve ordered new cushions for the cabins that never got them in the days when I was stitching and remodeling. My hard dink rests in the yard instead of on deck, and the rubber ducky will either go to West Marine for repair or have its air leak stopped somehow. Sea Venture’s due for a few weeks at the spa (notice the sad condition of her brightwork): fortunately, we can now give it to her.

Of course, those weeks must fit between jaunts to play at Cape Lookout or up the ICW. We wouldn’t want her to grow lazy. And I long to sit under the bimini once again, sipping Sumatra and watching sea antics instead of marina marvels.

These two pictures show her tied to the fuel dock just after she came in from the sea. Michael’s at-sea boots attest to the temperature out there in the Atlantic.  On the 18th, we moved around that pier to her parking place in Town Creek Marina, where she’ll sit for a month or two while we decide what’s next.

Here was their location at 4:15 today, almost to the NC border:

Look at the incredible depth contours of that ocean. Aren’t they amazing?

Sea Venture’s usual sail configuration of back-winded jib and centered mizzen allows her deep belly to fore-reach without really creating a slick. The slick is what tempers wave action; a hove-to boat will barely slip forward, usually at no more than .5 knots, keeping her from reacting to every whim of the wind and sea. It’s also a tactic we’ve used when we were just too tired and needed a break.  This time Michael set Sea Venture up with only the centered mizzen.

Our weather guru agreed with the National Weather Service that the storm probably wouldn’t reach Sea Venture, then off Cape Canaveral, until quite late. He suggested Michael and Bernie eat well, get some rest, make sure Sea Venture was ready for the storm, and then continue heading north as the main cell approached them from the southwest.

It came up suddenly much earlier than expected. Michael had already reefed the mizzen. The electronics were in the oven, he and Bernie were safely tethered in the cockpit, so all they had to do was center the mizzen and tie the wheel hard over.

He used the sat phone to call me when the wind was only blowing 36, before it climbed to 40 knots and approached 50. I could barely hear him on the satellite phone, but I was glad to hear his voice. What a different experience from the mess off Costa Rica. He asked me to pull up the infrared satellite pictures so I could help him understand the path and breadth of the systems.

Lightning flashes exploded around them, and we prayed for protection from its rampages. During what we thought was a lull between systems, he took off northward again and eventually got out from under the southerly system. Around 11PM, with lightning threatening in the northerly cell, he once again hove-to so that he wouldn’t sail into it.

He maintained position until the light show seemed to ease. By 10AM, they were nearing Jacksonville. By this afternoon, they’d crossed into Georgia.

seaventure
Latitude:30.78326
Longitude:-81.1257
GPS location Date/Time:05/15/2011 16:13:59 EDT