For the last 1,000 miles, we’ve been steering Wee Happy by hand mostly. K got our bought-used-on-craigslist auto pilot to work for a little bit here and there, but mostly it’s a piece of junk and is destined for the trash. Sailing down the Jersey coast hand steering the boat through the night in the cold was the most difficult time we’ve had yet. We need an autopilot if we are going to go offshore at all again to make any crossing, and having one means that we can have our hands free to deal with other things on the boat. It also means that for the most part, you can sit back and read a book while on watch, and you can steal away for a few minutes at a time into the cabin to make coffee, etc.

So we’ve been looking at every marine supply store that we’ve found for the last 1,000 miles, and we finally found one in Morehead City, NC that had one in stock. Since the store is ten miles from the city docks, we had to get a bit closer with the boat in order to make the store accessible to us. So we found an inlet with a marina that is only a mile and a half from the store and went in for fuel. Took the folding bike to the store, got the new beautiful piece of engineering magic, and headed back to the boat.

On the way I passed an old jalopy of a farm truck on the side of the road with a scrappy sign that read “mixed greens” so I had to stop. This guy loaded mounds and mounds of freshly picked kale into a bag for me. His farm was hidden right behind the big box stores on the strip mall of urban sprawl that went on for miles and miles from Morehead city out to the west. He would only take one dollar for that huge bag of kale, and he was gracious and just plain thankful for having a customer stop! If only we could have gotten more! All these hundreds of cars pass this guy every minute on a four lane road bound for wal-mart or some other mega corporation that makes billions by paying workers in third-world countries at the expense of US jobs, and none would stop at this little farm stand for the deal of a lifetime on FRESH local produce with no middleman and no big bonus check for corporate executives. Needless to say, the freshly picked local farmer grown kale made Lala very happy when I got back to the boat!

I was so overjoyed about finally having the autopilot, and Lala was grinning from ear to ear because we had fresh crisp local farm grown kale to eat (a nice break from the junk-white-sunbeam bread that is the only bread we’ve been able to find recently)! So the day really turned around for us from there.

We jumped back out into the ICW and started heading southwest again, as I hooked up the new marvel of technology and Lala cooked up kale and eggs and hash for a late breakfast.

Yum!

Back in Elizabeth city, the “harbor of hospitality” that is listed as one of the top-100 places to live on the east coast, we met up with a bunch of cruisers that were heading south on the ICW. We took the opportunity to join up with the fleet and travel together with them on the great migration south. Since then we’ve been making very good progress and have been getting to know the other cruisers.

One couple is from Deltaville, which is just south of Annapolis. They are traveling on a 47 foot steel hull sailboat that they purchased for $100 and saved from the scrap-yard! Yes, they got a 47-footer for $100! Now that was just the hull. It came with no masts, sails, engine, or rigging. They’ve spent the last year living aboard (to save on rent) and fixing her up to sail. They just put her in the water last week with a new (but used) engine and new (but used) masts, and this is their shakedown cruise. Ann and Owen are overwhelmingly good-hearted and gracious, and we’ve been enjoying “rafting up” with them at night for the last few nights. It’s inspiring to hear about their huge $100 find and to see with our own eyes that this cruising lifestyle does not have to be expensive, and it is not just for the rich! The name of their vessel is Steel Dreams.

We met a solo sailor named Calvin, who has never sailed before in his life. He just purchased a 25-foot Hunter sailboat named “Woodstock” in Annapolis from the Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating association, and he is sailing it south now. They showed him how to hoist the sails, and he’s off and sailing now! One sure hopes that he’s reading about sailing technique and all that, but it is inspiring to see how someone can get the sailing “bug” and then just commit and go and do it like we are!

Now, towards the other end of the spectrum is “sol mates,” a 2007 32-foot catamaran that the owner just sold for $172,000! We met Mike (the previous-owner) and Daz (his hired help) in the dismal swamp, and we locked-through with them a few times and had burgers together in Elizabeth City. IT’s funny, because we saw the name of the boat and thought that since they were two guys, they must be gay! But after getting to know them we learned that’s not true. Mike hired Daz to help him deliver the boat from Annapolis to Florida to it’s new owner. 🙂 Still the difference between our wee happy vessel and the almost brand new 32 foot catamaran way like the difference between an old camper an a new condo.

We also met a French-Canadian couple traveling with their 10 year old son on a vessel named Turbulence I. What a weird name for a boat! Bryan, the skipper, has wanted to take his son cruising for years, and they finally got a boat and launched to make sure they did it before the boy reached his teenage years. They have a nice boat, a 1988 Catalina 33(?), which is spacious and comfortable and has a full cockpit tent, but it set them back by $70,000. So they have a mortgage and the boat is not paid-for. They’re also run into technical problems along the way and had to cover for a few costly repairs. Just yesterday while traveling with the fleet, their propeller broke, and they had to get towed back to a marina with the capability of performing that repair. This is terrible news for them, as we were all planning to spend Thanksgiving together in Wilmington Beach. Now they are stuck, alone and without power, in a marina where no one will be working because of the holiday! That means that in all likelihood they won’t be repaired until early next week.

The last man that we’ve been traveling with is Kimbel on a 28 foot vessel named Kestrel. He’s a rugged and stalwart individual with a wonderful sense of humor and a warm smile. Last night he had us over to his boat for a delicious dinner. He installed a RV three-burner stove with oven before he left on the trip, and he baked a butterball turkey and rosemary potatoes for us. His boat is a bit rough around the edges, but he’s installed the new stove/oven, refrigeration, a good new VHF radio, a new flushing toilet (aka “head”), and a strong bimini.

All in all, traveling with the fleet makes for a more enjoyable trip. If something breaks then people are right there to help you. We don’t feel so all alone, and we are making much better progress now that we leave early in the morning with the fleet.

Walking around Beaufort NC in search of bread, we found ourselves lost in some ancient colonial cemetery overgrown with live oak and Spanish moss. Weird!

So, we left around October 1st, and now it’s nearing the end of November. So we can simply say that we’ve been traveling for two months now. We just discovered the odometer function in our GPS chartplotter, and it’s been running since we installed the thing at the beginning of our trip. Today, right now, actually, we are crossing over the 1,000 mile mark. That’s an amazing amount of distance for us to think that we’ve covered.

Still, we can do some basic math for fun. So let’s divide 1,000 miles by two months; that’s simply 500 miles per month. Then let’s divide 500 miles by 30 days per month, and we get an average of 17 miles per day.

Wow! 17 miles per day! We are flying down the coast here! Hold on to your hats everyone! We have another 1,000 miles to go to make it to Miami, so we might be there by the end of January at this rate!

Hey all you sweet people! We’ve been using Pandora for a while now, and we’ve developed a beautiful and charming radio station on it for you. Just click on the link in the right-hand column on the top to listen.

The mix is lively and light and fun, and makes for smiley-listening.

If you’ve never used Pandora before, then this is an exciting day for you! Pandora is an amazing internet-radio technology that is both intuitive and intelligent. You can use it to create radio stations based on music styles, artists, and songs that you like.

So give it a shot. Tune in and enjoy! It’ll always be available on our web site, so when you want to listen to a lively fun radio station, click the link!

For those of you who were left wondering how we managed to escape the Great Dismal Swamp, here is a little update on some of the details of the last few days. After motoring and sailing through the remainder of the Swamp, we arrived in the town of Elizabeth City, which apparently has an international, legendary reputation for welcoming boaters coming out of the Great Dismal Swamp. Their reputation is well deserved. It was like a surreal dream coming out of the swamp into a sunny harbor, where several very friendly people waved to us from the shore and assisted us in tying up to a free dock provided by the city. We were told upon arrival to come to the free wine and cheese party sponsored by the city as a way to welcome boaters. Seriously?! Ok, we’d love to! Our guidebook said that there was a fitness center in town who offered a sauna, hot tub and showers to boaters for $5. SIGN US UP! We had been looking forward to this for days. Was this town for real? Free docks, wine parties, and hot tubs, all just for us?!? I guess it was our reward for surviving the Great Dismal Swamp! The main street looked like a movie set, perfect and calm and clean, like something from the 1950’s. We got to the fitness center to find out the guidebook had lied. There had never been a hot tub or sauna there, but there was a hot shower, which we enjoyed, although with a little disappointment! Back at the wine party, we met up with a large group of people heading out early the next morning to continue south and have been traveling more or less with them for the last few days. Tonight we are all “rafted up” with them in the harbor of Oriental, NC, where we were also offered free wine by a wine tasting party that was happening on someone’s porch! I like North Carolina!

We also met a guy who has even less sailing experience than us!
He bought his boat on Ebay, picked it up and sailed out of the harbor on his trip south without EVER having sailed before, not even once! He said the people who he bought the boat from told him which rope to pull on to raise the sail, and that’s about all he knew when he left. He seemed to be doing fine though, and he was a great inspiration to me!
Today I had somewhat of a breakthrough in understanding how to sail. I’ve been increasingly annoyed with how much we have had to run our motor the last few days on the Intracoastal Waterway. Mostly it’s because we are in channels that are too narrow for sailing. And also because sometimes we need to cover a certain distance to the next harbor before it gets dark, and motoring is the only way to get there fast enough. This afternoon we entered into a large bay with a nice wind and immediately everyone in the sailing fleet put the sails up and turned the motor off. Ahhhh, so lovely! A silent break from the annoying hum of that motor! Then we had to make a turn towards our destination, which put us directly into the wind. All the sailboats took the sails down and put the motors back on, because everyone knows you can’t sail directly into the wind. But remembering some tips that our friend Rene the sailing instructor told us, I realized that we COULD sail into the wind, at least ALMOST into the wind. K. was not feeling so well and was resting inside the cabin, and so I experimented by myself in getting the boat to sail into the wind. It meant we had to zig zag a little, but it was so much more enjoyable than motoring, and I really increased my confidence in sailing. And it was much slower. That is the trade-off. That is why our whole culture is so addicted to motors. We want to go the speed WE want to go, not the speed the wind or other power will take us. I’ve spent a lot of time the last few weeks thinking about this trade-off. I plan to write more about it as I refine my thoughts on this subject. We are exploring an interesting edge of being on a different timeline, one that is best not measured in miles per hour.

We’ve hooked up with a flotilla of sailboats transiting the North Carolina outer banks and sounds via the ICW, and we’re really putting the miles under the keel, so to say. Tomorrow’s goal is Oriental, North Carolina, which is rputed to be the state’s sailing capital.

The travelling here is way way way more dismal and swampy than the Great Dismal Swamp. Weird.

The sun is out, and it’s about 70 degreez this afternoon. We haven’t made it to a beach yet, and we dedcided to skip Kitty Hawk. If all goes well then next week we’ll be day siling on the ocean along South Carolina’s coast.

There is no cell phone signal out he, so our internet and phones don’t work. We has to come to a cafe on land to make this post. So, more will come when get back in cell phone range tomorrow or Sunday.

In our ongoing quest for a warm beach, we have endured cold and rain, long days steering the boat without an autopilot, bad nights sleep for weeks on end, the New Jersey coast…in short we have faced trials and tribulations of many kinds. But today our journey towards the sun brought us to unknown land of the

GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

And to get to the Great Dismal Swamp we had to pass through the gates of Norfolk. As mentioned in the last post,Norfolk is the center of the U.S. Naval Universe. Enormous warships loomed all around us, and a massive industrial complex was built up along the waterfront to service these giant steel monsters.

Seeing so many powerful ships up close is undoubtedly impressive, and we were treated to a view of the shipyards that I don’t think visitors passing through Norfolk in a car would get to see. But I couldn’t help being stunned at how much human energy, intelligence, and labor, natural resources, and money were being directed towards war and destruction. I love to imagine instead that we, as a culture, could put that energy, money and resources instead into creating a better world, into creating more beauty, into solving the immense problems that face us. I think that putting energy into these types of endeavors would have a greater effect on the freedom that the military is supposed to be “defending” for us.

Puttering along in our tiny sailing vessel, I felt like we were tiptoeing through the heart of the beast, hoping it wouldn’t awaken and devour us.

We made it through unscathed, but the next challenge lay before us….

THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

What is the Great Dismal Swamp and why would we want to go there? In order to continue south from here, we could go around Virginia on the ocean, or take the Intracoastal Waterway, which is like a shortcut through Virginia to the North Carolina coast. Everyone that we have talked to, as well as numerous guidebooks, have advised us NOT to take the ocean portion of the Virginia coast, as it can be rough and dangerous and there are no harbors to duck into for safety if a storm comes up. So we are taking the Intracoastal Waterway, which is supposed to be safe and easy, and scenic…..but wait, it goes through the Great Dismal Swamp?!? That doesn’t sound appealing at all! What poor marketing team named that place? Well, as it turns out, it was named by Col. William Byrd in 1728, who explored the area with plans to make a canal to improve the shipping routes in the area, and declared it to be a dismal swamp. The canal was completed in 1802, and is the oldest canal in the U.S.
Today, the route is called “scenic”, and we were actually quite shocked to find that it was scenic, at least compared to the industry along the river in Norfolk. Trees decked in glorious fall colors line a narrow, straight canal, and the forest is thick and abundant with life.

But it does have the eerie, dark feeling of a swamp….the trees are close and dense, and you feel as if you could easily be lost like in the Blair Witch Project….
A sense of foreboding loomed….
Shortly after we entered the canal, we started to have engine problems. A that very moment, 6 vultures circled overhead. (at least they looked like vultures) The air was still. (no sailing here!) Would we be stuck for the night in the Great Dismal Swamp?

Once again our guardian angels stepped in and helped us out. After a little messing with the engine, but not really doing much to it, it started back up and kept going fine until we reached the North Carolina Welcome Center, where we are docked up very very closely next to about 6 other boats for the night. Oh, and as if on cue from the Dismal Powers that Be, the sky turned gray and it started to rain.

We made it to North Carolina, which we have held as our symbol of arriving in “the South”! Our goal now is within reach: the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a haven of long, endless beaches! But we are not out of the Great Dismal Swamp yet, and y’all will have to tune in tomorrow to our podcast that continues our dangerous journey through the perils of the swamp…..

Norfolk is the base of US Naval operations on the Atlantic coast. It is the staging area for all ship deployments on the Atlantic. That means that all naval ships sent to Iraq, etc… come from Norfolk. We here are immersed in navy ships. Our humble vessel plods along slowly and traces a path of least interference through the unending wharfs and piers covered with warships.

Got to wear shorts and flip flops for a few hours today! The warmer weather is coming!

Tomorrow: THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP.

This morning we found the dew so magical on the Wee Happy. Just look at how it accumulated on the main sail’s strap!

The morning was full of mist and serenity on Gwynn Island before we took off for our run to Norfolk.