April 30, 1997
Dear Friends, Family and other Onlookers,
I can only hope
that we will find a place in the next 50 miles who will be kind
enough to let us use their phone line. The next town on the way
is called Coinjock, and the winds are picking up in the wrong
direction, so maybe we can stay there for a day and I can get
this page uploaded.
You are traveling with us on the Intracoastal Waterway, a man-made and natural canal which runs between Norfolk, Virginia and Beaufort, North Carolina. Achim and I came up this way almost exactly two years ago, our reintroduction to the United States after our Caribbean excursion. We liked it so much we decided to do it again. The closest thing I grew up with like it was Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean, but this is the Real Thing!
We left Oxford in the later afternoon on Sunday and caught a
stiff Northerly all the way down the Chesapeake Bay. sailing
through the night wasn't easy, but Pangaea handled it very well,
and by the next day we had our first day of serious sunshine in
weeks.
This lighthouse,
known as the Thimble, marks the entrance to Norfolk. Goodbye
Chesapeake, hello Intracoastal Waterway!
This
was the first of dozens of bridges we will have to cross on our
way down. This is a lift bridge on the edge of Norfolk. Mostly we
encounter swing bridges, and the folks who sit there all day and
open/close them are very nice, but sometimes hard to understand
their accents.
Achim has quite a
few reasons to be smiling. Our motor works better than ever right
now after much toiling and adjustment. Our new mainsail we picked
up second hand fits us perfectly. The new deck is beautifully
white, and we are making great progress towards... what? South,
that's about all we can say for now!
Behind Achim you can see... what is that? A moped? No, it's more like a motorcycle! Here you have a better view of it.
This Yamaha needs some fixing up, but it was a gift
from another sailing friend, helmut Von Straelen on the ketch
Josef Hayden. We run into Helmut wherever we sail, and we've
already used this powerhouse cycle in Tobago back in 1994. When
we ran into the Josef Hayden in Annapolis, Helmut was preparing
to cross back to Europe, and said he didn't want the thing
anymore. We hope to get it running soon. It just fits behind the
mizzen mast, but we have to find a way to keep it from rusting
away.
We
finally broke down and got ourselves a new computer, but we may
not be able to keep it. the thing is too combersome, it's not a
laptop, but it's smaller than a regular desktop. I love the thing
and it'll be hard to shlepp it back to Office Depot. In the
meantime we've used it to play CDs in the cockpit and to make the
finishing touches on this webpage, but I still use my Satie (old
Toshiba) to upload stuff on land. In the next days we hope to
cross the Albemarle Sound, and then we have about 60 miles to
Beaufort, North Carolina.