The Captain Jerry

About noon we shoved off. Day one we hope to make it through Norfolk down the ICW. Motoring today will provide a good shake down run for the boat & crew. Believe it or not the combined experience with this boat underway between captain and crew is about an hour and a half. I have put sails up and down several times but have never left the dock.

Norfolk was pretty awesome rolling through Battleship Row in the navy yard. The view from water is a view you can’t get from anywhere else. The sheer size of the ships puts things into perspective.

Leaving Norfolk behind we settled into a nice pace of motoring down river. Since the biggest concerns depth (our draft is six and a half feet) and keeping an eye for bridges (we need 60 feet of clearance), we decided to motor by day. It is very hard to see on the rivers and canals of rural Virginia in the dark.

The day did end on a rather exciting note. We cleared a set of locks at Great Bridge which turned out to be not so great. Waiting in the locks for an hour put us after dark. There is a small place between the locks and the bridge where intended to dock for the night, but several other boats had beaten to all of the available spaces. Quickly getting on the radio to get the bridge raised before we drifted into it with current was challenging in the dark. When we made it through the draw be idge to find more docking on the other side, one of the other boat owners exclaimed, “you guys are lucky, the bridge shuts down at 5. That’s why we stopped. I didn’t think we could get through.”

This has been a fantastic learning experience! I freely admit that on this trip anyway, I did not know what I did not know.

The good ship Last Chance had been shipped overland from Toronto and had to be re-rigged. This was on top of the fact that the owner had just purchased her so he was unfamiliar with her. This allowed me to take part in setting up the boat as well as trouble shooting issues. I have found this to an invaluable experience. We installed the sails, took care of electrical issues. I even learned that the boat had two electrical systems due to air conditioning and heating being added later.

We then had to provision for trip which has now morphed into beginning the route down The Inter-Coastal Waterway (ICW) to give us a chance to get used to the boat before entering the open sea. We intend travel the ICW down to the Carolinas and cross the Gulf Stream toward the Bahamas. By then we should be familiar enough with the boat to attempt the open water passage to Bimini and the Bahamas as our entry into the Caribbean.

As mentioned in my last blog, I am heading south delivering a sailboat to the Caribbean with the owner and another captain friend of mine. We intended to sail with a flotilla of boats across open sea making a 10 day plus open water passage, but it has been decided that the boat and captain/crew have not been together long enough to take on such a voyage and we are instead heading south along the coast. This will give us time to gain knowledge and experience about the boat and each other to attempt longer passages later.