Hilton Head Island: Steve Earley is on his way; the better half

 

Steve Early and his 17’, Welsford Pathfinder, SPARTINA, have embarked on their longest cruise yet.  

Steve launched yesterday in Charleston and as you can see is heading southwest toward Hilton Head Island, which is near the lower left hand corner of the above image, and beyond.  It looks to me as though he will be here in two or three days.

You can follow his progress as I do at:

https://maps.findmespot.com/s/32VC#history/assets

You have often heard me say that the Southern Hemisphere is the better side of the Equator, but I have never before seen so clearly how much more land there is in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern, and therefore more people, and therefore more problems, than in a new world map projection.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/new-world-map.html

Look at all that water.  No wonder I like it down there.

Hilton Head Island: seventh circumnavigation 2

 We drifted for a few minutes before a slight exhalation filled the sails and GANNET began to slip along at two to three knots.  At least there were no waves to collapse the sails.  The Atlantic was as smooth as had been the sheltered water on the landward side of the island.  I wished for more wind, but at least we were moving, and there are worse places to be on a sunny winter afternoon than on a small sailboat gliding across glassy water.

As the hours passed I watched the shore a couple of miles to port and two ships a few miles to starboard heading for the Savannah River and began to consider where I would spend the night.

GANNET’s outboard is an electric Torqeedo.  I like it for several reasons.  It breaks down into three parts and is easy to mount and remove from the transom.  It is quiet.  It is clean.  It precludes my having to carry gasoline and oil on board.  It’s battery can be charged from GANNET’s solar powered electrical system.  But it has drawbacks in that it is expensive and has limited range.  Just what GANNET’s range was at that moment I was uncertain.  I had three Torqeedo batteries on board.  One was ten years old and hadn’t be used in a long time and might be dead.  The other two were probably good for 6-8 miles each powering at 2.5-3 knots in smooth water and not against wind or tide.

At 5 PM we were nearing the north end of Hilton Head Island and the entrance into Port Royal Sound.  Sunset would be at 6.  I could certainly lower the Torqeedo back into the water and power into the sound and anchor there for the night, but the Atlantic Ocean was as smooth as a good harbor and I was reasonably certain that the night would be calm.  Ten minutes before sunset we were in 35’ of water a mile and a half off the northeast corner of the island and a half mile south of a buoy marking the dredged channel into the sound.  I went forward, pulled the Spade anchor and deployment bag onto deck and anchored.  As I made my way back aft I l was facing east.  The nearest land was Bermuda eight hundred miles away.  I figured it would provide sufficient shelter and went below to turn on the masthead anchor light and pour myself a drink which I took on deck with Boom 2 speakers and sipped and listened to Bach.

Dinner was freeze dry beef stew bought three years earlier with the water heated on the JetBoil stove.  Old times.

At sea I sleep on the windward pipe berth.  Well we were technically at sea, but neither berth was to windward and I had removed the berths to have the covers replaced, so I retired for a  quiet night on the v-berth.  A few years earlier the eye of Force Five Hurricane Matthew passed near where we were anchored.  Timing is almost everything.

Hilton Head Island: seventh circumnavigation 1

 

On Tuesday morning I went down to GANNET at about 9 AM to prepare her for another epic voyage.  Well, not really so epic.  

Getting ready took longer than usual.  GANNET is no longer self-sufficient.  When really voyaging I could leave and return to the little boat with nothing more than the devices I carried in my messenger bag.  No longer.  I’ve removed as much from her as possible, including the Jordan drogue, clothes and most food.  I had to fill various water containers, stow things, fit the Torqeedo and check that it started.  It did.  Fit the tiller pilot.  Put the Velocitek in its mast mount.  Move the anchor and rode deployment bag from the bow to beneath the forward hatch.  Remove the mainsail and the tiller covers and the covers for the compass and the depth finder.  In all it took me more than an hour, but at 10:30 I was ready.  I undid the line to my new pile float and realized that I had placed the bracket on which I intended to hang it too high on the piling.  I tried tossing it up there two or three times and gave up and dropped it in the water.

I pushed GANNET back out of her slip.  The wind was northwest at 8 knots, pushing her back in, but the tide was still ebbing which neutralized that, and I leapt on board and put the Torqeedo in reverse until we were clear enough to go forward.

We were heading around Hilton Head Island counter-clockwise.  The northwest wind was behind and perfect.  I unfurled the jib, feeling resistance from one of the lead blocks on the furling line that I need to replace, set the Autohelm to steer, stopped the Torqeedo and tilted it out of the water.  It had been on for about seven minutes and its job was over for the day.  Water began to ripple past the hull as I brought in fenders and dock lines.

Past the marina Skull Creek runs south for almost two miles.  I’ve only sailed this way once before and that was when I left Hilton Head for Panama two years earlier during my previous circumnavigation.  I was careful to stay between the Intracoastal Waterway markers and was navigating by eye and the iSailor app on my iPhone.  The water in the channel is twenty and more feet deep.  In places just outside it is only one or two feet deep

Familiar restaurants on the shore seemed to fly past.  Dockside.  Hudson’s.  The wind was on the beam and gusty, heeling and rounding up the little boat sometimes more quickly than the Autohelm could respond.  At the turn at the marker at the bend to the west, we came hard on the wind.  I sheeted in the jib and took the tiller myself.  Two power boats had just come under the bridge and were heading toward us.  I hoped they understood sailboats well enough to know that if I were headed I would have to cut across their bows.  I had no room to tack away.  But I was not confident that they did.  

GANNET was heeled well over and making six knots under her small jib alone.  Smooth water.  The wind held steady.  Fine sailing, but I was relieved when we could ease sheets and fall off for the opening beneath the center of the bridge which is the only way on and off the island.  Mast height on GANNET is not a worry.  A small power boat was tied to a bridge piling fishing.  A brief lull in the bridge’s wind shadow and we were through.  

A curving half mile past the bridge the channel turns south again.  I don’t know where Skull Creek ends and Calibogue Sound begins.  Perhaps at the bridge itself.  With the wind now on the starboard quarter I set the mainsail and our speed rose to six and seven knots.  And then GANNET went out of control, rounded up and headed for a nearby shoal.  I glanced down and saw that the plastic end fitting on the tiller pilot arm had broken.  I grabbed the tiller, got us under control and when the sound opened wider, turned GANNET into the wind, loosely hove to, and slipped into the cabin and forward where I grabbed another tiller pilot, returned to the cockpit and swapped the old one out.  Back on course and the sailing was glorious.  Good wind.  Smooth water.  Warm sunshine.  February.

My plan had been to anchor somewhere near the south end of the island, but we were off Harbor Town at noon and no sailor wants to waste good wind, so I decided to keep on going.

We passed Hilton Head’s South Beach at 12.30.  A woman walking on the beach waved at GANNET.  I waved back for GANNET who was busy sailing and unfortunately has no hands.

Hilton Head Island is eleven miles long, the second biggest barrier island on the Atlantic Coast—New York’s Long Island is the biggest—and shaped like a shoe running northeast-southwest.  We were rounding the toe and heading up the sole of the shoe which is an almost continuous hard white sand beach that is perhaps Hilton Head’s chief tourist attraction.  However you don’t make a sharp turn and you don’t sail close to the shore.  Shoals extend out two to three miles.  The channels are marked, but I kept close watch on our position on my iPhone. Finally we were able to make the turn to the northeast three miles offshore.  As soon as we did the wind went behind us and died.

To be continued.

Hilton Head Island: my seventh circumnavigation

 You may be surprised to learn that if I can get GANNET out of her slip tomorrow against expected NNW wind I will embark on my seventh circumnavigation.  This one will be more modest than the first six.  I propose to circumnavigate Hilton Head Island which is only eleven miles long.  If all goes well this will take three days.  Remember that I’m old and slow.  I plan to anchor for two nights and sip desirable liquids and listen to music without being concerned that I am bothering anyone and watch sunsets.  It will not be a great adventure, but if you have been paying attention you know I do not seek adventures.  I hope it will be enjoyable.  I am a married monk, but like other married monks in the past, I do seek pleasure.

If you want to follow I will set the Yellowbrick to update positions every hour while I am underway.  

Surely you have the tracking page bookmarked among your favorites.  In the remote chance you inexplicably have failed to do this the tracking page is:  

https://my.yb.tl/gannet

L’Chaim

Hilton Head Island: how the other half lives

 Carol ventured from the Evanston condo yesterday and walked down to the lake where she took the above photos.  I thank her for permission to use them and for her not asking me to join her there.

Here is what Hilton Head looked like at about the same time.

Hilton Head Island: four small boats; longitude; and a poem

Yesterday I watched Pinckney Island appear and disappear in fog.  Today I watch it appear and disappear in rain.  But the forecast for next week is good and I have hopes of going sailing and anchoring out for a night or two.  Before I do I will have to inventory what is still left on GANNET.  

Steve Earley is coming this way next month.  With the freedom of retirement he is taking longer cruises and venturing into new waters.  He plans to launch SPARTINA in Charleston and follow the Intracoastal waterway to Jacksonville, Florida, or nearby.  I am looking forward to seeing SPARTINA from our windows.  Oh, yes, and Steve, too.

(Parenthetically I wonder how come I don’t get to retire.  My friend, Michael, has his date.  Carol has hers.  Steve already has.  Then I recall that my grandmother said that I retired the day I graduated from college, and that I have been free now for almost fifty years, and I have no desire to retire.  Time will retire me soon enough.)

In a recent post in his Log of Spartina Steve wrote of two appealing small boats.

http://logofspartina.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-great-journey-pathfinder-launched.html

One is COD, a 23’ dory being cruised by a young brother and sister on the Intracoastal from North Carolina to Florida.   Their story pleases me and I smile with admiration for them.

I copy the link Steve provides to an article about them which I believe you will enjoy.

https://towndock.net/shippingnews/brother-sister-dory-story

The other boat is a sister ship to Steve’s Welsford Pathfinder, ELIZABETH, which has been built with a cuddly cabin.  I do not find the Drascombe models with cabins aesthetically pleasing, but ELIZABETH is.  The proportions are right and I think she is lovely.  I applaud Noah, the builder and I assume designer of the cuddy.

After receiving Ken’s email mentioned in the last entry, I have been thinking about navigation which brought to mind a very good book, LONGITUDE, about John Harrison who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea with his chronometers.

‘Genius’ is one of the most abused words.  I have observed that mostly it is nothing more than an exclamation of admiration, like ‘super star’.  A former President even claimed to be a genius which is clear proof of how debased the word has become.  But if anyone is a genius John Harrison is.  I prefer the word ‘original’ to ‘genius’ and John Harrison was certainly an original.

LONGITUDE, the book by Dava Sorbel, is well worth reading, but in looking it up I learned that there was a two part television series based on the book and with the same name.  I bought it for $3.99 from Amazon and watched yesterday.  While it is perhaps a little too long, the TV series dramatically depicts Harrison’s decades long struggle to obtain the £20,000 prize offered by the British Admiralty for the first to solve the longitude problem.  How important this was to the Admiralty can be judged by knowing that would be more than $3,000,000 in present day money.

The series moves back and forth from Harrison’s time to the 1920s and 30s when a retired British Naval officer, Rupert Gould, found Harrison’s chronometers in poor condition and his own struggle to restore them.

Carol and I have seen Harrison’s chronometers at the Greenwich Maritime Museum.  They are objects of beauty as well as technical marvels.  We all owe both John Harrison and Rupert Gould a great deal.

Read the book; watch the TV series; or do both.  You will be well rewarded.

Navigation from Harrison to GPS did not change much, although the means of obtaining accurate time did.  On my early circumnavigations I got time signals with a Zenith Trans-Oceanic Radio.  It was big and heavy and powered by 8 D cell batteries.  How I kept it dry on EGREGIOUS I do not recall.

I am rereading Yeats, among others, and last evening came across ‘Under Ben Bulben’ which I have admired since I was young.

The poem is too long for me to copy here.  You can read it at:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43298/under-ben-bulben

The ending provides Yeats own epitaph:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,   

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago; a church stands near,

By the road an ancient Cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase,   

On limestone quarried near the spot  

By his command these words are cut:

               Cast a cold eye   

               On life, on death.   

               Horseman, pass by!

I had that in mind when I wrote the last words in STORM 

PASSAGE.

 

Hilton Head Island: waxed; faces; flags; a bargain

 Something remarkable is happening today.  The sun is shining.  There is not a cloud in the sky.  The temperature is 61F/16C.  And I biked to GANNET and finished waxing her hull.  With a 14 knot west wind blowing GANNET toward the dock, the stern line to the pile float saved me from constantly having to push her away.  Because Audrey has yet to gallop by on her horse—she is making lame excuses that the horse is needed to pull pods containing the Armada to their new home in Virginia—when leaving I looked back a boat length away.  I think GANNET passes the test, but then it may help that I am more than half blind.

Of vision, Larry noticed a similarity in GANNET’s face and mine in the photo posted yesterday of GANNET from astern.  I recall someone commenting on this years ago when I ran a photo of her being towed to San Diego.  GANNET and I are both old and one-eyed, but she is prettier.

Mark noticed in the background in another of yesterday’s photos a boat flying a Confederate flag.  I don’t know the owner of that boat, but having become aware of it, I glanced over today and found that the boat now flies not a Confederate flag, but two United States flags.  And a Trump banner.

An email from Ken, an American living in Perth, Australia, about sextant navigation caused me to wonder if one of the books I used to learn celestial more than fifty years ago, Mary Blewitt’s CELESTIAL NAVIGATION FOR YACHTSMEN is still in print.  Amazingly it is.  Now in its 13th edition.  There even is a Kindle edition.  I am going to buy it to see what if anything has been changed.

Below is a screen shot of the Amazon listing page.  Note the edition in the middle.  A bargain.  “Only 1 left in stock—order soon.”  

Hilton Head Island: ringed; PATHS OF GLORY; digital sextant

 

From 7 PM Friday until 11 AM this Monday morning the temperature here has been 45º or 46ºF/7.5ºC and most of the time it has been raining.  Not quite Chamber of Commerce weather, but there is worse.  Carol just experienced a white out in lake effect snow in Evanston where the wind chill is below 0ºF/-18ºC.  

Rain has ceased here for a few hours.  High tide was near 11 AM, so under continued solid low overcast I carried the pile ring down to GANNET and easily fit it over the top of the piling.  GANNET now has lines at four points and should not rub against the dock.  

That was quick.  I only saw the pile float on the other boat a week ago.

I watched PATHS OF GLORY on Amazon Prime yesterday, or rather re-watched because I saw the film when it was first released in 1957.  There is a recent unintentional pattern of my rereading or re-watching books and films that influenced me as a teenager.  I have no fondness for my childhood and no desire to return to those less than golden days.  I am enjoying being an old man.  

Kazantzakis disappointed, but Joyce Cary’s THE HORSE’S MOUTH, both novel and film, and PATHS OF GLORY most definitely do not.  I have long believed that most soldiers do not die for a cause; they die because of the egos and stupidity of generals and politicians.  And once kings.  That belief is based in part from my reading history, but in part from PATHS OF GLORY.

Stanley Kubrick directed the film shot dramatically in black and white and is listed as one of the three screenwriters.  Kirk Douglas stars in perhaps his finest performance.

Set in WW1 1917 France, the story is of the motivations and consequences of a forced hopeless attack on a German position.  I am not going to say more except that PATHS OF GLORY might be the best film you have never seen.

From Zane comes a link to a digital sextant for which I thank him.  This is an intriguing idea, but I expect not cost effective and I wonder about its durability at sea.  As the article states, price is not yet available.

https://www.oceannavigator.com/a-digital-sextant/

I navigated by sextant on my first two circumnavigations.  I still carry a plastic one on GANNET, but haven’t taken a sight in decades.  

I think that there is something to be said for any sailor going offshore to know how to take a noon sight for latitude which is quite easy and can also give a rough idea of longitude.  I googled ‘noon sight’ and found some explanations for how to take one that were incorrectly simple and many that were way too complicated.  Maybe someday I’ll write out my own.

Hilton Head Island: fog

 Our second successive foggy day.  

I biked to GANNET yesterday afternoon when it partially cleared and tried to wax the hull.  With near 100% humidity, the wax didn’t dry and was almost impossible to remove.  I soon gave up.

Today the fog remains dense into early afternoon and I won’t even try.  

I continue reading IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE and am half way through.  Reading the novel while an impeachment trial is underway is illuminating.  Fact and fiction blur and merge.  

Hilton Head Island: a ring and a prayer

 

I walked out to the end of the dock a few days ago and saw the pile ring above.  I had never seen one before.  This is an excellent idea which enables use of four dock lines instead of three and prevents a boat from rubbing against the dock.  When I got back to the condo I googled and found they are manufactured by a company based in Auckland, New Zealand, and for sale in the U.S.  The inside diameter of this model is 15”.  I measured the piling today.  It is 12” and I placed an order.

https://marinaquip.com/pile-ring/

I do not pray, but if I did, this would be a good one.  The poet is William Butler Yeats.