If only I was 30 years younger…
I had heard early on in our lockdown that we can expect a boom of pandemic babies at the end of 2020. It’s now looking like we can expect that to extend to early 2021.
I can just see the most popular baby names of 2020/2021:
Covidia
Karona
Pandemia
Kovid
Quarentina
Kovie
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In my continuing effort to provide entertainment value, I have another trip coming up.
Plan to be off the dock in New Bern NC at first light on 9 May, stop for fuel, down the Neuse to the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) to Chesapeake Bay and up to Solomons MD arriving around 14 May. I’m usually an ocean guy but this trip makes more sense on the inside.
I’ll post the tracker link again when we get closer to departure.
Lots of logistics are done already. Provisioning will be done closer to departure. The total plan is too long and a little weird to post. Meal plan that flows to shopping list. We’ll see what blows up when I go shopping and can’t find things.
Meal plan as it stands:
Pasta/sauce (sauce homemade and home canned from stock)
Meadle (ground beef and elbows goulash-thing made ahead, vacuum-sealed and frozen)
Curried chicken (owner’s wife making ahead, vacuum-sealed and frozen)
Shrimp stir-fry made on board
Roast pork tenderloin made on board
Kielbasa made on board
Lunches mostly sandwiches but could well have some soup made on board
Breakfasts alternate cooked breakfast (mostly eggs) and yogurt/fruit/bread
Big snack bag. Always ginger snaps. The rest is driven by crew preferences.
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Safe travels look forward to following the adventure!
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Awesome! I really enjoyed ‘watching’ the last trip…thanks for sharing! Safe voyage
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Nice. We really enjoyed following your journey last time. I also like hearing how you plan and provision.
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I think when this sh*t is over some time before the end of summer “someone” should invite us to a yacht party! Just sayin’
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Good. I sell this stuff to sailing magazines. For y’all it is my attempt to provide some diversion and give back to the HO community. grin
There are nautical maps called charts and like everything else the Internet has been a game changer. There are a couple of crowd-sourced annotation engines that help with places of interest (marinas, anchorages, bridges, locks) and hazards. Today i went through a number of sources for our planned route and took notes on things I care about. I have the drawbridges enroute all printed out for planning purposes. I have the last of the documentation for NC, VA, and MD waters printed (I’m transportation infrastructure. Who knew? grin)
Most people have at some point been stuck at an open drawbridge. Sorry about that. The nations waterways really are economic arteries. Bridges are expensive and high bridges are really expensive so sometimes drawbridges are the best answer for society at large. Bridges open on demand for commercial traffic (mostly tugs and barges) and on a schedule for recreational traffic. Sometimes I’m lucky and can slip through on an opening for commercial traffic. I’ll talk about the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) later but there are a bunch of bridges. To avoid getting to a bridge right after an opening and wasting fuel making circles I run ongoing time-distance calculations so we arrive just a couple of minutes before the scheduled opening. Of course we’re in radio communication with the bridge so they know we’re coming. They’re picky about starting an opening - they don’t want to be hanging open stopping traffic while we try to make up time. I shoot for two minutes early with some margin which often means we really slow down a mile out. We can hear the same horns you do on the road, the bells, and see the barriers start to come down. At that point I power up and aim for the closed bridge. Really. I can always turn, slow, reverse, or otherwise bail out. The goal is to get to the bridge pretty much as soon as there is room for us and we call the bridge as soon as we clear (we can see better than they can) so they can close as soon as possible.
I never know where my trips are going to be until a customer reaches out. Generally we’re schedule driven. I have managed to squeeze in stops to visit (customer gets a credit for the time) in the past. It could happen. Hard to plan too far in advance. I’ll certainly keep it in mind.
Under current circumstances a party is not well advised for this trip. grin I have been participating in a virtual happy hour Friday afternoons that has been great fun. On Friday 8 May I’ll be in happy hour from the car driving to the next boat. Maybe I could swing a HO happy hour using WebEx or Zoom during this trip. Let me scratch my head over it.
Just of the people I think I know geography for we have France and the UK at GMT+1, US East Coast at GMT-4, and US East Coast at GMT-7. I vaguely recall someone in Australia but they just may have to deal. If we set a time of 2000Z (GMT) then UK and France would be 2100L (9p), US EDT 1600L (4p) and California 1300L (1p). What do y’all think? Is there enough interest for say Saturday 9 May for me to set something up?
@sck, @gaffk, and other mods - no cost to anyone but my video telecon costs I pay anyway, not trying to sell anything to anyone, a distraction from lockdowns and a chance to further destroy misconceptions about one another. grin Permission, pretty please? Assuming interest.
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No worries on my part . . . I think lots of folks are enjoying your travels.
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Thanks Kim. If there is even a little interest I’ll set something up. I intend to focus on food in my posts and provide the travels as context. The happy hour I’m participating in on Fridays is pretty informal and I think that works well. Especially with the familiarity we have with one another at HO no matter how vague events simply unfold.
This could be really fun!
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A couple of years back, we spent a few days on Cape Cod. Driving near the Cape Cod Canal, we spotted this structure from a distance, so went to see if we could get a closer look to work out what it was.
Turns out its a railway bridge over the canal. Usually flat so the trains can run over it, it appears that the section of track lifts straight up to allow boats to pass.
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We (fam of 4) lived aboard a Cal 34 for 18 months when I was in high school. We left from Michigan and spent the winter in the Bahamas, so I’ve been thru all of those bridges at least twice. Yes, it’s a hassle to time them all.
I remember radio conversation with one somewhere in the Carolinas…my mom radioed the bridge to ask the tender to hold the bridge, and tender replied in a slow deal, “you keep it comin’, darlin’, and I’ll keep it up”. She managed to eke out a very calm “thank you” before all of us collapsed in giggles.
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Yes. That bridge, like most railway bridges, are usually open except when a train is scheduled. Schedules make that easy. Lift bridges are the easiest to maintain for rail alignment so they are common in that application. Swing bridges and drawbridges (technically basqule bridges) are more common for roads.
I’ve been through the Cape Cod canal a few times for deliveries that begin or end in Boston. I avoid it otherwise as timing the tidal current burns more time than the shorter distance saves.
Always best to put women on the radio. Beyond better microphone response and fitting into the frequency response characteristics of narrow-band FM better (voice tones), in a male dominated industry a woman’s voice gets more attention. I generally shy away from pink jobs and blue jobs but when training couples I emphasize radio skills for women.
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Indeed so - I did really know that. Apologies for getting it the wrong way round. I blame my advanced age.
I’m not sure this link will work without an account (free) but this is representative of what we look at https://activecaptain.garmin.com/en-US/pois/20489
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Link works, Dave. Thanks
Ok, thank you very much for the link. Since this is going to be a bit of a dangerous venture I wanted to give you a visual aid as to what to expect (don’t mind my @seal, he travels with me everywhere) so when you loop back around, keep your eyes open for this:
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