Finally

Sitting at anchor for a couple of days after First Light was lowered into the water had us take on a couple of projects while we waited on weather. The teak rails got cleaned and oiled though, truth to tell, they didn't come out looking as good as I had hoped. Better, but not good. A St. Louis project will be to (gently) sand the rails and coat them with Awlgrip Awlwood. Some LED strip lights were wired into the salon which came out looking really good when night fell. We tracked a small fuel leak in the starboard side engine that we might have finally caught and banished. Deb did a deep cleaning of the bilge to remove some very tenacious mold. Ah, but this morning...

Bye Bye Oak Harbor Marina

This morning we crawled out of the berth early, ran our pre-departure checklists, fired up the engines, hauled up the anchor, and headed down the river. Though we are thousands of miles and months away, we were headed for home. A thought that made me smile. That home lay on the other side of a new adventure and new territory for us was good for another smile.

As we cleared the river into the Bay the smile faded a bit. The wreckage of the Key Bridge was off to our port side and barely a couple of miles away. The magnitude of that disaster is hard to grasp by looking only at pictures. But looking at the container ship with parts of the bridge still draped over its bow, seeing the expanse of the bridge that fell and the cranes, barges, and boats all assembled to handle the job? Whoever is in charge of the salvage operation, and the experts gathered together to get the job done, appear to be doing a remarkable job. But it was a somber reminder of just how bad things can go when things start to go bad.

Not a terrific picture but it was very foggy

We turned away from the bridge and got about the business of moving over the water. It was a perfect day for trawler travel. And overcast sky kept the temperatures comfortable and the sunshine bearable. The winds were basically calm. About the only waves we encountered were created by the racing power boats that were out playing. A lifetime pilot and long time high performance motorcycle rider, I certainly understand the need for speed. Yet I am tempted to say some less than friendly things about those boats and drivers. Still, I suspect I would just be repeating words once spoken about me by car drivers startled by my passing them at speeds double and triple the posted speed limit, and by others who were not expecting to get buzzed by a low flying airplane, sometimes inverted, sometimes much bigger than your average “puddle jumper.” What goes around comes around I guess, so I will not begrudge the boat racers their perfect day of making obnoxious amounts of noise while creating killer wakes. I hope they had fun.

Roughly eight hours after pulling the hook out of the river where we first started our adventures many years ago in Kintala, we dropped First Light's hook it in a place we have never been. It is a tiny anchorage in Chesapeake City. We are surrounded by boats flying “Looper Flags”. Except for our disaster of a training sail years ago around Long Island, this is as far North as we have ever been on a boat. From now on, virtually every place we visit will be a place we have never visited by water before.

So day one is in the books. There is no telling what happens next. After last year's aborted attempt to make this trip we make no assumptions. Instead we will just keep going and do the best we can to handle whatever comes up. Hundreds, thousands, of people have gone this way before us. In Kintala we were often just part of the migration of cruising boats making their way south in the winter and north in the summer. Now First Light appears to be just another boat in the “Looper” migration. Having some company is a good thing.

LED light install

MV Pipe Dream a gorgeous DeFever 44. This would have been our choice had money

been no object...

I loves me some Nebo

Next Day

Looking at the wind plus tide plus likely wave height forecast, we decided to spend another night in Chesapeake City, then move on to Delaware City to top off with fuel, water, get a pump out, and see what day looks best for the run down Delaware Bay to Cape May. So with a day to spare we dropped the Dink in the water and putted over to the Dingy Dock for a look around. After spending some time chatting with another couple doing the loop we took a walk around town. After stopping for a quick lunch, along with the best cup of Coffee I've ever had, we decided to go visit the C&D Canal Museum. It was located on the other side of the Back Creek anchorage from where we were standing so we decided to putt over to in the Dink. But the Yamaha 9.9 HP 4 stroke engine that started on the first pull after being silent for months, would not start. I pulled until a blister formed on my right hand and my wrist cried “Uncle!” No luck. So we rowed back to First Light.

After fumbling around poking at this and looking at that, I tried again. It fired on the first pull, ran just fine for a few minutes, then sputtered to a stop once again. In spite of all efforts, it wouldn't start again. There is clearly a fuel issue but the filter is clean and, so far as I can tell, the remote fuel tank and hook-up is as it should be. Carburetor and fuel pump are next on the suspect list but we are at anchor. Working over the water is an invitation to loosing things in the water. There are no parts available, and the maintenance manual we found on line is nigh on to useless. So, remember all those nice things I said about the Yamaha? Yeah, forget it. It is just another outboard frustration source. Since we are going onto the dock in Delaware City the hope is we can find some kind of support to get the thing running again. Personally I'd like to use it as a spare anchor and get a motor I can trust but, a) $$$ and time, b) it would actually make for a pretty poor anchor and, c) I seriously doubt any such an outboard motor actually exists. But to live and travel on a boat means to row with the punches, so we will likely figure something out.