Sunday, October 24, 2004
Potomac River, VA/MD
After all our troubles in the Great Lakes, with the weather, the engine, and the lost time, I feel pretty confident in saying we are essentially caught up. We still have one week to go before the sudo-official end of hurricane season, and we are no more than a couple of days away from Norfolk, VA – the place you don’t go past during hurricane season. Not that we are trying to keep to a schedule, but it is much more relaxing to feel like you are ahead of the race than always trying to “catch-up.”
After Annapolis, we sat and did nothing in Solomon’s, Maryland, up a side creek of the Patuxent River. It was so quiet, peaceful, and beautiful up there I can’t even begin to explain it. Mill Creek, where we anchored, is completely protected from the Chesapeake waters, affording us perfect nights sleep. Sleeping on a boat gently swinging on an anchor is like floating in a cloud. We sleep so well, it is becoming difficult getting up in the mornings and all we want to do is take naps during the day because it is so nice. Life is good.
It has always been our plan to see things we’ve never seen before while on this trip. So, since there is time left before we push on to southern waters, we’ve detoured up the Potomac River enroute to Washington D.C. Neither of us have ever been there before. It will take us two hard days of travel to make it, so we hope it will be worth the effort. It is not the river that is making things difficult, but the weather – it’s getting cold here. Today, traveling up the river, I could see my breath in the air most of the way, in the middle of the day – yes, it was that cold!
Keeping the Cabin Cozy on Cold Nights
Way back in Port Huron, MI, we heard about another couple with a two year old boy who are traveling just as we are. In the Erie Canal, we would be told about them from cruisers we’d meet in port. Lockmasters would tell us they just went though hours before us. However, with our side trip to Asheville, NC, we never caught up with them — until Annapolis. Chad and Marsha, aboard Rebel Rouser, are both MSU alumni, from Michigan, have a Labrador Retriever named Sadie, and are traveling with a toddler towards Florida and the Bahamas, just like us. It is interesting how our backgrounds are so similar; we even know some of the same people at MSU, although we have never met each other before; it is truly a small world. Now that we’ve caught up with them and have met them, we are losing them again, as the weather is getting too cold. They have decided to head south as fast as possible to get to warmer waters and are leaving us behind. On our sail from Annapolis, we were amazed how many boats were headed south – obviously Chad and Marsha are not the only ones who’ve had enough. Now that the weather is turning bad, I understand the push to get south. We have two things keeping us from joining the fleet. First, we are going to D.C. Second is heat. We are the only sailboat heading up the Potomac. The rest are already down Norfolk way, or further.
We sleep well at night, though, due to our little diesel cabin heater. It is a piece of gear installed by the previous owners of this boat, Larry and Patty, and we are so grateful (Thanks L&P!). It is fantastic. Unfortunately, we have been using it far too much on this trip. We used it on a couple of unusually cold nights back in Lake Michigan, and a few nights on the Erie Canal and the Hudson. Since we’ve entered the Chesapeake, it gets used every single night. It makes the difference between sleeping comfortably and sleeping because we are forced to by extreme hypothermia. Bears hibernate, sailors don’t.
The heater has the added benefit of helping to dry things out around here. Especially days like today where it is cold and rainy – everything gets moist. The heater helps to minimize the condensation almost everywhere . . . except one critical place: the port light right above my head in the v-berth.
Imagine yourself, aboard a boat, living an ideal life, but not one without its challenges. You spend all day, working the boat, getting wet by the spray off the bow as it drives though waves or by rain drops as the sky opens up and dumps a days worth of drizzle on you. By the end of the day, tired, a little sore, you drop the anchor in some idilic cove with nothing but the sea and the starlit sky to welcome you. You go below and warm yourself by the fireplace and have a nice, hearty meal and a swig of “Grandpa’s wine” to help take the edge off the day. You use the head (thankful you remembered to pump out yesterday and have the luxury) before going off to bed. All snuggled in under your cozy down comforter, you drift off, gently rocked to sleep by the subtle motion of the boat in the water. A nice, deep, sound sleep. And then it hits you . . .
“Opffh . . . Hah? Wha? Uh, wha wa . . . wub wa wu . . . zzzzzzZZZZZZ.” And I’m back out. Until it happens again.
“Huh? What?!” I say loudly. Vanessa kicks me in the shin.
“You’re snoring, stop it,” she mutters, before rolling over and going back to sleep.
“Are you doing something?” I ask, but she’s already out, never woke up, actually, as the kick and remark was more reflex than an actual complaint. So it wasn’t her.
“Hmmm, okay, I’m dreaming,” I says to myself. I tuck back in and go back to sleep . . .
Again.
“Alright!” I scream, causing Vanessa to role over, and Binga to spit out her pacifier, but waking neither. I’m completely dumbfounded and wipe my brow in confusion, only to find it is wet. “What? Am I sweating?” I check other sweat-prone areas – pits, crotch, etc. No sweat. “What then?” I ask as I stare upward in a moment of contemplation, only to receive one giant drop of water square in the left eye.
Apparently, as I lay in bed sleeping in my coffin under the forward deck — and right below the forward-most, solid bronze port light — my breathing provides a great deal of moisture, condensing on the bronze, which is kept cool by the outside night’s air. It is the only port that does this, and since it is inches away from my mouth and I breath heavily when sleeping, it receives a fair amount of moisture, which it saves up and gives back to me in the early morning hours in a sort of chinese water torture terror – one drip at a time. And it is torture.
Since I’m up now, anyway, kept awake by the drops, I try to devise ways to make it stop – like building a tent over my head, but that would only divert the water off into the bed — not good, as we don’t like sleeping on wet sheets. I’ve tried to think of a way to devise a eaves system that would divert all that moisture to the water tanks for later consumption, water being such a valuable commodity on board and all, but the plumbing issues are significantly prohibitive. Not a bad idea though, all my heavy breathing ought to keep the tanks full!
In the end, I just try to lay on my side and breath on Vanessa, as opposed to lying on my back and exhausting vertically. It seems to have helped minimize the condensation some, but I’m not sure what it is going to do to my marriage. At least we are warm.
– Steve