We left GCS on Friday afternoon, May 12, to catch the tide to Jacksonville, where we were "repositioning" for a Saturday morning departure on the Loop. (Superstition has it that you never leave on a sailing voyage on a Friday, so that’s why we called this a “repositioning” instead of a departure….). Before we left that Friday morning we realized that our wind vane at the very top of the mast was hanging lopsided and was in danger of falling into the water. Since those dang things cost $50 the decision was made to send me up the mast to retrieve it as I weighed the least. We borrowed a bo’sun’s sling and up I went to the very top. It looked like a rather easy thing to do and since I’m not particularly afraid of heights I wasn’t especially concerned about going up. It was much harder than I thought it’d be, even with being pulled up in the sling, and I was really really glad to be back on the deck with vane in hand. I have to admit that my legs were a shakin’ by the time I got down and tried to stand up! Whether that was from exertion or just plain relief at being back down in one piece, I don’t know.
Finally, early on Saturday morning, May 13, we began our journey up the East Coast ICW.
Because we ended up leaving Jax 10 days later than the other members of our sailing fourtilla, we had to play catch up. Every day we got closer and closer, but poor weather out in the Atlantic kept us inside on the ICW for several days. Finally, on the 15th conditions were such that we were able to pop outside into the Atlantic south of Savannah and do an all day/overnight run up to Charleston. We arrived early in the morning on the 16th, just hours before the other 3 sailboats arrived. Finally, the gang was all together and the fourtilla adventure began.
We had left Jacksonville the week after the Tall Ships boat festival there and some of the tall-ships were still at Jax Landing because of bad weather. We ended up hip-hopping all along the Atlantic seaboard with various of the tall ships to different boat show stops. The Tall Ship festival in Charleston started the day after we got there, so they were all arriving from their last port. It was a very rainy, overcast day when we took this picture while on the way to visit Ft. Sumter. A true ghost ship, huh?
The next day was clear and sunny and we were able to get this pic of the big and sma
ll.
We came across other tall ships again on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina and again in Norfolk, VA, and then yet again on the upper Chesapeake. Once again, it was on a foggy misty morning when we took this photo of Pogopelli ghosting along behind this French tall ship just before we entered the C&D Canal that connects the Chesapeake with Delaware Bay. The last one we came across was the Virginia in New York City. We won’t be seeing any more of them since they
are continuing along to boat shows on up the Atlantic coast and w
e are now headed up the Hudson River.Which way do we want to go from Charleston?
This big ole boy was swimming down the river in South Carolina when we first spotted him. Pogopelli, traveling behind us, was able to get this pic of him crawling onto shore.
No room at the inn—all poles taken
We’ve seen interesting pieces of yard art along the way:
We've also had some arty photo ops:
Dead tree near FL/GA border on ICW;
Nested pipes near Norfolk, 
VA;
Wolf Trap Light on Chesapeake Bay.
And we've seen some different, strange or cute boats:
We've seen some BIG houses...
House and guest house:
And small ones:
Front view and then side view!
I don't think we could afford either one what with waterfront properties being prime real estate these days!
These are Martin houses made from gourds and strung along the antenna wires. Great mosquito/bug control in the Carolinas.
Out for a Saturday afternoon ride
When Stan and I did the Loop in 2005 we saw a really nifty open-hull sailboat, Mag, with tan bark sails. We got a great picture of her coming through a swing bridge with another very unique junk rig catamaran. We talked to Mag on the VHF radio and got their email address so 
we could send the picture to them. Since them we’ve been in email contact with them—Anne and Jeff—but had never met them in person. As luck would have it, we ran across them in the our anchorage in North Carolina. So we finally met. Jeff came over to Koko to meet with our fourtilla. The other three sailboats in our group all have Porta-Botes (not to be confused with Porta-Potties!) as their dinghies. And lo and behold, that’s what Jeff and Ann (now on a Charlie Morgan 34) use as a dinghy. So we captured this pic of a Porta-Bote convention. Miss Daisy, our dinghy now back in service after being left behind while we were in the Bahamas, was the lady in the crowd.
The Dismal Swamp Canal itself was neither dismal nor swampy, even though I think the area outside the canal is very swampy in places. Maybe dismal too. The Visitor Center on the Canal is the only one in the US that serves both a US Highway and a waterway. There’s only room at the dock for 3-4 boats, so we ended up rafting to each other 3 deep.
At both ends of the canal are locks so that the canal depth can be maintained at a federally mandated level of about 8’. The swamp is higher than the surrounding area so the locks lift the boats up to that level.
At the northern lock, called the Deep Creek Lock, is a lockmaster by the name of Robert. Somehow over the years he’s gotten a collection of conch shells.
Being musically inclined, he has made some of them into conch horns. If you are nice to him and time permits, he’ll even play one for you. Now, this isn’t just a long blare on the conch shell, these are actually recogn
izable tunes he plays. Having been through the Lock before and knowing about Robert’s collection, we brought him a really nice conch shell we’d collected while we were in the Bahamas, so we were all treated to one of Robert’s concerts.
Entrances into bays and towns from the Atlantic have breakwaters, usually just lines of large rocks piled in long rows down each side of the entrance. This breakwater into Manasquan NJ was particularly scary because it was so spikey. Admitedly, running into a rock breakwater would do just as much dam
age as running into these, but these just looked a whole lot more frightening. And to make it even scarier this time, we entered Manasquan with tide opposing wind and waves, making the waves the biggest and wildest we’d ever been in. A most hair-raising experience. This picture was taken the next morning as we were leaving—the seas were quite docile then, thank goodness.As we were entering New York harbor, a fire boat was escorting a flotilla of military boats out and his fans of water made quite a show.
Hmmmm, this is interesting: railroad cars--on a railroad track--on a barge, crossing the harbor.
And here’s Koko in full sail arriving in front of the Statue of Liberty,
We spent 4 days in New York City and on our last night there, we went up the Empire State Building to see the sunset. It was a Friday night and the lines were long, but we made it in time.
An aside story in a nutshell: It was about time that I finally made it to the Empire State Building. You see, my mother was involved in an extraordinary event there in 1945. On July 29, a Saturday morning, at about 10 am, a B-25 Bomber arriving from England in foggy weather accidentally flew into the side of the Empire State Building. It hit at about the 79th floor.
My mother’s uncle, a manager at the Empire State Building, had gotten my mom, Betty Oliver, a temporary job as an elevator operator while she waited for my Dad to get leave from the Navy. Her last day on the job was at noon that day.
My mom had just let off a carload of employees on the 79th floor and started down alone in the car when the bomber hit. One of the engines of the bomber severed the cables to her car and landed on top of her car. This was in the days before counter-balancing and other safety measures, so she and her car free-fell 79 plus stories into the sub-basement.
A Merchant Marine was able to wiggle his way in and rescue her. She was given Last Rites on the sidewalk by a passing priest (even though she was not Catholic) and taken to Bellevue Hospital. She was declared DOA, but they decided to try a new technique on her—direct injection of epinephrine into the heart to get it re-started. It worked. She was in the hospital for about 6 months with a back broken in six places and oil burns from the engine in different splotches on her arms and legs, as well as various other injuries.
Amazingly she went on to lead a quite normal life in Arkansas. I was born in 1946 and have two brothers born after me. You’d never really have known by looking at her (she passed away in 1999) that she’d suffered such a trauma. There were a few oil scars on her wrist and ankles, hardly noticeable, and one of her eyes was slightly lower than the other. She did suffer from arthritis in later years just as her doctors in 1945 told her she would from all the trauma. It is speculated that one or both of the following things contributed to her surviving the fall: the air pressure in the shaft created by the falling car creating somewhat of a cushion on impact, and the collapsed elevator cables beneath the car creating a cushion.
Her story was written about several different times in the 50’s in Guideposts magazine, she was featured in the Life magazine series “My Life in Bellevue”, and a book was written about the whole incident, including her story. Google Betty Lou Oliver and Empire State Building if you want more info.
We are now in Catskill, NY, dropping our mast and building a crutch for it so we can
carry it with us. The bridges are too low along the Erie Canal and Trent-Severen Canal in Canada for us to get under with the mast up. So we’ll be a sailboat-shaped power boat until we get to the Georgian Bay in western Ontario, Canada.
The next update probably won’t be until we get back into the US at Mackinaw Island, Michigan, sometime in August. Wi-Fi might be few and far between. We’ll be in the US for another couple of weeks, transiting the Erie Canal and visiting with boating friends in Waterford, NY(Bill and Linda) and in Henderson Harbor, NY (Dave and Polly--we last saw them in the Bahamas).
Let us hear from you!
Stannie
