Southbound ’17 – Travel Day 11: Deltaville, MD to Portsmouth, VA

From: The Captain

Serendipitous delay of game…

In our last travel day entry, I wrote about our impending date with a diesel mechanic in Portsmouth to, among other things, mitigate what had been a minor but getting-progressively-worse coolant leak.  While at port in Deltaville, Captain Pauly thought it worthwhile to attempt to tighten the failing coolant drain valve which was the source of the leak.  It was a smart idea that we concurred with which yielded an unexpected result.  The moment Nuts touched the wrench to the valve it snapped off like a dead branch in a high wind.  Of course, when there is no longer a valve attached to your coolant drain, coolant proceeds to empty itself from the engine into the bilge.  Nuts immediately stuck his finger in the dike while lying on the floor next to our port engine and got the coolant flow to stop.  Of course, we realized it would be inconsiderate to insist that Nuts lie there, finger on the hole, for the rest of the night and during our fifty-mile ride to Portsmouth the following day. After some clever manipulation of several spare parts, we were able to temporarily stop the leak and relieve Nuts of his finger-in-the-hole duty.  The issue now was that our temporary fix was most certainly not what we wanted to rely on when underway and we did not have the proper parts to make a permanent fix.  The reason I characterize the incident as serendipitous is that had Nuts not unintentionally removed that valve it very well (most likely) may have come undone while underway on our next run – and that would not have been good.  So we stayed another day.  And this is where we further fell in love with Deltaville.  The marina has loaner cars at the ready, there is a True Value with a little bit of everything just a couple of miles away and a West Marine and several other resources nearby with virtually everything we could have needed (including J&W Seafood Market, with fresh halibut and flounder for the Admiral to expertly prepare).  Deltaville might have that middle-of-nowhere feel, but for the many marinas and boatyards that speckle the harbor and waterways.   It clearly has a vibrant boating community during boating season.  It will always be a special place for us and we can’t resist one more shoutout to Jimmy Mackie, at Regatta Point Marina, who took such great care of us.  And, we named our arrival cocktail after him — the Deltaville Jimmy.  You can check it out on the main page where we’ve added our “Libations” link (work in progress).

On to Portsmouth…

Forecast: Mostly sunny. Winds from the north 15 – 20kt. Seas 3-4′

Distance traveled: 51.9 nautical miles

Time underway: 5 hours 26 minutes

Average Speed: 9.5 kts

Max Speed: 17.6 kts

Fuel used: 77 gallons

Our last ride for this journey on Chesapeake Bay was not what I would characterize as a great day on the water.  I like to say it’s always better to be on the water but the truth is some days the conditions can be just unpleasant and we had some long stretches of that on this run.  We gave it all we got with our thrusters which gracefully pushed us away from Regatta Point Marina at precisely 7:00am, fighting a 20kt wind that had us pinned against the dock.  Once past the watermen at work near the harbor entrance we had a consistent 3 – 4′ following sea, the result of wind against tide and the wind was winning.  And we were bucking the current all day.  But the sun was shining brightly to warm up the earlier 39 degree temperature and while we got tossed around more than a bit we enjoyed each others’ company, some excellent tunes and coffee and knew life was good when we had our first dolphin spotting of our adventure at precisely 10:03am.  We always take that as a sign of good luck and the pair of dolphins popped up from time to time around OLOH over the next few miles.  We’re definitely getting further south!

Things calmed down as expected as we turned to the west and made way towards Norfolk through Hampton Roads, Virginia.  At that juncture things became a bit more chaotic on the waterway.  Norfolk is home to the world’s largest Naval base and there are enormous ships moving around all the time.  For me, traversing this area requires easily as much focus as New York Harbor and we were careful to stay outside of the main channel as there is plenty of water for us away from commercial traffic and warships.  You also are required to maintain a distance of at least 100 yards from any Naval Vessel.  And they are watching.  Through their gun sites.  We were contacted at one point by what we believe was a Navy tanker asking our intentions as he was astern and fast approaching.  I was very polite in my response which was essentially, “my intentions are whatever you need them  to be.”  Jasper was unfazed by the big gray boats…

As we entered Norfolk we passed by red buoy “36” which represents Mile Marker 0 of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway which winds its way to Florida over the next 1,243 statute miles.  As the ICW is measured in statute rather than nautical miles I will be using SM for our distances as our travels south continue.  We are tied up on the fixed megayacht dock at the furthest point from land (sorry Jasper) at Tidewater Marina.  It was all they had for us.

We’ve never stayed here before and while it’s a good sized marina they don’t have a lot of options for boats our size and larger and the few floating T-head docks they do have that could have accommodated us were taken.  Oh, well.  It’s just for one night.  Jasper dragged us to the office after we were safely tied as he was sure they would have treats in a place like this.  Right again Jasper.

A very nice and knowledgeable Detroit Diesel tech from Western Branch Diesel in Portsmouth met us at the boat shortly after 2:00 to have at a pesky oil leak (he was very pleased with our coolant leak repair which pleased us).  An $11 o-ring and a few hundred dollars in labor/travel/shop supply charges later and our leak was no more.  He also looked the engines over and was pleased with what he saw.  Which pleased us.  He also proclaimed that, in his opinion, the Series 60 engines we have are the best engine ever made.  I don’t know about that but that certainly pleased us yet once more.

Finally, when we were in Deltaville we were very happy to meet Bob who was working his way south from Maine on his beautiful, one-of-a-kind, Maine-built boat.  He pulled into Tidewater Marina late in the afternoon and I was able to capture this shot of Boss Lady with a Norfolk backdrop as the sun was setting behind us.  See you out there Bob!

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