Onancock Wharf
Onancock VA
Saturday, May 29
Latitude: 37 42.68' N
Longitude: 075 45.29' W

KaiLani just left for Somers Cove Marina in Crisfield MD. We plan to move there on Monday and hope they have not moved on by then. Dennis and Karen really liked Onancock, probably because they are younger and more agile, so that, the docking arangement is not as intimidating to them as us. If you ignore that problem, Onancock has lots of interesting stores,eateries, and "whatnots".

Last night we all ate exceptionally good meals at the "Mallard" which adjoins the wharf area. Unintentionally. we also got "ring side" seats for the night's entertainment. To see the show move your mouse over the picture.

Onancocks docks are a little to much for us to be able to fully appreciate the town. Our boat has exceptionally high Gunnels for its size. At high tide the deck comes up to chest level when I am on the finger pier. Getting us and the dogs off the boat and onto the narrow pier, especially at night, is not much fun. (For added fun remember the Limbo Rope spanning the pier). Nor is the reverse process any better. The fact that the finger pier empties onto a busy parking lot means we don't dare let their leases loose. This is a further complication. There is not a lot of room on the pier for multiple dogs and attached person. Truth is, one of the seven dogs "walked the plank" and went for a brief swim.

Onancock Wharf
Onancock VA
Sunday, May 30
Latitude: 37 42.68' N
Longitude: 075 45.29' W

We heard from Karen last night and they were in Somers Cove, but thought they would move on today. She also said that they hit ground on the way out at the same place we did coming in. We still plan to leave tomorrow and will try to avoid an encore performance.

After they left, lots of other boats followed their example, and the dock and its slips were almost empty. Later a sailing club from Deltaville arrived and filled them. What was unusual is that most of them were sailboats. Usually the clubs we run into are made up of motor cruisers of various types. Much to our surprise they almost all left this morning, turning a three day holiday weekend into a two day one. One of them that didn't leave noticed that we are from Greenville, NC. (Its on our transom). It turned out that they were from Wilson, NC a city only about thirty miles from us. They had made the same compromise as we did in deciding to trade a 3 hour drive to there boat in favor of a much richer cruising area.

Traveling without a fuel gauge is a tad disconcerting. The wharf has no fuel dock but one is available across the creek. The dock master carried me over their in a Golf Cart so I could fill a diesel can. We will use it to refuel here where I can keep careful track of (Hopefully) the whistle warning.

The local radio station, one of only two available, is hard to describe. (The other station, not so difficult: 'all country all the time'.) Onancock's station is mostly classic rock coupled with conservative political commentary, several hours of Big Band music, and lots of local news including obituaries. I guess, if there really was a "WKRP in Cincinnati" this would be it.

Somers Cove Marina
Slip D-12
Crisfield, MD
Tuesday, June 1
Latitude: 37 58.70'N
Longitude: 075 51.48'W

There are lots of abilities sailors should have: quick reflexes, balance, good vision and many others. They all decrease with age. The The exception is that part of vision, the dictionary tells us means

"a mental image of what the future will or could be like".

In a word, it is "Imagination." Imagination of this sort is BAD if you are a cruising sailor. As a form of transportation sailboats inspire a much different view of a trip than the cars we are all so used to. Fo the sailor, in the event of something dangerous the option to pull over to the side of the road and stop is not an option.

When you are leaving your slip in a strange place to head for a stranger place by way of a large body of water you can imagine all sorts of "futures", almost all of them not good.

The same is not true with a commute or trip by car. You don't expect to accidently exit through the side of your garage. Arriving home in your car by way of the frond door of your house does not cross your mind. Nor do you give any thought to you and the car disappearing into an endless sink hole. No, you expect your passage by car to be uneventful. Sure you know that you can run a stop sign and could get a ticket. No big deal. And car accidents, we all know, happen to other people.

On a cruising sailboat if you have vision, as defined above, things are much different. Before leaving Onancock for Crisfield, yesterday, I could easily think of 15 disastrous things that could happen and no less than 50 bad ones. The problem was I forgot number 51.

We debated whether to leave or not.
The marine forecast for the Chrisfield area was an unappealing 10 to 15 knots of wind and 2 to 3 foot seas. I admit that there was a time, long long ago, when we would have thought this ideal, now at our age and with the three dogs along, it was at best uncomfortable sounding. At the same time, for the same area of the Bay, NOAA weather radio was reporting SW winds and waves of 1 foot. So what the hell, we went.

The trip up was the proverbial "peace of cake." We even laughed that the waves were less than 1 foot. So what was error 51. Error 51 was not realizing that both forecasts could be correct. To borrow a title from a Stephen King book, it is like Crisfield is under a weather dome of its own. Once we turned Crisfield marker 2 the wind and waves totally changed. Suddenly we had 3 foot seas on our beam and rapidly growing wind. The waves set us rolling beam side to beam side. Uncomfortable but not dangerous. If we were still real sailors we would have taken down the sunshade and put up the sails for the 4 or 5 miles remaining, but rather, we endured. The worse was to come.

The wind continued to grow, but Somers Cove is now surrounded by condominiums and other large structures. So I assumed it would be relatively protected inside. Getting into Somers Cove is an act of faith. You sort of have to take a heading from the last marker and assume that an opening will appear in the wall of buildings. It did. We entered and the wind built (20 -25 knots). This is a huge marina and, unfortunately, the marina help was busy somewhere with another boat. When we finally contacted them we were told to make an immediate left and dockhands in red shirts would meet us at our slip. We saw two of them running towards the pier to our left. With the wind blowing, as it was, we could hardly stop and wait. We were going into a slip whether or not we liked it. And with the wind behind us we were going in fast! At the last minute (oops second) they (the dockhands) reached the slip they wanted for us. Kay tried to divert from the one we had thought they wanted us in to actual one. The boat chose to split the difference, which meant that we were about 20 feet away, and traveling at about (what seemed) 100 mph towards a large piling. What happened next happened so fast that I am sure none of us know for sure the how and why it turned out as well as it did. There was a BANG as a Fender shot off and we were finally at rest part way into the wrong slip. It was wrong because it had the wrong electrical hookup for us.

The wind was screaming and a person in a red shirt was telling me we are going have to move, "What's your plan captain?"
"Plan? I have none", said I, helpfully
We could not even get the boat to back against the wind which now peaked at 28 knots.
Eventually Kay came up with a plan and with the help of two dockhands another sailor from a a nearby Beneteau and seven lines we managed to pivot Spindrift from its bow-in position in the wrong slip, around the end of the finger pier, to a stern-in position in the right slip. We were here!

When I checked in with the harbormaster, she noted that we had a hard landing. I said "Well the last time we were here, 20 years ago, the same thing, only worse, happened/ Oh, she said, "were you the ones who went through the fuel dock?" Nope, I said, "it was actually G-dock, one dock over from the fuel dock."

Carl