35 Last leg

After the pretty anchorages up the corkscrew rivers of the upper Chesapeake, Delaware Bay is flat and dreary. We anchored behind Reedy Island opposite the giant cooling tower of the nuclear power station which presides over the bay and watched freighter after freighter on their way up to Philadelphia. They seem to heave themselves over the horizon as if surmounting a hill and then slide by with a glassy mound of water by the bow.

The next morning we jumped on the ebb tide down to Cape May.

You hope for a good window for the overnight leg from Cape May to New York. We got one: a perfect 10-15 knots from the Southwest. There was a residual four foot swell from a storm in the Atlantic a couple of days ago. We set up the Monitor and sailed almost all the way. After the sun went down, the cold fingered your bones (even through double layers of thermals and full wet gear, ski hat and gloves!). There were lots of fishing boat lights, mysterious red-white-red (restricted) and three-white light tugs to keep you interested. At midnight we had hot chili and toasted pita bread. You can’t believe how good that was. Dawn came off Sandy Hook. Not the quick brassy dawn of the tropics but a slow, reluctant dawn in dilute pastels with lots of greys. That smudge on the horizon is Manhattan.

This will be our last leg in the ocean, the last time falling asleep with water gurgling past the hull.

We will be back at QCYC soon.

It has been an exciting four years.

END

34 Baltimore


We arrived in the middle of the big party.

The Volvo 70s, which are racing around the world, just finished leg 5 (Rio to Baltimore). The city is putting on a “Waterside festival’ in their honor. The Hoopla is in full swing. You can gawk at the boats (carbon fiber hull, canting keel, sails like billboards). You can buy souvenir regalia. There is a tall ship from Brazil you can get on. And there is the crab cake eating contest. This contest is not a frivolous affair. It is regulated by the International Federation for Competitive Eating and there will be eleven world class competitors.

Tucked away in a corner, something we had to see.


NOAA’s “Thomas Jefferson” was resurveying in Maine when it was called to New Orleans to see what Katrina had done to the tanker channels. It is now back up north, and is here for a PR day as part of this Waterfront festival”.


The members of the NOAA crew that showed us around are a young and bright. They really enjoy what they are doing. NOAA is not part of the military (like the coastguard or navy) and they are all very unstuffy and relaxed.

The ship has a multi-beam sonar that plots the contours of the seafloor on either side for each increment in the ships GPS position. Also it tows a ‘side scan sonar’ which looks like a torpedo (they call it “The Fish”) that plots a continuous image of the bottom as detailed as an ultrasound of your baby. (They have this neat picture of a whale that swam under the boat). The two launches which the ship carries have identical equipment so they can plot three lines at once.

At the end of each shift, terabytes of data are dumped into the ships computer. And out comes a chart? Not quite. The ship rolls in the swells. You have to correct for that with a gyroscopic gadget that plots the ‘moving vessel profile.’ The speed of sound varies with salinity and temperature. You have to measure those. Then there are the glitches from fish or bubbles. The scientific crew goes through the data frame by frame rejecting artifacts and distinguishing whales from rocks. This review is completed overnight so that the ship can return to the next day to areas of doubt.

When they are happy with the data they fire them off to the NOAA shore station and a map is published on the NOAA web site. Anyone can look at it for free.

Katrina had shoved a huge sandbank in to the tanker channel. Good job they did not let any tankers through. A couple of days after the NOAA survey they started dredging.

33 Annapolis

From the water it looks like one of those historical prints: the spire of the church and the domes of the State House and the Naval Academy stick up above the town’s sky line. It is the boatyist place. Out in the bay, the tankers wait for a berth in Baltimore. Grey navy training ships and coastguard runabouts plow around amongst racing sailboats and little optimists. Boats are on the move everywhere.

Those young men and women in crisp whites that stroll around town are from the Naval Academy. They are training to be officers. They are learning how to aim missiles by computer; how to control the reactors of nuclear submarines; and how to live with the layers of rote that have become navy tradition. In barracks thy have to make 90 degree turns at corridor corners and shout “Go Navy! Beat Army!”

The dome with the gold crown that you see from the water is the Navy Academy Chapel. Under the chapel, in the crypt, a uniform guard of honor stands at all times. Behind the guard, in a gloomy black marble sarcophagus, are the bones of the American Navy’s first and most revered hero.

What makes a hero? What sort of a sea dog was he?
John Paul was born in Scotland. At twelve he went to sea as a cabin boy. By nineteen he was first mate on a slaver, by 21 the commander of a merchant boat. He must have been a bit pugnacious. He flogged one crewmember to death. He killed the leader of a mutiny. To avoid prison, he changed his name to John Paul Jones and fled to the British colonies in America. He arrived at the outbreak of the war for independence (1775) and joined the confederation navy. He served them well burning British ships around North America and even across the Atlantic.

His defining moment came in 1779. He confronted the British warship “Serapis.’ At first he got the worse of it. The British captain shouted at him to surrender. He shouted back, (I guess they were that close) the phrase that is now revered:

“I have not yet begun to fight.”

The ships resumed bombarding each other. In the end they both sank. But the British ship sank first.

When independence made him redundant he joined the Russian Navy. This did not work out. He died in obscurity in Paris. But his reputation in the American Navy kept growing. He became an idol. In 1905 they searched for his grave, found it, and brought his bones back from France with an escort of battleships.

So here he is, the pit bull of the sea, for the emulation of midshipmen.