Monday, October 3rd - Day 8
Air temp 50, winds N-NE@20, cloudy but rain has stopped for now, sea temp 62
Just a quick update to let our family and friends know we are safe and sound after the weekend storms. The forecast has changed a bit (for the worse) so we paid for two more nights at Sailing Associates Marina and will be here until at least Wednesday.
It rained almost all day yesterday so I decided to add some water to our tank from the rain. I don't recommend doing this unless your water tank(s) are very low on water and you won't be at a marina for a while to fill the tank. But, it had been raining for several hours so the decks should have been very clean plus I had an idea to prevent "stuff" from going into our tank. The marina here does have fresh water on the dock but it has high iron content from their well. It even looks brownish. Last time we were here I used a house-filter to add water from the dock and, after only about 100 gallons, the filter cartridge was red from the trapped iron.
We have a house-type filter after our water pump for our faucets and shower. It takes the normal 10 1/2 inch cartridges and I have several spares. The cartridges were a little bigger in diameter than our water-fill deck fitting so I used a knife to taper one end so it would fit in the hole. I removed the deck fitting cap, inserted the cartridge and used a short bungee cord to hold it in place. Then I plugged up the deck drain so the rain would build up into a little lake around the filter. Here's a pic I took of the setup. I had just plugged the deck drain (bottom of pic) so the water had not built up yet.
This setup actually worked fairly well but it took a while for the water to seep through the filter. I think we added about 20 gallons in 3 hours. Lots more rain predicted for today and tomorrow so maybe I can fill the tank.
I should also say we carry (2) 6-gallon jugs for drinking water. We normally do drink the water out of the tank but won't now until we can drain it, flush with a little bleach and refill with good, fresh water.
Laura was in baking mode yesterday and cooked up something new - chocolate / peanut butter cupcakes. Somehow, she magically got the peanut butter in the middle. She brought up a batch to the marina office (that's our agreement to get them off the boat when she wants to bake) and they were highly received. We did save a couple for after dinner...
As we've previously seen on Chesapeake Bay, the winds blew the water out of our marina last night. We are down about 2 feet below yesterday's low tide but still floating. It was weird to step up onto the dock. Compare this picture with the one I posted a couple days ago.
Rain and high winds are predicted for us today and tomorrow as the remnants of Ian turned toward us. We are hoping to leave Wednesday for the Annapolis area and should be in Reedville, VA on Friday at our friends Walter and Mary's dock. Oh boy! Perfect timing for Wine-Down-Friday at their local Good Luck Cellars winery. We've had lots of fun there in the past.
Boat work
I was mentioning to Laura yesterday that I neglected to put our boat-repairs in the blog. We have had a few problems since leaving Catskill (nothing major - knock on wood) and I've been able to fix most of them. I like the saying that cruising is, "working on your boat in beautiful places." But, this year, we haven't gotten to warm, beautiful places yet.
On our sail down the coast of NJ, the toilet in our cabin stopped pumping water. It uses an electric motor to pump seawater through the toilet for flushing and running our Electro-Scan waste treatment system. I closed the seacock and pulled the strainer while underway. It looked fine - I had cleaned all the sea-strainers as part of my before-we-leave checklist in Catskill. While I thought about it a while, we switched to using our forward head that has a manual pump and a holding tank. After getting to the dock here, I used air pressure to blow out the water line from the toilet pump to the sea strainer. After a few minutes, I was able to get it working again as it sucked in some really dirty water. The line must have been plugged with mud or something.
As we pulled into Cape May a few days ago, I noticed
our steaming light 3/4 of the way up our mainmast wasn't working. At
the anchorage in Cape May I spent a little time troubleshooting and
found it was getting power to the wires going up the mast. That one I
couldn't fix as I didn't have a spare light. Because the steaming light wasn't working, on our way up Delaware Bay at night, I also turned on our masthead navigation lights.
Our shower-sump
was working intermittently - I could hear it running in short spurts. I
had seen this before so knew what to do. The pump switch is electronic
and submerged in the sump. Because it pumps scummy shower water, it
gets coated in slime after several months. While anchored in Cape May, I climbed down in to the
engine room bilge, took the cover off the sump and cleaned the switch. 15
minutes later it was working great again.
Marine Weather
I've had a few questions from other boaters on the websites I use for weather forecast while traveling on the boat. I do subscribe to Chris Parker (Marine Weather Center) which gives a broad picture through emails sent to me every day but I also use several websites for more localized forecasts.
WindFinder.com - I like windfinder and use it for my primary source of wind speed / direction and wave height. Check out the screenshot below. This is for Atlantic City today. You can easily see on the left side the winds will be high 20s with gusts to near 40. Plus the arrows show the direction will be from the NNE. On the right side, is the wave height, period and direction. Yikes! 8.5 foot seas this afternoon. No thanks..
You can scroll down on this screen to see the forecast for the next several days / nights.
PredictWind.com - The wind speed and direction tables are easy to read and you can also get a picture of your cruising area with wind direction and speed arrows. Below is the PredictWind "tables" screen for the same area around Atlantic City today. Each of the several lines at the top are individual models and show very similar numbers to WindFinder. Notice the bottom of the screen shows 10 foot seas - close to the 8.5' from Windfinder. PredictWind also has a map with wind / sea height arrows like Windy below.
You can also scroll to the right to see the next several days.
Windy.com - similar to PredictWind with wind speed and direction arrows on a moveable geographical area. You can press the play arrow at the bottom to see the forecast for the next several days.
I typically use WindFinder in several screens to show the area(s) we will be traveling in front of us. Once I have a tentative plan, I use PredictWind and Windy to verify the forecast. For the next couple days they usually agree but, farther out, they are typically different. When they are all different for the next couple days, watch out!
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