Icw Log Or 28 Days Before The Mast

PUFFIN: An Intracoastal Waterway Log or 28 Days Before the Mast Lawrence Zeitlin Prolog: We bought Puffin from Charlie Moore for $22, 500. Puffin was a 1974 Willard Vega Horizon, a 30 foot long heavy displacement motorsailer that looked a bit like Tubby the Tugboat with a mast. It seemed quite seaworthy with its high bow, double ended hull and pilothouse. It was handsome in a very traditional sort of way.

Charlie's advertisement in the Soundings magazine classified section appeared in February, 1995. I had just retired from 32 years as a college professor and was at loose ends. I missed not having lectures to prepare or being paid to pontificate to a captive audience. Maggie, weary of having

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me underfoot 24 hours a day, urged me to get involved in some project, no matter how impractical. I had long fantasized about buying a boat and sailing it up the Intracoastal Waterway and she challenged me to put up or shut up. Late in February we took a quick drive down to Florida to look Puffin over. The trip offered the additional side benefit of a few days respite from freezing weather. Charlie's asking price was about a third less than for other boats of its type so we were a bit suspicious about its condition. The suspicions were partly confirmed when we had a close look at it. It had been in the Florida sun for 22 years and, like most mature Floridians, its skin showed signs of deterioration. There was a network of very fine cracks on most surfaces and some blisters on the hull. Blistering is a disease of older fiberglass boats. Water enters the fiberglass through tiny pores in the material and forces the outer skin away from the lower layers. Like human blisters the damage is unsightly but rarely life threatening. The problems with Puffin seemed mostly cosmetic. The Willard Boat Company had a reputation for building very sturdy craft. The structure appeared sound and the lines were good. The boat had been well cared for, although obviously heavily used. Maggie liked Puffin because there were plenty of comfortable places to sit on the deck and even a few spots to set up an easel for her painting. We made Charlie an offer for the boat if it passed a survey. The cost of the boat was roughly equivalent to my settlement for unused sick leave and vacation time. It seemed like a good trade. February was too early for a boat trip back North. There was still ice in the Hudson River. Our mooring at Croton Point wouldn’t be put in for another three months. We would leave Puffin in Florida until warmer weather. This would give Charlie time to get Puffin ready and for us to get used to the idea of buying another boat. On the drive home we had plenty of time to think about the wisdom of our decision. As we reentered the domain of snow and ice, the thought of sailing in Florida grew ever more appealing. Late in March we packed a large duffel bag with everything we thought we would need for a month of boating. We had the usual stuff for camping out, towels, sheets, a couple of sleeping bags, plenty of sweat shirts and pants, and one nice looking set of civilized shore going clothes each. I packed the specialized nautical gear including a handheld marine VHF radio, a newly purchased GPS electronic satellite navigation receiver, a bundle of old charts of the East coast, and a copy of Chapman's handbook, the mammoth sized bible of boating information that every yachtsman cherishes. In my pocket I carried the Multi-tool that my department had given me as a retirement gift instead of a gold watch. This surrogate toolbox was the size of a large pocketknife which unfolded into pliers, a wire cutter, several screwdrivers, two knife blades, a can opener, a corkscrew and other things

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that a handyman might need. It was my security blanket in case things went wrong. Maggie, ever the artist, packed paints, drawing pencils, canvas, art boards, and a plastic drop cloth to protect the deck from over enthusiastic paint spatters. All our travel needs fitted into the trunk of our one way rental car for the return drive to Florida. Charlie was anxious to sell. His wife, his constant boating companion for the previous decade, had died several months earlier of a lingering illness. He implied that the memories connected with the boat were now painful. It was only after we got to know him a little better that we discovered that he had just become engaged to an attractive woman who was not all that keen about stepping into his dead wife's boat shoes. To add to his desire to sell, his best friend, several years younger than he, dropped dead of a heart attack while both were vacationing in the Bahamas. It happened only a week before we returned to Florida. Charlie was determined to go for the gusto before it was too late. He also wanted to buy a bigger boat. After a bit of negotiation, we closed the deal, subject to a survey, in a Jacksonville diner over a meal of red snapper seasoned with the ubiquitous local red peppers. "Red on red" was what they called it in that part of town. I wrote the sales contract out by hand and we signed it with Charlie's friend, a retired shrimp boat engineer, as a witness. Everyone seems to have a different idea about what constitutes a proper motorsailer, and in truth, there are as many different types of motorsailers as there are ideas. My own definition is that a motorsailer is a boat with enough power to make headway against strong winds and heavy seas, and enough sail area to get you to safety if the engine fails. This is a belts and suspenders conservative approach. Most yachtsmen classify motorsailers by their approximation to the extreme ends of the boating spectrum, a pure sailboat at one end and a powerboat at the other. By this reckoning, Puffin is a 30/70 boat, 30 percent sail and 70 percent power. It is essentially a powerboat with auxiliary sail rather than a sailboat with auxiliary power. A 30/70 motorsailer uses its engine most of the time although it can make reasonable progress under sail if the wind is favorable. On the whole, its sailing performance would be roughly equivalent to one of Columbus's caravels, hardly state-of-the-art high technology but adequate for long, slow voyages. Still, with the sails set and the engine ticking over at a moderate speed she should be able to keep up with most cruising sailboats and, of course, outdistance them if the wind died. I first saw a boat like Puffin moored near my parents’ Florida condominium in the late 70s and lusted after one. I liked it because it seemed to combine the virtues of a sailboat and a trawler, disregarding the fact that it also combined the liabilities of each type. Both the boat and I were newer at the time. The name Puffin so obviously suited the look and character of this boat that we decided not to change it. This both pleased Charlie and saved us the trouble of painting a new name on the stern.

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Our log of Puffin's journey to its new home in the Hudson River tells the story much as it happened, expletives deleted, of course. The log is both a record of our personal experiences and a condensed travelogue of sites along the ICW. If some of the nautical terms seem unfamiliar, bear with me. All will be explained in due time. If on the other hand the story is not salty enough for you - you can always turn to Moby Dick. March 25, 1995 Puffin was docked at the Marineland marina. The marina was just off a narrow and relatively uninhabited portion of the Intracoastal Waterway between St. Augustine and Daytona. The Marineland Oceanarium was the first place to stage live dolphin and whale shows. Now over 50 years old, it looked small and unpretentious compared to the bigger Sea World oceanariums in Miami and San Diego. The grounds were well kept with flowers and palm trees. A small zoo with alligators, snakes and tropical birds surrounded the show amphitheater. Marineland exuded a certain run down charm which extended to the Marineland Motel across the street and the marina itself. Marineland is on a sandy barrier island nearly 20 miles long and a quarter of a mile wide located between St. Augustine and Daytona. The eastern side of the island fronts the Atlantic Ocean, the western side, the Intracoastal Waterway. Other than Marineland and the motel, there was little development along this stretch of the Florida coast. The beach front was sandy and extended in both directions as far as the eye could see. There were very few bathers. Just sea birds and acres of shells. In addition to its cosmetic defects, the boat had a couple of apparent problems. The floor was damp and there was some oil in the bilge. Charlie kept a dehumidifier on all the time at the dock to keep the interior dry. We contacted the Jacksonville branch of the Society of Accredited Marine Surveyors and requested a rush job. They sent down a young man with the evocative Southern name of Downing Nightingale. He crawled into every compartment and tapped the hull repeatedly with a hammer. He ran the engine through its paces and pronounced it mechanically OK. He commented that Puffin had fewer blisters than would be expected for an older boat. He suspected that the wetness came from a leaky fitting on the water tank and attributed the oil to a sloppy filter change. Finally he graced the boat with an acceptable survey. We made whatever repairs we could on the spot. I tightened the water tank fittings and replaced a cable from the steering wheel to the rudder. Charlie put in the new autopilot that he had ordered but never found an occasion to install. After selling the boat he would have had no use for it so he threw it in with the deal. We made arrangements to have the bottom painted with new anti fouling at Peterson's Boatyard located in a commercial boat construction area near St. Augustine. There has always been a Peterson's Boatyard in every city in which we have lived. It seems to be a generic name.

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As we motored Puffin to the boatyard in St. Augustine for its anti fouling paint job, Charlie asked me if I would like to try the sails. He seemed surprised when I said OK, and even more surprised when I turned off the engine and made reasonable progress on sail power alone. Charlie was not a sailor and preferred the certainty of power to the ambiguity of the wind. I can't remember actually learning how to sail. In fact I have better and more traumatic memories of learning how to ride a bicycle. Sailing must have been picked up through osmosis at one or another of the summer camps my folks sent me to when I was a kid. I certainly didn't get it from my parents who were Midwestern hydrophobes. In the mid ‘50s I earned college tuition as a sailing instructor at the Culver Naval Academy on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee in central Indiana. The Academy maintained a fleet of wooden E and C class scows. Don't be misled by the name. The scow is a blazingly fast boat, literally a racing hydroplane powered by sail. In my youth scows held all the sailing speed records and usually were able to outrun the spectator powerboats. Puffin was definitely not a scow! After hours the instructors would stage informal races. We got good enough to challenge the local yacht club fleet with mixed results. Our scows were kept in the water most of the summer and got well waterlogged. The club scows were hauled after each race and were light as a feather. The results were predictable. In light airs they tromped us. In heavy winds the weight of our hulls plus the added advantage of acrobatic crew members in wet sweatshirts perching out on the exposed leeboard kept us from capsizing when most of the club fleet found it hard to keep the sails out of the water. By the next year we felt that we had mastered the art. As the result of a particularly windy summer I was the lake’s C scow champ and a fellow instructor was the leading E scow skipper. The local club was generous enough to send us and their A scow class winner to the Midwest regionals at Lake Geneva. As luck would have it the wind was too light to blow out a candle and we finished far out of the money although the A scow did quite well in a sparse fleet. By the third summer I was good enough to win a series of regional races and placed high in the nationals. For a brief shining moment I was rated the best C scow skipper in the country – until I was beaten by some upstarts named Melges. I’ve sailed in other boats since but nothing beats the excitement of a well tuned scow in high wind, planing over the water, boards humming, always on the edge of catastrophe. I’ve tried to describe the feeling one gets in an A scow, skimming across the waves in a 38 foot boat at 20 knots with only the wind for power but most of my younger sailing colleagues don’t get it. The closest one came to understanding was a college friend of my son who exclaimed “It must be just like hang gliding!”

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Maggie's water rat credentials were far more genetic than mine. Viking blood runs in her veins. She spent her early childhood near the Norwegian fjords, her father was a shipyard carpenter and her brother was a lifelong merchant seaman. She was raised on tales of exotic climes and distant places. Much of our 40 year married life had been spent messing around with boats. The first picture I ever took of my wife-to-be shows her in boatyard garb, face covered and eyes behind goggles, wielding a bottom sander, as we struggled to rebuild an old cruising sailboat that was our engagement gift to each other. Our gift boat was in such a sorry state that a determined person could stick two fingers between gaps in the planking. With a summer long effort we ultimately turned it into a seaworthy little craft. Our children, Mike and Karen, learned to walk on boats lurching from step to step with each roll. Even my professional career was wet, containing long stints as a consultant to the Marine Board, the U. S. Merchant Marine Academy, MARAD, the offshore oil drilling industry and the Port of New York. At one point we even owned a company devoted to maritime research. The trouble is that we don't look or act much like sailors. I appear to be what I am, the prototypical college professor, tweed jacket and polysyllable words. The word nerd comes to mind but it is one I avoid using. Maggie is a talented artist, a frontier woman born in the wrong century, an enthusiastic mother and an occasional homemaker. Peterson's Boatyard, barely more than a hard packed field next to the waterway, was cluttered with boats in various states of construction and repair. There were commercial shrimp boats, runabouts, motor cruisers and fairly large sailing yachts. The yard was run by a man and wife team, not much older than our children. It was obviously their first business venture. The foreman, a senior and more wizened hand, understood our desire to start for home and marshaled his forces to get us out of the yard in a single day. The bottom received a new coat of toxic anti fouling paint, each quart about three times more expensive than a bottle of good Scotch whisky. Provisioning Puffin for the trip up the ICW took two days of driving back and forth from Walmart to supermarket in our rental car. Puffin had no refrigeration so most of the food was canned, boxed or packaged in plastic. Canned stew, soup, beans, and dried fruit made up the staples. For snacks we laid in a supply of crackers, nuts and other edibles that would keep in a humid environment. Of course, we included a few bottles of wine. We also stocked a small supply of fresh fruit and vegetables expecting to buy more produce along the way. For emergencies we bought a very small Zodiac inflatable dinghy at a boat store in Jacksonville. Our entertainment center was a car radio with a cassette player that we picked up at Walmart. To organize the provisions, Maggie bought some plastic boxes for storage.

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A previous owner of Puffin had added a large swim platform to the stern, reaching across the width of the hull and extending about three feet back. He was an independent film producer and the platform served as a camera mount for filming marine scenes. The platform and the bow sprit made the overall length of the boat about 35 feet. Charlie warned us that we would need at least this much space to tie up alongside a dock but always to state the size of the boat as 30 feet, the true length of the hull, to any marina manager. Marinas charge by the foot. Our insurance company reluctantly agreed to insure the aged Puffin on the basis of the survey. The agent told me in confidence that the only reason they did so was that I was such a long time customer. Besides, we have had marine insurance on Quark, our other boat, for 25 years and have never filed a claim. The insurance papers would take a few days to arrive so we used the time to get familiar with the Puffin. In the evenings, we explored the area, walked the beach, gazed at the Marineland exhibits, and enjoyed the lovely view of the Atlantic from our motel window. March 26, 1995 A checkout ride on Puffin on the ICW adjacent to Marineland showed that we had much to learn about heavy displacement boat handling. Compared to the other boats we have owned it was lazy and slow to respond. I suppose it should be a little sluggish. It weighs 16, 000 pounds compressed into a pudgy 30 ft. hull. Quark, our twin keel sailboat, is only seven feet shorter, but displaces less than 4, 000 pounds. After a while I got the hang of maneuvering Puffin in tight quarters. The trick was to anticipate what you wanted to do long before you did it, then do it and hope that you made the right decision. The inertia of the boat hindered any quick corrective action. Actually, with the right combination of rudder, reverse gear, and throttle, and the dexterity of a six ball juggler, Puffin could be made to turn in its own length. At the end of our checkout ride we worked our way to the marina fuel dock and filled the 120 gallon diesel fuel tanks and the 70 gallon water tanks. This added another three quarters of a ton to the boat's weight. Charlie claimed that Puffin could carry a lot. He used it to smuggle building materials and cases of beer to the motel his son ran in the Bahamas. More frightening than docking the boat was lighting the alcohol stove. It was about the size of a small kitchen range with three burners and an oven. The procedure for ignition was to build up pressure in the alcohol tank with a bicycle pump then allow alcohol to drip from a burner into a lighting pan. A long match ignited the alcohol, which flamed up heating the burner. Just before the alcohol flame went out, the burner knob was turned in the other direction, allowing alcohol to vaporize in the hot burner and burst into flame. At least that's what it was supposed to do. We could only manage to get one burner to light reliably. Charlie admitted that he could never get the

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oven to work. Alcohol burns with a weak flame and it takes forever to heat a pot of water. Also the smell is oppressive in a closed boat. Fortunately we didn't plan to cook a turkey this trip. March 27, 1995 The ICW is an interconnected chain of waterways, largely sheltered from the open sea, stretching from the tip of Florida to the coast of Maine. Old timers call it the ditch but that name doesn't do it justice. It is a passage of fascinating variety. In Florida and parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, the ICW is shielded from the ocean by low lying sand bars and grassy islands. Rivers heading in the general North/South direction make up a lot of the route. Canals connect adjacent bodies of water. The route that was to become the ICW was first mapped in the late 1800s. It was later widened, straightened, and dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II to protect coastal shipping. While deep enough for our boat, or even an oil barge, it was certainly too shallow for German submarines. ICW buffs consider only the portion from Norfolk to Key West to be the authentic ICW. The northern parts are mostly bays and sounds. Mile 0 starts at Norfolk and ends at Mile 1200 in the Florida Keys. Since we would be heading up to New York, the miles would decrease as we went. After Norfolk the big water starts. The ICW runs the length of Chesapeake Bay then through the Chesapeake and Delaware canal and down Delaware Bay. We would make a sharp left hand turn at Cape May and travel about 100 miles in the open ocean up the Jersey coast before reaching New York harbor. Our plan was to arrive in time to attend niece Elizabeth's wedding early in May. If we averaged about 50 miles each day we would need 24 days to get home at our cruising speed of a fast jog. If the weather turned uncomfortably bad we would simply stay at anchor until it cleared up. Our personal comfort was not too important but we were not masochists either. Also, we couldn't arrive home in Croton-on-Hudson too soon or we would have no place to moor the boat. Coastal, river and canal cruising was familiar stuff although neither of us had done much do-it-yourself sailing out of sight of land. The boating residents of the Marineland Marina reassured us. Some of them had made the trip a dozen or more times, despite being semi-invalids, genteel boating bums and potential candidates for Alcoholics Anonymous. Actually, they were very nice to us and gave us a list of favorite stopovers and anchoring spots. All agreed that March was too early to start. They told us that the weather could be very unsettled in the early spring and that we should hang around Florida for a month or so. This was a very tempting suggestion. The spring weather in Florida was beautiful. The gentle warm winds waved the palms seductively and the marina lifestyle was a page from a Hemingway novel. Expatriates lolled away the hours while the world moved on without them.

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At dusk all the marina regulars gathered on the veranda with a can of beer, a glass of wine or a bottle of a stronger potable and swapped boating lies until nightfall. One Canadian couple made the trip from Montreal every winter and went back every spring. Eventually the Canadian government told them they would have to spend more time in Canada or lose their medical coverage. Now they leave their boat in Florida, spend six months and one day in Canada, and like geese, fly south every fall. Another old-timer had a slow growing form of cancer that was quickly being overtaken by a speedy case of alcoholism. He was curious to see which would kill him first. Most of the veranda crowd were betting on the booze since he would start drinking late in the afternoon and not stop until he had finished off an entire fifth of rum. At this point his wife would gently lead him off to bed. Curiously, he never appeared to have a hangover the next morning. March 28, 1995 Today was engine recognition day. This is the first diesel engine I have been personally responsible for maintaining so everything was new all except the engine. Puffin still had its original 21 year old Perkins diesel, an engine first designed to power London taxicabs. The engine was about twice the physical size of the one in our car and far heavier but only about a quarter as powerful. It was reputed to be extremely reliable although the big supply of spare parts stashed in lockers and cabinets cast some doubt on that reputation. Not to worry. Charlie was a retired auto parts salesman and treated the engine with loving care, buying spare parts as a present for the engine whenever he felt low. Unfortunately he only used the sails as sunshades. The rigging was in as bad a shape as the engine was in good shape. Any real sailing would be out of the question until we got around to making a few repairs. Leaving Maggie to arrange our foodstuffs and belongings, I attempted to change the oil and filter. Oil change is the curse of the diesel. It involves sucking the old oil out of the dipstick hole with a vacuum pump, unbolting the filter case, replacing the filter element and gaskets, then refilling with a couple of gallons of new oil. Because the engine is below floor level, the process is conducted while kneeling with head and arms hanging downward. Everything is artfully arranged so that black thick used oil spatters around the cockpit, covers one's clothes, or falls into the bilge. The manual said the oil must be changed every 100 running hours. We would have to make another oil change somewhere en route so I figured I had better get some practice in under the supervision of someone who had done it before. The next step was bleeding the fuel lines. It was a cleaner but far more finicky job which must be done every time the fuel filter was changed. Every speck of dirt and minuscule air bubble must be removed from the fuel lines or the engine won’t run. Bleeding involves manually operating the fuel pump while letting fuel drip out of all the slightly opened connections from the fuel tank to the engine until no more air bubbles

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emerge. The smell of diesel fuel has got to be one of the most pervasive odors known. Multiple clothes washings won't remove it. I was told by the marina regulars to learn to love the smell. The insurance confirmation came in today so we had no more excuse to stay. March 30 - Day 1 Puffin left Marineland bright and early and headed toward St. Augustine. It was a balmy day with bright sun. We were both a little apprehensive now that the actual trip had begun. Neither of us looked particularly confident. Charlie suggested, more than once, that we simply have the boat trucked to New York. He also suggested that we take his toolbox containing an assortment of wrenches and other fix-it tools and that if we had any trouble we should give him a call. Was he having pangs of conscience? Did he know something about Puffin that had escaped the surveyor? The marina regulars waved goodbye as we carefully negotiated the sand bar partly blocking the entrance to the ICW and turned north. Soon after leaving Marineland we motored by the Fort Matanzas National Monument where a particularly brutal massacre occurred in one of the 16th century wars for the possession of Florida. On this spot in 1565, a Spanish commander ordered 250 French soldiers to be killed after they had surrendered. Legend has it that the river ran red with blood. Today, however, it was a brilliant blue. The sandy banks of the ICW slipped by smoothly and the palms nodded to us as we passed. The sun was nearly overhead as we approached St. Augustine. A 40 minute wait for next Bridge of Lions opening gave us an opportunity to drift around the harbor. Our guidebook described St. Augustine as a product of desire for power, riches, adventure and eternal youth - all guaranteed to induce explorers to leave their homes and brave the savage seas. The area was visited by Ponce De Leon and first settled by the Spanish, taken by the French, retaken by the Spanish only to be sacked by Sir Francis Drake. It was ceded to the English, then transferred back to the Spanish and finally acquired by the United States. This schizophrenic past was reflected in both the architecture and cuisine, although the main influence today appears to be sun seeking retirees from up North. "Hey, Mac! Which way to the Fountain of Youth?" The Bridge of Lions got its name from a pair of granite lions guarding each entrance to the ornate stone span. The bridge had a lifting section in the middle which was raised once an hour. St. Augustine appeared to be a very pretty city from the water. The public marina was just south of the bridge and one could step right from the boat deck to the main street. Old buildings, church spires, and the Castillo dominate the view. The city was the start of Henry Flagler’s railroad to the Keys. This made St. Augustine a tourist destination, and it has stayed so to this day.

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Puffin motored slowly by the Castillo De San Marcos, the Spanish fort built of coral coquina rock. This massive stone structure, erected by Spanish explorers, stands much as it did hundreds of years ago. St. Augustine was established in 1565, three quarters of a century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Nine different wooden forts were built on the site to protect the route of the Spanish galleons loaded to the gunwales with gold and silver plundered form Mexico and South America. The wooden forts were attacked by English, Caribbean pirates, or Seminole Indians, and all eventually burned. The fort built of coquina rock was fireproof and is the one still standing. Maggie and I explored the Castillo just after we were married. It’s too bad we had such a long trip ahead of us or we would have been tempted to stay a couple of days to sip the water from the Fountain of Youth ourselves. We anchored for the night behind a small island in a wide stretch of the ICW about 10 miles south of Jacksonville. This was our first night aboard. The stove lit without an explosion and we cooked up a meal of canned stew on the single functioning burner. The boat rocked gently in the evening breeze as we sipped after dinner coffee on the back deck and congratulated ourselves on successfully completing the day's journey without incident. If things went this way every day, the trip wouldn't be half bad. March 31 - Day 2 The day started out dark and gloomy and promised worse to come. We were almost at Jacksonville when rain began to fall. Jacksonville is a big shipping town and the ICW was lined with commercial docks and other marine facilities. Several sets of marker buoys indicated the various shipping channels. This was no place to be without local knowledge. It was like being dropped in the middle of a highway cloverleaf with no road signs. The tachometer, the device that told us how fast the engine was going, had been behaving erratically, the indicator needle waving all over the dial. Our problems compounded when the tachometer cable broke about an hour after we started. This was a real handicap since Puffin, like most slow boats, had no speedometer. Actually a speedometer is just about useless for cruising since all it tells you is speed through the water. Generally the water itself is moving and not always in the direction you want to go. What the navigator really wants to know is speed over the bottom and that is dependent on currents, tides and cross winds. Without the tachometer, we had to judge engine RPM by sound and guess at the boat speed. The rain increased. Cascading water made it impossible to see out of the cabin windows. Puffin had no windshield wipers, something we had overlooked in our evaluation. The visibility was so poor that I steered the boat from the outside station, out in the wind and rain, wearing every bit of rain gear aboard. I needed wipers on my glasses too but I finally figured out a way to angle my hat brim toward the rain and provide some shelter

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for my eyeballs. Wind gusts blew the hat off every few minutes. At Maggie's suggestion, I looped a cord from the brim around my neck so I nearly strangled. At least I kept the hat. North of the naval nuclear submarine base at Mayport the clouds really burst. We couldn't see more than a few dozen yards ahead despite Maggie handing up a constant stream of Kleenex to wipe my glasses. I tried to suppress the nagging fear that a submarine would surface right under our hull. Just before panic set in, a local sailboat passed us also heading up the ICW. I raised it on the VHF radio and asked the skipper if he wouldn't mind if I followed him. He was having the same visibility problems but at least he had sailed these waters before. We trailed him for about an hour until he turned out of the channel to head for his home dock. Fortunately the rain lightened at about the same time and we could see again. We anchored for the night just west of Amelia Island. It was a shame that the weather was so miserable otherwise we would have liked to row ashore. We stopped here on the way down and explored on foot. Amelia Island proved delightful in an old building, quaint street, step back in time sort of way. It was like New Orleans without the sin. The floor was wet again and we discovered that the rainwater was leaking in. April 1 - Day 3 April Fool's day was much nicer. The sky showed signs of clearing. After our breakfast of oatmeal and fruit we headed into Georgia to be greeted by the overpowering stench of the paper mills near Brunswick. In the distance we could see the towering stacks of the mills, each belching its plume of white smoke. The ICW meandered through marshy canals with banks covered by green wavy sea grass studded with a few gnarled moss covered trees. It was hard to get lost because navigation markers were plentiful and the waterway here was only about a hundred yards wide. Going North, green channel markers are on the left and orange markers are on the right. You just need to know your right hand from your left to stay in the channel. The green markers are square and the orange markers are triangular so I managed OK. Maggie, the artist, served as my instant corrector of color errors. Off to our right was Cumberland Island, a wildlife preserve protected by the National Park Service. It is a subtropical forest and uninhabited except for the rangers. Within the woods and dunes are wild horses, deer, armadillo, wild turkeys, wild pigs, and alligators. The horses and the pigs are said to be descendants of domestic animals that swam ashore when Spanish galleons were wrecked off the Carolina coast four hundred years ago. Through the trees we could just glimpse the crumbling remains of Dungeness, the home of Thomas Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie's son. Philanthropist Andrew gave his money to charity. Thomas, on the other hand, built a huge mansion on this barrier island, surrounded by moss hung oaks. Unfortunately, his children found better uses for their share of the fortune and the home is now a ruin.

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Just north is Jekyll Island. This was the site of the Jekyll Island Club, winter home of America's rich and famous for 56 years. Some wealthy industrialists from the northeast bought the entire island for $125, 000. They wanted a place with seclusion and warmer winter weather than New York or Boston. The water flowing from the island’s artesian wells was said to be "healthful" in curing gout and other diseases associated with high living. The island was covered with live oak trees draped in Spanish moss and it must have been quite a change from Newport, Rhode Island and New York City. William Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were all charter members of the club. The collective fortunes of the 100 members were estimated to be 25% of the entire world's wealth at the time! Invited guests were welcome, but anyone not a member was called "stranger" while visiting. It was a select group indeed. The “cottages” of the Jekyll Island Club members, built in the late 1890's through the early 1930's, hardly fit the normal conception of a cottage. Club rules dictated that cottages were not to be larger than the Club House. Still, the Rockefeller "cottage" was 12, 000 square feet in area, about the size of five or six ordinary houses. Eight hundred servants saw to the needs of the members and their families. These were mostly personal servants brought with the group from "up north". A typical picnic prepared for noon at the beach included white jacketed waiters serving a five-course luncheon on tables spread with linen cloth. The menu might feature crepe suzettes, lobster Newburg, oysters Rockefeller and flaming baked Alaska. This is better than we usually eat aboard Puffin. The start of the end of the Jekyll Island Club began with the depression of the 1930's. Roosevelt's New Deal income taxes made Jekyll Island an extravagance that even the rich couldn’t afford. In 1942 a German U-boat torpedoed and sank an oil tanker in nearby St. Simon's Sound. The club members feared for their own personal security. There were other ways to avoid cold weather. Florida offered a warmer winter climate. The children of the original club members wanted more excitement than taking high tea on the veranda. Life in Palm Beach was more appealing than the isolation of Jekyll. The Club officially closed in 1942. In 1947, the state of Georgia bought the whole island and everything on it for $650, 000. No wonder Roosevelt was called a traitor to his class. We found a good protected spot just behind St. Simon's Island to anchor for the night. This is another site with a ripe history. John and Charles Wesley preached here. This is where Aaron Burr hid out after his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Even John J. Audubon painted some of his best portraits of native birds here but only after killing and stuffing them.

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We were near the channel, so we raised our battery powered anchor light up to the spreaders and hoped it would make us visible to the commercial traffic that operated day and night. The nautical Rules of the Road are kind of vague on this point. The only requirement for a boat anchored in a waterway is the display of a light or lantern in the rigging, visible from any direction. The rules were obviously written in sailing ship days when a single candle could be seen for miles along an unlit shore. Against a background of illuminated homes, strip malls, and auto headlights, a 2 watt bulb seemed scant protection against 40 knot speedboats and 1000 ton oil barges. Our navigation equipment for this trip consisted of a strip chart of the ICW in booklet form, sort of like a motor club Triptik. We also had a listing of buoys and critical markers, and a marina and facilities guide. As a backup we had the GPS receiver but we hadn't used it for anything more demanding than finding the location of our house. To further complicate our navigational chores, all distances on the ICW are measured in statute or land miles while most other distances over the water are measured in fifteen percent longer nautical miles. This made for an exercise in mental arithmetic when we wanted to compare our ICW strip chart with other marine information. The strip chart was based on a Corps of Engineers survey done in 1948. The marina regulars told us that since the ICW was in a constant flux of silting up and being dredged, any year's chart would be as inaccurate as any other. The only tide table we had was in a travel booklet picked up in Hilton Head on our way down. The VHF radio that was our primary means of ship to ship communications had a line-of-sight range. That means if we couldn't see who we were trying to raise on the radio, we probably couldn't talk to them either. Our secondary means of communication was by yelling. By this time we had worked out a routine for the navigation chores. Often Maggie told me where we were and I steered the boat. Less frequently I told Maggie where we were and she steered the boat. Sometimes neither of us had any idea where we were. April 2 - Day 4 Puffin made a good run today along the ICW as it twisted its way through low lying islands on the Georgia coast. We had pleasant weather at last. Colors were soft and diffused by a very slight haze in the air. The grass along the shore was brilliant green, the water various shades of blue. Orange waterway markers shimmered as if they were internally illuminated by neon lights. The ICW in this part of Georgia has about as much direction as a bowl of spaghetti. We traveled ten miles North then nine miles South, sometimes seeing the very same trees and houses from the other side. We passed many small fishing boats and shrimpers.

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On one fishing trawler a young girl and her dog were seated on the cabin top waving to passing boats. She was not more than seven or eight and dressed in a summery pink frock. Her joy was so contagious that even the most dour fishermen smiled and waved back. I waved too, then reached for my camera to record this lovely scene. By the time I got it out and focused our boats were too far apart for a picture. No matter, it was one of those lifetime memory images like the ferryboat girl in the white dress in Citizen Kane. My only regret is that I can’t share it with anyone. We ate lunch as we motored, usually cranberry juice and veggies with a handful of peanuts as a snack. Our anchoring destination for tonight was near Ossibaw Island. Along the way we were joined by a small pod of dolphins that traveled beside us for a couple of miles. They swam parallel to the boat, then dove underneath and came up the other side. What a fun game. Too soon they tired of us and went looking for a slicker boat, or perhaps one that dumped food scraps over the side. A number of wider spots along the ICW near Savannah were to be used as the sailing venues for the upcoming Atlanta Olympics and there was much construction of docks, boathouses and other facilities. Fine looking houses were being built as well, almost certainly to be rented for exorbitant prices for the Games. If we stayed anchored here for a couple of months we would have prime seats for the Olympic sailing events. Savannah is located on the highest point above the river. James Oglethorpe, a member of parliament in England, had a mission. A friend of his had died in debtor’s prison. He wanted to establish a place in the New World where another "chance" could prevail. He persuaded King George III to grant land for such a safe haven and Georgia was established. The King didn't have debtor’s relief in mind. His intention was to provide a bulwark against the Spaniards in Florida. Oglethorpe was given no pay and little authority but supervised the colony for ten years. He laid out the City of Savannah based on designs from the Roman Empire. Savannah, like Rome, featured central squares surrounded by homes, businesses, meeting halls and places of worship. These squares were decorated with fountains and statues. The original laws of the colony were very strict and specific. There was no hard liquor, no slavery, and no lawyers. These restrictions quickly changed. Eventually Savannah became a center of the slave trade, taverns flourished and debtors were thrown in prison. I am told that there are even a few lawyers in town. April 3 - Day 5 The full scale northward migration of boats on the ICW had not yet started but we still had plenty of company. Fast motor cruisers zoomed by us, leaving us bobbing in their wake. The bigger boats, or those with

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more daring skippers, took the outside passage in fair weather. Commercial traffic was mostly barges and tugs except near fishing ports. We passed and were passed in turn by many of the northbound boats. Our maximum speed was seven knots, a landlubberly eight miles an hour, though we usually cruised at six knots. This was slightly slower than some of the accompanying trawlers. But since we kept at it a bit longer eventually we met again. Once in a while, when we were close enough, we tried to start a conversation with our fellow travelers. The conjoint noise of our motors made anything short of a shout inaudible. We did find out that many were retired and were cruising from winter homes in Florida to spend time with their children and grand children in the snow country. One man was a retired German engineer who told us in a Bavarian accent that a cruising retirement was much nicer in the USA than on the terminally polluted waterways of Europe. The costs were less here too. At last we have become a Third World retirement haven where foreigners come to make their money go further. Bridge openings were a challenge. Most opened on the hour and if we didn't arrive just before the opening, we had to wait, with a growing accumulation of boats, until the clock chimed again. Here was where that turn in your own length practice paid off. The turning basins on both sides of the bridge got crowded as all of us tried to hold our boats off each other and the piling lined shore until opening time. Our best strategy was to adjust our approach speed so that we reached the bridge just before it closed. The timing was critical but it was better to be too late than too early. When we saw the bridge start to open about half a mile ahead of us we frantically radioed the bridge tender imploring him to keep it up until we passed through. Most of the time the bridge tender complied if we were within five minutes of the zero hour. We sped through the span without pausing, oblivious to the glares of waiting motorists. But we always remembered to thank the bridge tender on the other side. A little politeness never hurts. That night we anchored in Jarvis Creek on Hilton Head Island. Our tourist office brochure told us that the tidal range was nine feet. We arrived at our anchoring destination near high tide and looked around for a spot that had at least nine feet more water beneath us than necessary to float the boat. To keep the anchor from dragging, we always need to let out at least five to seven times more anchor line than the depth of the water. Allowing for the tidal range and the draft of the boat meant that we would need at least 75 feet of anchor line and that the boat would swing around in a circle 150 feet in diameter. This was too much for a narrow creek a bit more than 100 ft. wide. To make sure we didn't drift into either bank, we set two anchors to restrict our swinging range.

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The procedure for anchoring in a tidal creek was quite simple although I had only done it a few times before. First you set an anchor near one side of the creek, and then you move to the other side and set another anchor. Finally, you haul in both lines until the boat is near the middle. If the wind shifts you will not drift too close to either shore. When we dropped the hooks at night, the creek looked broad and the land flat. Unfortunately, the battery in our anchor light was flat too. It had lasted only two nights and the bulb was now about firefly bright. I managed to jury rig a substitute anchor light by wrapping wire around the terminals of a spare 12 volt bulb, taping it as high as I could reach in the rigging. I then plugged the other end into the cigarette lighter socket. It was much brighter than the battery powered bulb. On out first drive down to Florida, we detoured to Hilton Head to see what this popular resort was like. A thousand years ago this island was paradise to the Escamu Indians. In sequence, it became paradise to the Yemasee Indians, to the Spanish conquistadors, to the French Huguenots, to English plantation owners, to freed slaves, to housing developers, and finally to franchise owners and mall rats. Every fast food establishment that you ever dreamed existed was located on the main street, every shoe store, every toggery, every Gap, TJ Max, Victoria's Secret, Body Shop, ad infinitum. What distinguished it from a massive outdoor shopping mall were some very nice beaches and a lot of humid air. April 4 - Day 6 The world was different at low tide. We awoke to find ourselves anchored in a narrow stream with small, low islands all around. When the tide dropped, the land emerged. We chose our spot well last evening. The double mooring held us in the middle of the only deep water in the creek. We could hear and see small fishing boats puttering around the shallow water between islets, setting and retrieving fish pots and crab traps. After breakfast we continued northward while the weather became more unsettled. As we rounded a bend in the ICW we saw a trawler, one of our fellow travelers, lying on its side on the muddy bank. Apparently he wasn't aware of the 9 foot drop in tide. He had a six hour wait until he floated free. We couldn't get close enough to ask if everything was all right but we felt reassured when the embarrassed skipper appeared on the tilted deck, shrugged his shoulders and waved us on. Puffin cruised slowly through more wandering waterways in the South Carolina low country. The ICW passed close by Beaufort and by Edisto Island south of Charleston. Beaufort was once called the most aristocratic town in the Old South. We have it on good report that quite a few residents are still waiting for the return of the Confederacy. The town was established in 1562 by Jean Ribaut and a band of French Huguenots and was the first Protestant community in the Americas. Had the Huguenots had a better publicity agent than the Pilgrims, we might all be speaking French and eating crepes suzette on Thanksgiving.

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Beaufort is reputed to be a favorite layover destination for ICW boaters fleeing the cold weather. It is known for its Southern hospitality. The town Fathers (and Mothers) have established a marine Welcome Wagon which hands out goodies in the hope that boaters will leave the town with fond memories while spending some money before they go. The Welcome Wagon lady hands a rose to every woman on board and gives a smile to every gentleman. Before the advent of nylon and dacron, Edisto Island was the main source of sea island cotton which was the American version of Egyptian cotton, which in turn replaced flax for making sails. How's that for bringing a nautical theme into geography. Now Edisto Island is apparently one huge real estate development and signs posted along the channel offer home sites and condos for the travel weary. Charleston looked picture book pretty from the water with its rows of elegant pastel colored houses bordered by carefully tended gardens. Our tourist booklet said that it was founded by English aristocrats loyal to King Charles II. In gratitude for their support, he deeded them all the lands south of the Virginias to the Georgia border. At the time this was looked upon as a largely symbolic gift since the King's surveyors said the marshy, water soaked ground was worthless for any purpose. To every one's surprise, the land proved ideal for growing rice, as well as cotton and indigo. The Carolina lowlands, with the hard work of African slaves, became one of the major rice producing areas of the world. The wealth of the rice paddies, the booklet informed us, went right into the architecture of Charleston. It was the epitome of European luxury in the New World. From what we can see from the deck of Puffin, it must be true. Charleston's historic district is much larger than Savannah's. Most of these old buildings were preserved because of Northern “retribution” following the Civil War. Since Charleston initiated the start of hostilities by firing on Fort Sumter, federal aid to re-build the city was a long time coming. Charlestonians had to "make do" with what they had available. Since there was little money to rebuild, a large number of very old structures remained. An architectural board reviews any proposed construction or renovation planned for all buildings older than 75 years. You can do whatever you please on the inside, but the outside must look just like it did at the end of the Civil War. At Charleston harbor the ICW markers headed straight out to sea. The weather had become blustery and the fresh wind coming off the ocean raised short choppy waves in the harbor. Our ICW navigational guide mentioned that the waterway headed out into the harbor then made a sharp turn to the left at a numbered navigational buoy. It would be imprudent the guide said to save time by cutting across the harbor since there were many shallow spots. We were unable to locate the turning buoy and began to get uneasy.

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Fort Sumter was less than a hundred yards off to the right. It was a low dark stone structure on a rocky island about half a mile offshore, not even slightly resembling the story book fort of one’s imagination. This fort was the direct result of lack of preparedness in the War of 1812 when British ships of war bombarded undefended US harbors. The “Star Spangled Banner” is Francis Scott Key’s musical rendition of the British attack on Baltimore. To prevent this from happening again, Congress authorized coastal fortifications up and down the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Fort Sumpter was built on a foundation of Maine granite blocks laid on a sand bar in the harbor. Typical of most government projects, construction was so slow that by 1860 only 15 of the planned 135 heavy guns had been installed. It looked like an unlikely place for the start of the Civil War. But on April 12, 1861 Confederate forces fired shells at Fort Sumter for 34 hours straight while the women and children of Charleston lined the harbor to watch the fireworks. The fort finally surrendered with surprisingly little loss of life. Maine granite is very strong. Southern troops held the fort for the next four years. We tried to feel a twinge of historic nostalgia at passing by Fort Sumpter but we had more immediate concerns. The ICW appeared to be heading straight out to sea. No turn in sight, no familiar waterway markers, and dark clouds on the horizon. By this time we were convinced that our next landfall would be Europe. Finally I recognized a familiar buoy number through the binoculars and Maggie located it on our strip chart. It was the turning buoy at last. We made the appropriate turn and soon were back in the narrow confines of the waterway. By evening it was cold and rainy so we stopped for the night in Oyster House Creek. This is a narrow stream on the western bank of the ICW. There was a cozy, well lit house on the shore and we envied the pleasures of unmoving beds and TV. Fortunately, we were warm. The engine, after running all day, acted like a big cast iron stove and the cabin didn't cool off until we are snug in our sleeping bags for the night. April 5 - Day 7 We worked our way up the coastal islands on the South Carolina shore. From deck height we could look over and see the Atlantic. There was still plenty of damage along the shore from Hurricanes Andrew (’92) and Gordon (’94). Most of the beach front houses were built on stilts and had survived the direct surge of sea water but the ICW was lined with wrecked boats and piers. The storm surge appeared to have torn loose boats and boathouses, carried them inland and dumped them, shattering the structures and breaking the boat hulls. Cleanup has been very slow. This may be a nice place to visit although you wouldn't want to live here - at least not during hurricane season.

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Motoring up the waterway was very relaxing. Both of us would sit in the upper steering cockpit, chatting and looking at the scenery. It was like watching an interminable, but still enjoyable, slow motion travelogue. The only real problem was the sun. There was no cover over the cockpit and by noontime we were usually baked and dehydrated. Hats and long sleeved shirts became the uniform of the day. Finally, out of desperation, we rigged a beach umbrella to the boom, angling it to cast some shade in the direction of the wheel. Every waterway turn meant that the umbrella would have be readjusted. It couldn't be tightly tied in one place. The staff was jammed through a loop of rope around the boom and the base of the staff was held firm by the person whose foot was in the right place. This jury rigged bimini cover solved our problem until an unusually strong gust of wind levitated the entire umbrella out of the cockpit, over the back of the boat, and into the water. It was impossible to make a quick enough turn in the narrow channel and our last view of our sunshade was of the umbrella slowly sinking beneath the ripples. We stopped for the night at Graham Creek. By now our anchoring drill was pretty routine. I yelled a lot and Maggie dropped the anchor. Maggie would haul the anchor in the morning while I maneuvered the boat to ease the strain. The hardest part was scraping off the mud and gunk that clung to the flukes. Maggie would get the big globs then we would hang the anchor from the bowsprit and let the slow forward motion of the boat wash it comparatively clean. When we set two anchors we had to do everything twice. I often offered to switch jobs but Maggie seemed more intimidated by the trivial task (for me) of clutch and throttle control than by the backbreaking work of hauling 50 pounds of anchor and mud. Of course she made the obvious joke that Puffin had an anchor wench instead of an anchor winch. This did almost nothing to ease my guilt. April 6 - Day 8 It was a truly miserable day. Rain, cold, and wind. We were in a good spot so we just stayed to wait it out. Fortunately we had packed a passel of paperbacks so we had plenty of reading material. That and a few boat chores kept us busy all day. Maggie marked our strip map and identified the critical markers in bold writing so we could see them in a hurry. The front opening ports were leaking and water dropped on our faces at night. We discovered that most of the wetness on the floor and the berths came from deck and port leaks. Our temporary repair for the leaky ports was to tape plastic covers cut from Maggie's painting drop cloth over them. We also used a piece of plastic to cover the forward hatch. I caulked every suspicious crack along the perimeter of the windows with a tube of bathtub grout that I had discovered in Charlie's toolbox. Maggie and I wondered if there was more he hadn't told us. These temporary fixes made the sleeping area comparatively dry but some drops still fell from bolts securing deck fittings. Removing and rebedding the fittings to eliminate the leaks would have involved much more outside work than we were prepared to handle in

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this kind of weather. We opted for an expedient fix by cutting the tops off two empty plastic cranberry juice bottles and fashioning the bottoms into little buckets. We then hung the buckets directly under the leaky bolts. No more rain in the face. People that have never owned a boat fantasize that boating is a leisurely activity. They couldn't be more wrong. No boat is ever in perfect condition or even in really good condition. It is always a battle between maintenance and deterioration, a labor of Sisyphus, ever fighting the natural agents of decay. There is always a task to be done to make the boat more seaworthy, and when that is accomplished, another task, and still another. The trick is to learn to love the process. It is the race that counts since there is never any ultimate victory. Although Puffin was not a big boat, it had plenty of below deck space. There was a sleeping area in the forepeak with two full sized berths, hanging closets on each side and several dresser type drawers. From the forepeak, you climbed two steps to reach the pilothouse. The internal steering station with instruments, electrical panel, Loran, VHF radio and broadcast radio was on the right hand or starboard side. The port or left hand side had cabinets for supplies and the water heater. The pilot house had its own ladder leading to the upper steering station. Lift a hatch in the floor and you found the engine. Down two steps astern, being careful not to bump your head on a crossbeam was the main cabin with the stove, sink and icebox to port and a dinette table and couch like seating benches to starboard. Under the benches was still more storage space. Immediately aft was the bathroom with toilet, sink and hand held shower. At the back end of the main cabin was a short ladder leading to the rear deck. All the below deck spaces had standing headroom, at least for us. This division of space made it possible for each of us to read draw or just snooze without interfering with the other. The only thing we really lacked was a gym. After being confined below for a rainy day it was necessary to run up and down the ladder to the deck a few times to work the kinks out of your muscles. April 7 - Day 9 The ICW along this part of the South Carolina shore was straight and easy to follow. We stopped in Georgetown, a little oasis between an aging steel mill and a paper mill. Neither was in operation when we arrived. The town fronted a fairly wide creek extending west from the ICW. Just beyond the paper mill the creek bent in a gradual arc to reveal a lovely harbor with dozens of pleasure boats anchored in neat rows. Georgetown was once the rice exporting capitol of the South and, in addition to picturesque streets, featured a museum devoted to rice farming. Waterfront buildings were painted with large colorful murals showing scenes from the town’s early days. Georgetown had decided that it was risky to tie its future to the industrial age and had made a determined effort to attract tourists, even those arriving aboard boats.

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Our berth for the night was at a small marina and fuel dock along the waterfront. We selected it on the spur of the moment because a near sister ship of Puffin was tied along a neighboring dock. In topping off the fuel tanks I somehow managed to spill about a quart of diesel fuel into the water. It was panic time since the EPA mandates a big fine for fuel spills. Fortunately, Maggie remembered that we had a bottle of dish washing detergent on board. The dock attendant suggested dousing the deck and the water surrounding the boat with the soapy contents of the bottle to disperse the sheen before the harbor police noticed. The sheen vanished but a halo of soapsuds surrounded our boat for some time. Lesson number one in fueling has been learned. Stop the pump before the tank is filled! A boardwalk ran along the harbor and was lined with shops and fancy eateries. The one we selected provided an excellent meal, fresh seafood dredged from the canal we had just traveled - a welcome change from Dinty Moore stew. We engaged in a fruitless search for a tachometer cable, exploring the picture book views of the town in the process. The only ominous sign was a street marker about six feet above ground level marking the height of the last flood. The flowers here were beautiful and it was only April. April 8 - Day 10 Today we made it to Myrtle Beach, renowned for golf, seashore sports and other sybaritic activities. The waterway here was largely man made, a straight canal lined with big houses, still showing some damage from recent storms. There were few spots to anchor out of the traffic stream so we stopped at the Coquina Marina, an establishment so large that we needed a map to find our designated pier. There were at least 1000 boats here, some small and insignificant, others pseudo ocean liners. After calling the dockmaster on the radio we were assigned a berth only to find ourselves lost in the dozens of possible passages. It was like being trapped in a watery Hampton Court maze. Eventually a dock boy noticed our confusion and directed us to the proper spot. For dinner, we decided to hike to a first class restaurant several miles away, highly recommended by a local skipper. It was a long walk down the main highway. Certainly we needed the exercise after so many days of confinement. Golf courses were arrayed to the right and left of us along the way. The restaurant was supposed to be informal so we were still in our sailing clothes. When we entered the restaurant we had the sudden realization that informal in Myrtle Beach, at least among the golfing set, meant tuxedos were optional. Though we were the most casually dressed, we were secure in our dignity and had an excellent, albeit expensive, meal. By the time we got back to the boat, it was dark. We attempted to make our first phone call to our children to tell them that we had survived so far. Turning out our pockets yielded just enough

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change for one call. Now the problem was determining which child to call. We finally decided that if we called Karen, she would probably call Mike but we were not certain if it would work the other way around. Fumbling through a maze of common carriers we finally reached Karen. But our time ran out in the middle of the conversation and we couldn’t scrape up enough change to eke out another three minutes. So we left her hanging in mid-sentence. We hoped she would assume the best and not that we had been zapped by a lightning bolt. April 9 - Day 11 The ICW in North Carolina was close to the ocean with narrow, low lying sandy islands acting as a breakwater. We could not accurately judge speed, so we followed a sailboat that was going about as fast as we wanted to go. He reluctantly engaged in the usual ICW social chit chat over the radio because, as he indicated by hand signals, the battery in his handheld VHF radio was running low. There was a parade of boats at this point. Sometimes we got too close to each other, backing off when we could see the whites of the other skipper’s eyes. ICW markers were often covered with bird’s nests so big that the number couldn't be seen. No problem. It would have been hard to get lost. Our sailboat guide suggested that a good evening stop would the harbor in Wrightsville Beach. The town was off the ICW to the right, down a winding canal lined with condos. We barged our way through a sailing race, contributing to a shuffling of the leaders, and found a wide harbor, perhaps a mile across, with expensive summer homes and apartments all around. Many yachts were moored in the harbor, some permanently, and some transients like us. Our definition of a yacht, by the way, was any boat larger than our own. Maggie and I have never considered ourselves yacht people since that would violate the working class, neo-socialist values of our upbringing. We found an open anchoring spot and dropped the hook. By nightfall, the harbor was crowded with other transient vessels, some from abroad. This appeared to be a favorite nesting ground even though it was not listed in any of our waterway guides. One person just tells another. That is how local knowledge, that store of miscellaneous information that old timers have floating around their brains, accumulates. What a beautiful night. The sky color deepened from robin's egg to azure to midnight blue. We sipped wine surrounded by twinkling lights. It was a thoroughly delightful evening. April 10 - Day 12 Puffin left Wrightsville Beach just after dawn. The morning was foggy and the winds calm. Soon after leaving, we were yelled at by a dockside lounger not to make such a wake. I estimated our speed was about 4 or 5 knots. We must have spilled his morning coffee. Maggie and I alternated in steering the boat. Given the short spacing of the ICW markers, it would have taken real work to get lost.

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Canal cruising gives you the opportunity to see things close up and in slow motion, totally unlike driving. The closest analogy is biking leisurely through the countryside. The scenery flowed slowly by, the foliage changed from palm to moss hung oak to pine as we made our way north. We decided to chart our progress, state by state, on an AAA Road Atlas. On the large scale map of the United States, the mark showing our present position was disappointingly close to our starting point. The day cleared and the wind got blustery. It was cold and more rain was predicted. We had made good progress today so we decide to stop early and find a berth at the Dudley Marina in Swansboro. This was a medium sized service marina catering to motorboats and fishermen. Showers were available and welcome although Maggie found a peephole in hers used by the resident voyeur. She wadded up a piece of toilet paper and stuffed it in the hole adding to his frustration. The marina lent us an automobile to do some shopping in town. The car was the mother of all wrecks. I expected it momentarily to collapse into its rusted component parts as it sputtered and lurched along the local roads. We replenished our fresh food supply and bought a few goodies at a local combination supermarket and dry goods store. Maggie picked up some nice white towels at bargain prices. I seem to recall that there were a number of textile mills in this region and that Swansboro was once the site of a particularly nasty battle between management goons and labor organizers. The town was also pickup truck heaven, but it worked to our advantage. At last I found the correct tachometer cable in the auto parts store next door to the supermarket. It was a universal truck speedometer cable, a part which must be special ordered in more civilized locations. That evening I cut it to length with my Multi-tool and installed it. It worked. April 11 - Day 13 The weather looked OK for a change despite a low lying fog that hampered visibility. It seemed a good opportunity to make up some time so we left just after dawn. We headed east through Bogue Sound. This is a wide and shallow stretch of water, separated from the sea by a low narrow grass covered barrier island. The deep channel threads through the sound in a serpentine manner and we had to keep an eye on the channel markers. The waterway made an unexpected turn just as a particularly dense blob of fog hid the markers. Within seconds the boat slowed, then stopped abruptly and we found ourselves aground on a falling tide. The ICW old timers told us that hardly anyone made it through without hitting the bottom at least once. Well, we've been baptized. Fortunately the bottom was mud rather than rock. I used the dinghy to set an anchor in deeper water so that we wouldn't drift further ashore. We prepared to wait it out until the tide came in. A passing commercial fishing boat skipper asked if we needed help and offered to pull us off. He grabbed the anchor line, wrapped it to his stern cleat and started to tug. All

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it did was tip our boat. Puffin weighed 16, 000 pounds and had been aground for at least an hour. The fisherman was challenged by the failure of his towing efforts and became obsessed with getting us free. He attached the line to his hoisting crane, raised it well above deck level and hit the throttle. His boat had plenty of power, as it needed to have, to haul fish nets. The rope stretched bar tight. Maggie and I cowered back afraid that it might snap or the cleats pull out of the deck. But everything held. The high angle of the line counteracted the tipping force and Puffin slowly began to pivot. We assisted him with our own motor and slowly worked free. When we offered to pay him for his salvage job, he wouldn't take any money saying that it was just a local custom to help another boat in need. He might require a tow himself one day and we might just be the ones that happened by. To play it safe we decided to follow a commercial barge figuring that its hull was deeper than ours and it would hit the bottom before we did. The channel made a sharp left turn at Morehead City and our blocker left us. We were now headed north. Most of this area had modest houses along the waterway, many built on stilts. Although the tides were less than in South Carolina, storms sweep water inland from time to time and cover the very flat ground. We passed many fishing boats along the waterway and a couple of oyster dredges. The oyster boats scoured the bottom with a conveyer belt system that scooped up everything on the river bed and brought it to the surface on its moving belt. Crewmen picked out the desirable oysters and clams from amidst the old tires and shoes before the belt rotated downward toward the bottom again. The residue was dumped back in the water. These boats appeared to pay not the slightest attention to the signs prohibiting oyster dredging in polluted areas. Raw oysters and clams suddenly dropped several places on my seafood appetizer list. Several small boats were loaded so heavily with oysters that the gunwales were only an inch or two above the water. A slight wave would have swamped them and liberated the oysters. We stopped for the night at Cedar Creek, the last potential anchorage before crossing Pamlico Sound. April 12 - Day 14 Pamlico Sound was choppy from a brisk onshore wind and, although the water appeared wide and open, the dredged channel was quite narrow. Fortunately we left the open water by midday and threaded our way past several small islands. North of Belhaven there was a strip of canal that terminated in the Alligator River. It seems that every third waterway from Florida is named Alligator something or other. It tends to discourage you from letting your feet dangle over the side. The water in this river was the color of strong tea from the tannin in the decaying vegetation.

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Our search for an anchorage began about dusk. We tried a few spots, and eventually found one to our liking. The ideal anchorage for a small boat is another one of those maritime Holy Grails. It must be protected from the wind and strong currents, out of the stream of traffic, deep enough so that you will not touch bottom when the tide goes out but not so deep that you need to let out an excessively long anchor line. The bottom should have good anchor holding properties without any rocks to snare the anchor or abrade the nylon rope. The anchor must not lose its hold if the wind or tide changes although it should pull out easily in the morning. Finally, the anchor must come out clean without requiring messy scrubbing. A hard sand bottom is probably best but there are few such anchorages this side of the tropics. Its no wonder we had to try a several spots before we found one that even approximated our minimum specifications. The country was heavily wooded and the only signs of human life were the lights on a few nearby boats. We were told that there are black bears in the woods who regularly swim across the river to reach the other side. Maggie was sure that she saw one swimming across our bow. The sunset was beautiful. There was a ring around the moon. Now if I could only remember what that means. April 13 - Day 15 Dawn was announced by raindrops falling on our face. We had forgotten to rig the mini-rain buckets. I finally recalled what the ring around the moon meant. Despite our careful selection of an anchorage the previous night, the boat rocked and pitched in the storm tossed waters. The anchor held firmly and there was no danger. It was just uncomfortable and a bit cold too. The weather radio told us of small craft warnings and eight foot waves on Albemarle Sound, our next destination. The waterway guidebook noted that Albemarle Sound could be unpredictable and nasty because the shallow brackish water quickly built up into steep choppy waves in an onshore wind. We decided to stay put for the day. So far we have had three days layover and were halfway through our reading material. By noon the rain let up a bit and a few boats passed us to attempt the Albemarle Sound crossing. We decided to go tomorrow since the day was half over. The weather along the North Carolina coast is particularly unpredictable because of a peculiar meteorological phenomenon. Here the warm Gulf Stream heading north meets the much colder Labrador Current heading south. The conflict results in the frequent storms that plague the Outer Banks. So many ships have foundered in violent storms off these shores that this corner of the infamous Bermuda Triangle is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. There are about 5000 sunken vessels off the North Carolina coast and we didn’t plan to add to the total.

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Some boat housekeeping chores occupied our time. I adjusted the autopilot so that it would reliably steer the boat and Maggie reorganized our supplies. By mid afternoon, the sun came out and the wind died. The weather forecast assured us that tomorrow should be even better. We listened to the radio to pass the time. All we could get near the ICW was Bible belt fundamentalism, country and western music and Public Radio. The prevalence of Public Radio was a surprise until we remembered that every small college probably had a FM station networking the PBS broadcasts. We heard a lot of PBS and a few of the tapes we brought with us to play in the car. When I drive, I like to listen to opera, usually concert performances of soloists played very loudly. We slipped a couple of these tapes into the cassette player and treated the black bears to a stirring concert of Luciano Pavarotti and Cecilia Bartoli. April 14 - Day 16 The hoped for good weather never materialized. We decided to go anyway. Albemarle Sound lived up to its reputation for roughness. The wind from the Atlantic drove choppy waves of 4 to 6 feet right on our starboard beam. Their timing was perfectly synchronized with the natural roll period of the boat. Like a child on a playground swing where correctly timed small pushes can get the swing moving in a huge arc, the waves got the boat rolling from side to side about 45 degrees each way. I was steering from the lower station trying to keep my balance as the rug slid from one edge of the wheelhouse to the other. Finally Maggie folded it up into a two foot square pad and I stood on it behind the wheel. The sand on the floor left over from the folded shag rug acted like tiny ball bearings underfoot. Maggie scrubbed up the sand with wet towels while we rocked and rolled. After about three hours of cocktail shaker motion we finally crossed the sound and entered the North River. The entrance required a sharp turn that Maggie finally located. Just as we rounded the point and headed into calmer water, a Coast Guard patrol boat hailed us and wanted to board for an inspection. The patrol boat had a crew of five or six young seaman, all equipped with lethal looking sidearms, and a drug sniffing dog. The noncom in charge told me that our dinghy, tied on the swim platform, was obscuring our name and port and they wanted to see our papers. Since we didn't have any papers yet, I got confused and couldn't even find the bill of sale. Maggie told me where to look but naturally I couldn't locate it. The guardsmen opened all the cabinets and hatches and the engine compartment. Eventually I found the bill of sale, right where Maggie told me it was and it satisfied the legal requirement. We got a clean bill of health in the inspection too. The horn worked, we have the required number of life preservers and fire extinguishers, etc. Our only defect was that we lacked a sign posted over the galley telling us not to dump garbage over the side. The Chief Petty Officer commanding the team graciously overlooked that major deficiency and gave us an official satisfactory

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inspection certificate. He confided that they had orders to stop every northbound boat since a major shipment of drugs was expected up the ICW. The CPO obviously decided that two senior citizens piloting an ancient sailing trawler were unlikely suspects. The dog wagged its tail. We continued on our way and, as we looked back, we could see the patrol boat hailing the following ICW voyager. At Coinjock we stopped to refuel at Midway Marina. This was a small rustic looking place being rehabilitated by a husband and wife team who retired from city living to raise their kids in a less toxic atmosphere. It was not much of a marina, basically a fuel dock and a log cabin type building containing a little store and a lounge. It was extremely neat and hospitable. The interior was finished in varnished knotty pine with blue curtains and braided throw rugs. It served as the family's living room in the off season. We felt that we could use a little home style hospitality after the traumatic events of the afternoon so we decided to stay the night at the dock. The back yard was planted in flowers with a scattering of plastic children's toys. We borrowed the marina car and drove to a local diner where we had a Southern Fried dinner. April 15 - Day 17 Today's route was through the Albemarle Canal in Virginia, a narrow man made canal with sharp hull eating rocks lining each side. At one point we passed through an Army artillery range where traffic lights warned us if there was shooting in progress. Naturally red meant stop and wait or you might have an errant projectile fall on deck. By this time our days were pretty routine. We woke at dawn and struggled into our boating togs. Maggie would wipe the condensation off the deck while I would try to light our Kamikaze alcohol stove to heat water for coffee. Breakfast was usually of cold oatmeal, Parmelat ultra pasteurized milk and whatever fruit we happened to have. This was much the same breakfast we have had at home for the last ten years. There must be a virtue in consistency. Either that or the curse of little minds. By this time the coffee was ready and we gulped it while planning our days run. Maggie would then haul the anchor while I tried to position the boat to ease the strain. Then came a long stint of morning motoring. Lunch usually consisted of a handful of peanuts, some greenery, perhaps a slice of bread and a glass of diluted cranberry juice. Actually, the cranberry juice disguised the taste of the lousy Florida water. We have nearly 60 gallons of Marineland water on board and are consuming it at a very slow rate. Our pristine New York water has spoiled us. About noon we saw a sign warning that the Dismal Swamp Canal was closed because of low water. The Dismal Swamp Canal is an alternative passage from Albermarle Sound to Chesapeake Bay. This was a real disappointment since the canal was reputed to be neither dismal nor swampy. We were looking forward to cruising on one of the country's earliest and most picturesque public works. Young George Washington

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made some of the first surveys of the route and he owned property in the area. The canal, dug by hand with slave labor and fed by rain water through a feeder canal, was quite an engineering accomplishment. During the Civil War Union troops tried unsuccessfully to blow up the locks but it was too well defended, and the Confederacy kept it open as a supply route. Amazingly, most of the original bulkhead system, built from local cypress trees cut in the 1700's, still exists in good condition. The ICW guide noted that the canal was only 50 ft. wide in places, bordered by huge overhanging oak and cypress trees. Instead of anchoring, a sleepy sailor could simply tie the boat to the nearest branch. George Washington's ghost is said to patrol the shoreline. That probably explains why the Corps of Engineers has seen fit to keep this passage open since it is far too small for commercial travel. This excursion into the past will have to wait for our next trip. Many of the homes fronting on the ICW in Virginia were very lavish, easily costing many hundreds of thousands. Equally impressive boats were docked in front. Where was this southern rural poverty we heard so much about? About 5 or 6 p. m. we started looking for a spot to stop. Tonight we stayed at a very large boatyard, the Atlantic Yacht Haven, a repair and construction yard near Great Bridge, VA where ocean crossing yachts make their final preparations before heading out to sea. It was located just before the only lock on the ICW, one which lowered a boat 3 feet to reach the level of Chesapeake Bay. The main reason we stopped at the yard was to buy a costly book of charts for Chesapeake Bay. Unknown to us, we could have docked for free just before the lock. Well, next time we’ll know. Tied just ahead of our boat was a retired 56 foot ocean racing sailboat belonging to a young couple who just bought it in Florida and were returning it to their home in Long Island. At first I thought that we would have company up the ICW but their mast was too tall to pass under the 65 foot clearance fixed bridges. They will have to take it outside after Norfolk. We strolled into Great Bridge to do a little shopping and have dinner. Crossing the road to walk back to the boat took at least five minutes. We were back in civilization; at least as far as auto traffic was concerned. April 16, Easter Sunday - Day 18 This morning’s big event was the Great Bridge lock. Locking up or down is very simple once you have done it a few times although we were certainly anxious about it the first time. We have become old hands at negotiating locks. About ten years ago we cruised the Erie Canal from the Hudson to Lake Cayuga to visit Mike at college. After passing through 41 locks, including the 200 foot climb of the five lock Staircase, we earned our Lockmeister's degree. The most impressive of these canal locks was the poorly maintained Federal Lock at Troy with wall cavities big enough to swallow an ocean liner at a single gulp.

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A lock is just a section of a canal with upstream and down stream gates. In our case the water level was raised to the upstream height and the upstream gate opened. Our boat moved in and tied up along side the canal wall. Then the water was lowered to the down stream level as we adjusted the mooring lines. Finally the down stream gate was opened and we exited. After locking through the Great Bridge lock we worked our way up to Norfolk. Early on Easter morning we were the only moving boat on the water. Norfolk is an industrial city and the waterway was lined with factories and shipyards. The Naval fleet at Norfolk reminded us of the Reserve Fleet of outdated WW2 Liberty ships that used to be anchored near our home in the Hudson River. Whole flotillas of warships were tied together along the shore with not a soul stirring. We passed by aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, cruisers, destroyers, and support ships of all types, up close and personal. The harbor was narrower than I expected and, with Naval facilities lining both sides, it felt like sailing in a canyon of gray painted metal. This was an extraordinary sight. It also suggested that here was a potential for another Pearl Harbor. Easter Sunday would be clearly the time for a surprise attack. At last we were through Norfolk and headed for Hampton Roads where the Monitor and the Merrimac ironclads slugged it out during the Civil War. We had reached ICW mile zero. The full length of Chesapeake Bay lay ahead of us. Again the weather was unsettled with a wind blowing from the northeast and waves of about 6 feet. We headed up the bay, wind on the starboard forequarter. After a while we were out of sight of land for the first time since starting on our trip. There is a qualitatively different feeling about sailing offshore. While in the canals or bays trouble meant simply rowing ashore and seeking help. That’s not possible once land vanishes over the horizon. It is not the distance from shore that matters as much as the isolation. We have been on ocean crossing cruises where we felt as secure as in our own beds, confident in the seaworthiness of the ship and the competence of the crew. But here we were responsible for our own safety in an untested vessel, far from land, and certainly beyond the limits of our short range radio. I tried to exude a confidence, both in my seamanship and in Puffin, that I did not entirely feel, and I'm sure Maggie did likewise. I cranked up the autopilot and found that it could hold us on a reasonably straight course even in the wind and waves. The boat rolled and pitched, still going in the right direction. The weather forecast was far from encouraging, reporting small craft warnings all along the bay. We had learned by this time to take the forecasts with a grain of salt, but it was not reassuring. The GPS worked just fine. The letters GPS stand for global positioning system, a cold war byproduct that was originally intended to help missile launching submarines find their exact location. Our GPS receiver is a tiny box, about the size of two packs of cigarettes laid end to end. It picked up signals from satellites orbiting the Earth and by some

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form of electronic magic translated the radio waves into latitude and longitude information which could be marked on a chart. The boat's present location was displayed on a little screen on the face of the GPS receiver and an arrow pointed the direction to the next desired location or waypoint. The manual that came with the receiver stated that the position was accurate within a dozen feet any place on the Earth's surface. We shall see. I found the places where we would have to make course changes on the chart, entered them as waypoints in the GPS, and then followed the heading indicated. Maggie made little crib cards of the waypoints so I would know which one was next. Most of our waypoints were center channel marker buoys. It was unfortunate that local fishermen used the same spots to locate their crab and fish traps. This meant that we had to steer manually as we approached each waypoint to avoid the crab trap buoys. Maggie spotted the small white crab trap floats at a distance and we argued for a while trying to decide if it was a buoy or a gull. If it didn't fly away it was a buoy. Towards evening we headed toward the shore and anchored for the evening at the mouth of the Rappahannock River near Windmill Point. Our Easter dinner was a can of pork and beans. Yummy! April 17 - Day 19 Today's run was much like yesterday's. Out into the bay, going from waypoint to waypoint, we steered a zig zag path dodging crab traps and buoys. Sometime during the middle of the day we passed the Maryland state line. We anchored for the night by Solomons Island, just across from the mouth of the Patuxent River. Our evening was enlivened by watching the fighter jets from the Naval Air Station zoom overhead. We were the only boat in what was reputed to be a favorite anchoring area. The radio announced the Oklahoma City bombing on the first news broadcast we have heard in some time. It was amazing how the rest of the world disappears when you are on the water. A vibration along the propeller shaft seemed to be caused by the fact that the reverse gear was almost dry. This is a gearbox attached to the rear of the engine that allows you to reverse the direction of rotation of the propeller for backing up. It also contains other gears for reducing the speed of the propeller, sort of like the gearbox on a car. There was a slight oil leak from the rear seal. That explained why the bilge water was usually oily. The rotating shaft coupling was slinging the leaking oil droplets around the engine compartment in a fine spray. We added what remained of our gear oil and fitted one of Maggie's art boards over the coupling as an oil deflector. Another repair item for the ever growing list. April 18 - Day 20 Our route was straight up the middle of the bay, following the big boat channel markers. Again our GPS directed us from buoy to buoy. The autopilot did most of the heavy lifting even though one of us had to stand guard constantly to avoid fish and crab pots.

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The weather was still brisk with 4 to 6 ft. waves. By this time we were used to the rock and roll motion of the boat when the seas hit us on the beam. When I got a chance, I would try to fix the rigging so that we could hoist enough sail to stabilize the motion. Sailboats with round bottom hulls roll very easily and depend on the roll dampening effect of their sails to make them habitable. The technical term for this is tender. I suppose the reciprocal descriptor for a stable boat should be tough but the nautical gurus use the term stiff instead. Puffin was so tender that if it was a steak, you could cut it with a spoon. Our path was crossed by many fishing trawlers with net handling arms hoisted above the water. From a distance, they look like enormous spiders. As we motored closer to Annapolis we could see several Navy surf boats practicing man overboard recovery maneuvers. A dummy was thrown over the side and the crew tried to retrieve the make believe seaman. They were mostly Naval Academy cadets who handled the boats pretty ineptly in their first on-the-water experiences. The dummies must have been quite waterlogged by the time they were hauled on board. Whenever Maggie had the con at the upper steering station, she wrapped her face with a scarf and wore dark glasses, looking more like an Arab terrorist than a suburban housewife. The crewmen on passing boats often stared at her in astonishment. Some boats even turned and followed Puffin for a short distance before resuming their course. Unknown to us, the news media had postulated that the Oklahoma bombers were disgruntled Arabs who would probably be fleeing the country and that all exit routes should be watched. After listening to the radio, Maggie changed her costume. The channel to the Severn River was well marked and the population of boats of all sorts increased as we closed in on the town. The weather lightened and the late afternoon sun peeped out. We passed the Naval Academy on our right as we approached the harbor area. Our waterway guidebook suggested that we could pick up a town mooring and pay a small fee when the harbor master came out to collect. There were a number of unoccupied moorings so we choose one close to the town dock. It was still very early in the boating season. In midSummer there was usually a three week advance reservation requirement. The harbor master never showed so we rowed our rubber dinghy the couple of hundred yards to the dock and tied up along the scruffy looking town pier. Annapolis worked hard to live up to its reputation as an upscale boater's town. The harbor area resembled a Disney World pastiche of period houses and shops studded with tourist attractions. The Naval Academy was just down the block. Cadets and tourists mingled in the harbor front fast food establishments. Bronze plaques marked the spots where historic events occurred, including one that noted that Annapolis was, for a very brief period, the nation's capitol.

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John Paul Jones, hero of the American Revolution, and "Father" of the US Navy is buried in the U. S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. How he got there is as interesting as any of his battles. Jones was originally from Sweden. When the Revolutionary War ended Congress saw no need of maintaining a big navy and stopped paying him. He moved to Russia and served the Czar as naval administrator until they ran out of money too. Finally he moved to France where he died of pneumonia. He wasn't married, had no family, and was buried in an aristocratic cemetery near Paris. Aristocracy went "out of style" after the French Revolution and the cemetery, still holding all the caskets, was paved over and new buildings were constructed on the property. The builders of the U. S. Naval Academy wanted to inter a real naval hero in the chapel. After all, the churches in Europe have their genuine relics of the saints. Who better than John Paul "I have not yet begun to fight" Jones? The problem was that no one was sure where he was buried. The US ambassador to France worked on this mystery for 6 years. Records no longer existed, and the exact whereabouts of John Paul’s remains were unknown. Several caskets were ultimately disinterred from the foundations of the newly constructed buildings and examined for identification. Jones, upon death, had been wrapped in linen and lead foil. Then his coffin was filled with navy rum as befitting a good sailor. Fortunately a "life cast" plaster mold had been taken many years before his death for a bust. Remarkably, rum saturated Jones was very well preserved. A drawing was made of his bust, and overlaid with the remains from the caskets. One was a "perfect" match. Soon Jones was on his way back to Annapolis. The chapel had its heroic relic. We shopped at the large Fawcett's boating store to get some gear oil and other trinkets. Unfortunately the store didn't stock the oil we needed. The checkout clerk looked at our slightly disreputable clothing and my three weeks growth of beard and assumed we were fellow "cruisers. " Making sure that no one in management heard him, he suggested that we try the big auto parts store in the more residential part of town. They would have the gear oil that we needed and the prices were lower than at Fawcetts. He admitted that he too was a "cruiser" and was only working in Annapolis because he ran out of money and needed to make a stake before heading out again. This was social devolution hard at work. In three weeks we had descended the ladder from middle class gentility to boating bums. The auto parts store was in a mall about a mile away. We ambled through the tree lined streets, past well maintained old houses, over the Severn River on a large bridge. The river was lined with marinas and boat yards with sailboats on the ocean side of the bridge and powerboats on the land side. The shopping mall had food stores, variety shops, and a movie theater as well as the auto store. We bought some food supplies, detergent to clean the bilge, a case of oil and some gearbox stop leak, temporarily

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overlooking the fact that we would have to carry all the stuff back to the dinghy. We retraced our steps, with many rest stops, lugging the burden. On the next trip a folding shopping cart might be a good idea. Back at the dinghy we unloaded our supplies and rewarded ourselves with ice cream cones. The row back to the boat was a bit harder now because of an onshore wind and the cargo load. With determined effort we finally got there. Still no harbor master. Probably too early in the season to collect a fee. I put oil and stop leak in the reduction gearbox, detergent in the bilge, and we feasted on our fresh produce. April 19 - Day 21 We contemplated staying in Annapolis another day but our uncertainty about the continuation of relatively good weather encouraged us to keep going. Maggie and I plotted all of the GPS waypoints using our new charts, reversing our course down the Severn to get back in the middle of the bay. As Puffin passed under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and turned toward the C&D canal the weather began to deteriorate. Soon it was the usual windy and wavy norm. I pumped the bilge with its sheen of dripped gearbox oil just as a helicopter flew overhead and worried for the rest of the day that the pilot had reported us to the EPA. Clearly we have become environmentally paranoid. About noon the wind died and the clouds parted giving us a relatively tranquil voyage past huge shore side homes, usually set in acres of green well tended lawn, with the ubiquitous yachts moored in front. This must be where all the Washington lobbyists live. By this time the bay was quite narrow and one could easily see from shore to shore. The Aberdeen Proving Ground lay to our left. Let's hope today was not a practice day. At Turkey Point there was a signpost telling us the direction to the C&D canal connecting Chesapeake and Delaware bays. Next to the sign was a traffic light which flashed red if there was any big boat traffic heading our way and green if it was safe to enter. While we might just squeeze by a freighter, the canal was too narrow to accommodate two large ships passing side by side. We entered the C&D canal by late afternoon. It was about the width of a football field, with rapidly sloping rock lined banks. The canal provides a short and protected passage between the Philadelphia/Wilmington ports and Baltimore/Norfolk so there was a lot of commercial traffic. The ships were mostly bulk petrochemical carriers. Chesapeake City is located about a third of the way through the canal. Its main attraction for boaters is a dredged small boat harbor which could be entered through a short passage off our starboard side. As we turned in, I failed to see a young boy fishing off the bulkhead and almost ran over his lines. We avoided catastrophe by turning, backing and yelling. Each of us thought the other was particularly stupid for not paying better attention. The harbor was about two hundred yards wide, quite shallow and already heavily occupied. We had to hunt around a bit for a good

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anchoring spot. Finally we anchored sandwiched between a very well maintained Danish sailboat and a Friendship sloop from Boston. Both were single handed though the Boston boat had a large black dog as a mascot. Incidentally, the name Friendship has nothing to do with personal relationships. Rather it is a type of boat built in Friendship, Maine and was popular among New England fishermen in the early 1900s. This one was long and low with a single swept back mast and an extended bowsprit. It had been lovingly restored and probably looked much as it did when it was new almost a century ago. We rowed ashore to stretch our legs. In our walk we met the skipper of a large sailboat anchored a few hundred feet from us. He had picked up the boat in Texas and was delivering it to the Great Lakes for a friend of his. The crew consisted of another friend and two ladies. He had no charts of the area north of Chesapeake Bay and was unfamiliar with the Hudson or the Erie Canal. I showed him our old charts of the Jersey shore and drew a sketchy map of the Hudson and Erie Canal from memory, pointing out the good anchoring areas, etc. I told him that the Erie Canal might not be open until all the ice had melted in upstate New York, certainly not before the beginning of May. He was in no hurry, he told us, because he and his companions were enjoying the trip so much. Even without charts, if he made it from Texas to Delaware without mishap, he should probably get the rest of the way OK. While Maggie cooked dinner, I managed to jury rig makeshift lazy jacks. This was just a line from the end of the boom, over the mast spreaders, around the mast and back to the boom. It was crude but it would support the boom and permit us to hoist a reduced sail in the absence of a topping lift. We hoped it would give us a steadier ride in beam winds. April 20 - Day 22 For some reason the C&D canal had little traffic early in the morning and we quickly reached Delaware Bay. The course now headed southeast; giving up much of the advance we had made toward home over the last couple of days. It seemed odd to program the waypoints in the GPS with lower and lower latitudes. By chance we had a favorable tide down the Delaware and made very good time. There was an atomic energy plant along the Jersey shore spewing huge quantities of what we hoped was non radioactive steam. We are accompanied, at some distance, by the Danish sailboat and the Friendship sloop, all of us traveling at about the same speed. This was not mere coincidence. There is an inexorable hydrodynamic law that states that all similar sized sailboats and trawlers generally have the same top speed or hull speed, the longer the boat, the faster the speed. In our case the hull speed was about 7 knots, a bit over 8 miles per hour. That is also the top speed of every other displacement hulled 30 foot boat. To travel as fast as an average teen on roller blades, our boat would need to be almost 300 feet long.

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The little arrow on the GPS directing us to our next waypoint appeared to be leading us straight out to sea. Maggie was worried and suggested that we should head closer to shore. I had faith in the GPS, at least so far. It hadn't steered us wrong yet. Finally in the distance I could see a spit of land which must be Cape May. It was confirmed when a Cape May to Lewes ferry emerged from the land and headed toward the invisible Delaware shore. The banks of Delaware Bay are very flat, lined with small fishing villages. There were more fish traps in this bay than in all the others put together. Our route zigged and zagged as we maneuvered to avoid them. Eventually we could make out the entrance to the Cape May Canal and turned to enter, dodging the next ferry. The canal traversed the gentle South Jersey dunes and we emerged in the Cape May harbor. Our guidebook informed us that the canal was not dug for the convenience of pleasure boaters like ourselves, or even for commercial craft, but was intended to provide a short cut for air/sea rescue boats. During WW II Navy pilots used Delaware Bay as a protected training site. Boats from the Coast Guard rescue station at Cape May were dispatched in case of crashes. They had to make the long trip around the pointed end of the cape and frequently arrived too late. This justified digging a canal which cut the distance in half. Since it was only intended for smaller rescue boats, fixed bridges over the canal had lower clearance than others along the ICW. Sailboats with tall masts were required to take the long way around. Fortunately Puffin's mast was stubby. We had hoped to stop at a marina tonight. In the dusk we were unable to find the entrance and anchored just off the channel in very shallow water. A couple of boats were ahead of us, one of them was already aground on a lowering tide. We anchored and bumped the ground one or two times on little wavelets. I guess we were clear of the bottom by about six inches. Soon we were joined by the Danish boat and the Friendship sloop. After a while we saw the skipper of the sloop rowing ashore to walk his big black dog. April 21 - Day 23 Today was rainy and miserable with high waves and storm warnings predicted off the Jersey shore. We decided to stay put since we would have to head offshore along the coast. The protected portion of the ICW in New Jersey had shoaled to the point where we would hit bottom too often. The Danish boat headed out to sea to brave the elements. The sloop stayed put. We read, did housekeeping, dozed off. Suddenly we heard a crunching sound and felt an impact. The Friendship sloop's anchor had dragged and his boat had drifted down on us. The crunch was his bowsprit cracking on our armor thick fiberglass hull. We fended him off with boat hooks and feet as the skipper emerged from the companionway looking very sheepish. He had been sleeping too and wasn't aware that he was dragging. He reset his anchor, hopefully more securely this time.

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April 22 - Day 24 OK, there were still 8 foot waves along the Jersey shore but we decided to make a run for it. We headed out the Cold Spring inlet and set our course for the Absecon Inlet next to Atlantic City. I hoisted a reefed mainsail between the jury rigged lazy jacks. It stabilized the boat and we made good progress, passing all the condos on the Jersey shore. A lot of fishing boats worked off the coast, including those spider like trawlers. We saw the towers of Atlantic City in the distance and were reassured again at the accuracy of the GPS. It was so precise, in fact, that if we used a correctly positioned channel marker as a waypoint we would have to be careful that we didn't hit the marker. Just after Atlantic City we turned left at the Absecon Channel and enjoyed calm water inside the breakwater. Our destination was the Farley Marina, a state facility that was run by the Trump Castle Hotel. For the price of a night's dockage, you could get full use of the marina with the amenities of the casino thrown in for free. There were saunas, slots, poker, and craps plus automatic membership in a casino club that provided discounts on restaurants. You could arrive in a 50 ft. yacht and leave in a rowboat. It was all very well organized. We called the marina operator on the radio and were assigned a slip immediately. Since it was early in the season, we got a choice slip near the casino. The marina had excellent facilities, showers, lounges, etc. and we took full advantage of this luxury. The Trump Castle is a white wedding cake design high rise hotel about a mile north of the main gambling area on the Boardwalk. The lower floors are devoted to the casino, the upper floors to guest rooms. The marina in front of the hotel gives it a Monte Carlo look and suggested a form of slightly decadent sophistication which the bus loads of New Jersey day tripping housewives did their best to counteract. We gorged ourselves in the Casino all-you-can-eat cafeteria, losing a few bucks on the slots but breaking even on the subsidized meals. The night was cold, about 40 degrees. We plugged in our shore power and used an electric heater. This was the first time we had been warm all night since leaving Norfolk. April 23 - Day 25 As long as we were in Atlantic City we might as well explore a bit. We have lusted after this gambling Gomorrah for years, never finding the opportunity to take the trip. A jitney transported us to the lower end of the strip and we hotel hopped all the way back, gambling a couple of dollars in each. Most, even the new Taj Mahal were glitzy although a little disappointing once inside. There is scant resemblance to the luxury palaces shown in the TV ads. A slot machine is a slot machine is a slot machine. I'm not sure who said that. It was either Gertrude Stein or Jimmy the Greek.

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The Boardwalk was crowded with early season vacationers. We dodged both the roller skaters and the bicycle rickshaws that romantic couples and weary gamblers use to go from casino to casino. We toured the shops, watched taffy being pulled, and stopped by the Atlantic City museum. The major focus of the museum was on the history of the Miss America pageant, originally a publicity stunt to lure visitors to the Boardwalk. There was a nice art museum featuring marine paintings. As we made our way back to the boat we looked for the Monopoly game street names. By evening we were tired but a few bucks ahead in the gambling department. We decided to blow our winnings and then some on a gourmet meal at the Trump Castle's top restaurant. It was very tasty, especially after a couple of weeks of pork and beans and canned stew. April 24 - Day 26 We probably should have left yesterday since the weather has gotten pretty bad. More high wind and waves were predicted for the Jersey coast. The old ICW hands at the Marineland marina certainly were right about the April weather. Since we have a nice berth at a reasonable cost, we decided to stay another day and wait until the storm blew over. The high point of today was changing the oil, a messy job at best, especially when performed under the disapproving glare of the adjacent yacht owner whose lily white hands were never soiled by lifting an engine hatch cover. We used the fresh oil bought in Annapolis, topped up the gearbox, and greased the propeller shaft bearings as well. After the dirty work we strolled the piers of the marina and stared into other people's boats. There was a mixed fleet here. A few looked like they have been docked all winter, perhaps abandoned by owners unlucky at gambling. One or two were almost sunk at the pier, only the mooring lines holding them above the water. At the other extreme were the gold platers yachts on which no expense had been spared to bring shore side luxuries aboard. One such sailboat was berthed right next to us. It gleamed with chrome plated fittings and every nicety shown in the marine catalogs. At the end of the row of docks was a small craft that looked like a sailboat without a mast. Clamped to the stern was a 2 horse power Yamaha outboard. A painted sign on the side of the hull advertised that this boat had motored from the Canary Islands to New Jersey with that very same outboard. We never did see the seaman who made the trip, however he was either very small or very crowded, and certainly very brave. The gambling life must be dreary since few people in the casino looked as if they were having fun. The exception was an Asian gentleman playing Baccarat. He and his party had a table all to themselves. He bet big bucks and had an enormous pile of chips in front of him. The group was well attended by Casino flunkies, a pit boss, and several pretty girls serving drinks. The Asian gambler treated American dollars as play money, which to him they must be. At the marina store we bought a small placard warning of the dire penalties for dumping garbage overboard. It fitted nicely over the sink.

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April 25 - Day 27 The coast from Atlantic City to Manasquan is flat and uninviting. The waves were still high but the reefed mainsail held us quite steady. We were paralleling the coast about a mile offshore, ticking off the towns one by one as we identified the landmarks from the chart. This was made easier because most towns had their names written in huge letters on water towers. We reached Manasquan inlet in the early evening, clearly marked by a long stone jetty which provided some protection from the Atlantic waves. Bumbling around in the harbor for a while, we finally found a dock where we could refuel. It was early season for the recreational fishing fleet and most fuel docks were closed. After fueling, we decided to just tie up and stay the night. April 26 - Day 28 After the glamour of Atlantic City, Manasquan in the off season has little to recommend it. We started early, continuing up the Jersey shore past Asbury Park and round Sandy Hook. With the Sandy Hook twin towered lighthouse off our port beam, New York City was just visible in the distance. The out flowing tidal current right on our bow dropped our true speed to about two or three knots. It appeared that we would have to spend the night anchored in one of the shallower areas in the Jersey flats. After two hours Staten Island was off to our left and Brooklyn to our right and we were moving very slowly against the tidal flow. We cut corners to the extent that our draft permitted and tried to bisect the Verrazano Bridge, the metaphorical entrance to New York harbor. By this time the current was slack and we made better time. Like hopeful immigrants we rejoiced in the sight of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan towers. These were now home waters and we could put away the charts and the GPS. The shoreline of Manhattan looked as simultaneously magnificent and grungy as it always has. Whenever we sail by Manhattan, I like to stay fairly close to the pier line, both to keep out of the way of river traffic and to see New York from an entirely different angle. The clouds had cleared. We waved to the derelicts and office workers sunning themselves on deserted piers. Sparkles of sunlight, reflecting off the skyscraper windows, gave the impression that the city had decked itself in jewels to honor our return. By the time we reached the George Washington Bridge the tide had turned in our favor and we found ourselves getting a lift up the Hudson with a speed over the bottom of nearly 10 knots. The lower portion of the Hudson is a tidal estuary and the tidal peak races upriver at 15 miles per hour. In the narrow portions of the river the tidal current can exceed three knots. The Indians who lived along the shore in pre-colonial days called it “The River that Flows Both Ways.” We zipped by the Palisades, passed Yonkers, and saw the Tappan Zee Bridge ahead. Aided by the current, Puffin was going faster than at any time since leaving Florida. Like a seasoned dray horse she had seen the stable and was making her final

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sprint. We intended to stop in Tarrytown for the night. Now it appeared that we would make it all the way home before dark. We reached Croton Point by about 6 p.m. expecting to find our mooring in place. I'm glad we were finally in home waters because our hard working engine was beginning to sound a little rough. Probably time for a fuel filter change. What! The mooring hadn't been put out yet and it was promised to be in by today. In fact there were no moorings in Senesqua Park at all. Well, another night at anchor and for once we had Croton Point all to ourselves. April 27 - Day 29 Early in the morning we tied up at the deserted dock at Senesqua. Steve Jennings, the harbor master, told us that the mooring installation had been delayed for a week because of the stormy weather. The moorings would be put in any day now. In the meantime we could stay at the dock. We had been on the water 28 days with 6 days of layover. Puffin had covered about 1200 miles in 22 sailing days, averaging about 55 miles a day. Our average motoring speed was approximately 6 knots despite waiting for bridge openings, especially in the Carolinas. The old Perkins engine burned 164 gallons of diesel fuel for an average fuel consumption of .82 gallons per hour. We made the short hike to the Croton Colonial Diner on unsteady "land" legs to phone Maggie's friend Jane for a ride. We were home.

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Appendix – The Willard Horizon motorsailer Puffin. The Willard 30 Horizon is essentially the Willard trawler hull with a moderate sailing rig, the ultimate in get home emergency power. My Willard was built in 1974. It appeals to the aging sailor, like myself, who doesn't want to give up rags and lines entirely. I was originally attracted to the Horizon model because it seemed to offer an easy transition to the trawler world. I was certainly too optimistic. The installed sailing accommodations are rudimentary and the sailing performance is roughly on a par with a turn of the last century workboat. Still, with the sails up and the boat heeling in a brisk wind, my Horizon looks very "yar" and I often get compliments on its appearance. The prevailing westerlies on the East Coast permit long motorsailing cruises with the wind abeam and the fuel consumption drops to very low levels. The sails also minimize rolling in beam seas, another problem often cited by Willard owners. It is hard to be precise about the characteristics of a motorsailer. Francis Kinney, who revised "Skene's Elements of Yacht Design," gives a general insurance company rule that says a motorsailer is a yacht with enough engine power to achieve hull speed AND enough sail power to claw off a lee shore if the power fails. Juan Baader, in "The Sailing Yacht" has a much more pragmatic rule. He says that if a yacht is faster under sail than under power it is an auxiliary powered sailboat. On the other hand, if it is faster under power than under sail, it is a motorsailer. Contemporary usage categorizes motorsailers by hull type and deck configuration since most modern yachts are fully powered. They have moderate to heavy displacement hulls with full keels and relatively shallow draft. Pointing ability and clawing to windward are not their strong points. Most turn a large three bladed propeller. With the engine off the drag of the propeller significantly impedes sailing ability. The deck configuration of all current motorsailers features a pilothouse with full headroom and an internal helm. In fact this feature almost defines the class. Several manufacturers build boats with identical hulls and differing deck moldings. Those with a pilot house are called motorsailers, those without are called auxiliary powered sailboats. The Willard Vega Horizon has a full displacement hull, powered by a Perkins 4-107, driving a three blade 18" x 14" prop through a 2.57 reduction gear. Fully loaded displacement is about 16, 000 lbs. Hull speed is almost exactly 7 knots although the boat will probably squeeze out another knot when racing for a bridge. Comfortable cruising is 6 knots at a shade under 2100 rpm engine speed. Continuous rated power of the Perkins is obtained at 3000 rpm so a good deal of reserve is left in hand and the engine is lightly stressed. Based on our experience at a 6 knot cruising speed fuel consumption is .82 gal/hr. If the speed is dropped to 5 knots the onboard 120 gallon fuel supply permits a 1000+ nautical mile

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range under power. All older Willard 30s share the same hull and engine so performance under power should be nearly identical for all models. The LOA is 30 feet but the boat feels larger. On my boat there is a wide, short bowsprit and a full width stern boarding/swimming platform. Overall length between perpendiculars would be about 35 feet. The beam is nearly 11 feet and the draft a measly 3'6" thanks to a full length broad keel. With its high bow and a canoe stern the hull shape is vaguely similar to a Colin Archer turn-of-the-century lifeboat, those paragons of seaworthiness that plucked Norwegian fishermen from the North Sea. Like the Colin Archer designs, the Willard has a very good sea keeping characteristics, a necessity since it cannot outrun any storm. The rounded bottom gives it a tendency to roll in a beam sea, more than harder chine trawlers, but not as much as most sailboats under power. It is certainly seaworthy but not altogether comfortable in bad weather. Boat motion is excessive in beam seas of 3' and it is unwise to have breakable crockery on the table or open beer bottles on deck when passed by a powerboat. Maneuverability under power is exceptional with the sailboat sized rudder, a 3.25 square foot half inch thick bronze plate mounted immediately behind the prop. The inertia is fairly high given the hull's mass but manipulation of the engine controls and rudder will let you turn 360 degrees in the boat's own length. This is convenient in crowded marinas. We have found that, compared to sailboats, the increased cabin space and relatively stable hull form make for comfortable cruising but the practice of sailing takes some relearning. First, the drag of the prop is so great that sails alone move the boat at only 4 to 5 knots in 15 knots of reaching winds. Pointing is similarly poor. Sailing closer than 70 degrees to the wind is a chore. Running the engine at a tick over speed of about 900 rpm (about 350 rpm at the prop) when sailing makes all the difference. This fully compensates for prop drag and provides enough power for easy maneuvering in gusty winds. The sails keep the boat from rolling and the reaching speed increases to 6 knots. Fuel consumption is very low. This motorsailing tactic may be bad for diesel longevity but a few minutes of high power every day tends to blow out the carbon. The boat still has its original engine, a tribute to the durability of the Perkins design. Despite the marginal sailing performance, we have found the sails are useful for emergencies. They also serve as very effective roll dampers in a beam sea. Under both sail and power in favorable winds, fuel consumption drops to only .3 gal/hr at 5 kt and theoretical cruising range is extended to 2000 miles. I understand that was the original idea. The Horizon was intended for brave souls wanting to take the inner passage to Alaska where diesel stops are few and far between. My boat is laid out more like a sailboat than a contemporary trawler. It has a conventional standing headroom forepeak with two sleeping berths. Immediately aft and up a couple of steps is the pilothouse with full engine controls and navigational equipment. There is a complete electrical panel

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with circuit breakers for all onboard equipment and a 110v. distribution system for the infrequent times we use shore power. The engine lies below the pilothouse floor at about the midpoint of the hull. It is easy to reach by raising a hatch but all maintenance has to be undertaken with head hanging downward. Not good for someone prone to headaches. Fuel is stored in two 64 gal. black iron tanks on either side of the engine. The engine's central location requires a 13 foot long propeller shaft with two support bearings, each of which must be greased periodically. There is no sound treatment and noise levels are fairly high under power. Two steps down and aft of the pilothouse is the main saloon with galley and sink to port and a table and dining area to starboard. The couch to the side of the table can be converted into a double bed for friendly guests. There are plenty of storage areas and cabinets. Aft of the dining area is the head and shower, small but adequate. Fresh water capacity is 70 gallons. Exit the saloon by climbing a couple of steps and you are on the stern deck. There is sufficient space for a small party, say 6 people. It's just about right for a summer barbeque and beer party. The water tanks and our LectraSan waste treatment system are in the lazarette below the stern deck. There is an additional large storage area there as well. Above the pilothouse is the upper steering and sailing control station. This is quite different from the flying bridge on a conventional trawler. A seating area and foot well for the helmsman are molded into the starboard side of the deck. A destroyer wheel is placed before the helmsman with a set of engine controls but no instruments. The mast is immediately to the left on the center line of the boat. All sailing lines are led to the helmsman and the boat can be sailed by only one person. Visibility is unexcelled but because the boom swings directly overhead, a bimini with adequate headroom is impossible to fit while sailing. The helmsman gets wet when it rains. Sailing conveniences, as delivered, were minimal. We had to add cleats, winches, topping lifts etc. The boat could be sailed without this extra gear but it would not be fun. Non-sailing Willard models may have a genuine flying bridge or may lack an outside steering station altogether. The interior decor is more reminiscent of a very well appointed workboat; say the private boat of the owner of a fishing fleet, rather than a floating boudoir. This is not a boat that was intended to appeal to the ladies. There is a lot of varnished teak inside and out and relatively small ports. The new boats are being furnished with a much higher degree of luxury and are clearly designed to meet the standards of feminine first mates. The Willard 30 hull permits only about 200 sq. feet of living space, slightly larger than a Sing Sing jail cell. This means that the boat is too small to live on comfortably for extended periods, particularly for those desiring a high degree of creature comfort. It is not an ideal marina bound family "summer home". The Willard's forte is extended cruises to remote anchorages for a reasonably adventurous couple. Here the seaworthiness and self contained nature of the boat pay off. It's size and power requirements make for economical operation and a long range. The dimensions of the boat and

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conservative nature of the mechanical plant permit most maintenance to be carried out by the owner. The quality of construction is very good. The very solid hull molding, the inner liner, and the deck molding are well bonded together making for a very rigid structure. The mechanical components are inserted during construction and access for repair or replacement is minimal. Most owners who have repowered their boats report that considerable surgery has to be performed to get at all the bits and pieces. Fortunately the mechanical parts are very conservatively rated and should last a long time. The older hulls are susceptible to osmotic blistering. The gel coat on my boat shows an overall superficial craze of fine cracks. A factory engineer told me that the early series hulls were constructed of the same plastic used for military specification boats. Willard supplied many of the craft used to pacify the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war and halogen compounds were incorporated into the resin as a fire retardant. Unfortunately they also absorbed water and released gases which facilitated blistering. Another structural problem is the tendency of the fiberglass covered plywood decks and pilothouse roof to delaminate over time. We fixed ours by injecting epoxy resin through small holes drilled through the fiberglass over the weakened areas. The teak coaming is made up of a variety of odd shaped pieces fitted and caulked together. While initially waterproof enough, the caulking will deteriorate with age and must be replaced periodically. The Willard 30 Horizon is fine for a retired couple who wants to experience the cruising life style without selling the ranch and moving aboard. It is small enough to keep the costs reasonable, especially for a handyman, yet large enough to take any coastal voyage imaginable.

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