THE TRIP

Well, this was it. My 23 ft. water ballasted trailer sailer days were over. I was going immediately from a trailer sailer to take a brand new, 33 ft. long, 14 ft. wide, 7500lb catamaran on a 400 mile trip!!!!

A co-worker and I rented a one-way van and drove to Annapolis. We rented the van because I had ordered a bunch of stuff from the Annapolis marine store to take to the boat when we picked it up. A lot of things - Delta anchor, helm chair, shorepower cord, emergency gear - all that stuff. There was a one-time discount that the store had with Performance Cruising (the manufacturer)..... I just had to get everything at once!!! (didn't I?). Anyway, it would never have fit in a car.

Well, we arrived a day before delivery and loaded all the stuff into the van (hoping that someone wouldn't drive away with all the stuff while we were at a fleabag hotel). Luckily it was a cargo van with no windows in back (to expose all of the stuff inside!).

We got to Performance Cruising early in the morning and met with Tony and Sue. These are great folks. Tony took us onto the boat and showed us all of the systems and explained things. Raised the sails, etc. ...."just to demonstrate that it was indeed still floating" (as Tony said).

We then had to sign all of the papers with the mortgage company - GASP!

We spent the night aboard tied up at the Performance Cruising docks. We left the next morning after filling up the tanks at a nearby marina.

I still couldn't believe I was actually going to take this thing all the way to North Carolina. It was so big!

We left early in the morning and finally found our way out of Back Creek into the Chesapeake bay. There were a lot of other boats on the bay and the scenery was great.

The trip along the Chesapeake was uneventful, except that we made nowhere near the progress we thought we would.

We had put some trolling gear out the back of the boat (a spoon and an planer) with not a clue about how to use them or anything. We just put them out and forgot about them.

In the late afternoon, I happened to look back and saw the planer skimming the surface of the water. According the the cryptic, chinese-translated instructions on the back of the package, that meant that there was supposed to be a fish on the other end of the line! I pulled it in and there was a bluefish there, barely big enough to keep, but we did anyway.

We named him "Jimmy" just before emptying out his innards and slapping him on the grill. That's a really small grill by the way, it creates an optical illusion as to how big "Jimmy" really was. It tasted good anyway.

The first night (first arrow on the chart above) we just anchored along the shore after searching for a creek that the chart insisted was there (it wasn't). It was really comforting to have 150 feet of anchor line out in only 3 feet of water! There was no way we were going anywhere.....

The next day was pretty much the same, a combination of sailing and motorsailing the whole time in winds ranging from 0 to 10 knots. Not much fun, because even when there was wind, we needed to go straight into it.

We spent the second night a Smith Creek Marina. The marina was up a small creek that had only two and a half feet of water in the "main" channel!! They didn't bother telling us about that part until we were right there. I put the centerboards up and the rudders about halfway and we made it through O.K. It was also about 200 yards from a fish packing plant and we were downwind.....

The next day, we headed for Norfolk. S.O.S. - Sailing and (mostly) motor sailing. I did find out that the Gemini gets almost a full knot of increased speed at the same RPM with the mainsail up. Cool!

We spent the night in Norfolk at a marina that must have cost more than a room at the Hilton in downtown L.A.!

The next leg was spent motoring, pleading with bridge operators, and waiting for openings. I almost ran over a 30 foot by 2 foot (diameter) LOG in the harbor in Norfolk! I didn't know I had to look out for that stuff.

The scenery was great along canals of the Virginia cut. Lots of nice sunsets and calm water.

We spent the next night in Coinjock, NC. The marina there was GREAT. The owner let us use his truck to drive to the "other" marina's restaurant to eat. A big power boat came roaring through the narrow canal that the marina was on at 15knots or more creating a HUGE wake! You should have heard the radio "light up" with comments for him!

We arrived at Manteo early in the afternoon and met the "exchange" crew member (another co-worker of mine).

We left the next morning amid gale warnings on the Pamlico sound. "How bad could it be", we thought, "the sound is only 12 feet deep and the wind will be from dead behind us". Little did we know...

Well the boat had gotten "smaller" as I made the trip from Annapolis and I learned how to handle it better, but it was about to get "bigger" again....

The winds throughout the day came up through 35 knots and in the process (we'll call it chaos, for now) we got the genoa sheets tangled around the furling drum and the genoa would not roll up all the way. There was about 2 feet of clew flapping around (can you say "shredding"?) for the remainder of the day.

By the time the winds reached 40 knots (saw a max of 43kn on the windmeter), we had both sails completely down except for the now ragged 2 feet of genoa clew), and the motor on and in gear at 2000 rpm. I went forward three times to try and tame the genoa sheets and clew - to no avail (none that I was going to attempt, anyway).

We were averaging 9 knots of boat speed and surfing down the odd 6 foot wave at 10 and 11 knots (max speed on the log was 11.3 knots). It was hard to believe that 12 feet of water could generate waves this big! It was only the odd one, though, where the large 3-4ft chop (if you could call it that) combined to form a larger one.

We "bailed out" and turned down the Hatteras channel into Hatteras harbor, where I promptly left about 2ft of gelcoat from the port hull on the dock (the dock was exposed to all 40 knots of the wind). As we turned into the Rollinson channel we saw a cool rainbow, end-to-end.

In hindsight (as well as not being scared anymore), it was amazing how well the boat did in those conditions. There was never a point at which it looked even remotely dangerous. It was only the novices at the wheel that were the problem! Actually, surfing down waves at 11 knots and hearing the breakers churning underneath the bridgedeck was really cool (oh, sure, now you say that!).

The next day was calling for 20-25 and small craft advisories which was no problem for the short trip from Hatteras to Ocracoke (especially after what we saw the day before).

The last day was spent motoring (entirely) the 50 miles from Ocracoke to New Bern on completely glassy water.

All in all the trip was a fantastic learning experience. What a better way to get to know a new boat than by taking on a 400 mile trip the first time out!