Friday 2 September 2016

Last stop before arriving at Deltaville

Just a little way to go now

This was in July, sorry I have been slacking lol.
This post is for the "boys" all the ships that is.
So after going past lots of "industrial" places our options were either go into a marina or find a place to anchor. The decision was anchor as just stopping one night in a marina doesn't make sense as we wouldn't be going ashore. WE reached Portsmouth which is one side of the water Norfolk the other. 
Yes we are now in Virginia. 
Our overnight stop was at Hospital Point, its pretty big, we were sort of expecting a rolly night with all the passing traffic and the shrimp boats but it was fine. This area is a huge US Navy dockyard, every kind of vessel including submarines and aircraft carriers. 


Harry S Truman.

It was 08:00 hours and that was a lady raising the "colours"


Great to see the Spanish ship in town 


You can take a tour on this, we declined, maybe next time
Now thats a real live aboard trawler
Our evening view from the anchorage 
A tourist ride, anyone?
After a good peaceful night we set off early, well we tried too, the anchor came up ok but I did hear the windlass groan a bit,  attached there was a huge lump of clay, in fact so much it could have made a 100 piece dinnerware service, no photograph sorry I was way too busy trying to remove it, thank goodness for the anchor wash down, the good thing was we weren't going to drag.

As we left we could hear warnings from the navy telling boats to stay clear of anything that was moving or about to move. Some areas are restricted and have an exclusion zone, one of which is where ships are taken to be "degaussed". That's to demagnetise the ships (and submarines) hulls so that they are less likely to be detected by 'MAD' (Magnetic Anomaly Detection), so Don tells me?  He also said that he had a feeling of 'Deja Vu' as he was in that dock, on a submarine in the eighties.

Doesn't look much and we were not allowed to go closer but Dons mates may be interested.
So on we plod outside the area and we are called on the VHF by the US Navy, they had a ship very close to us and asked us to change course so that we would go astern of them after all it wouldn't be good being run over by this.

If they had hit us they probably wouldn't have know anything anyway.
Into Albemarle sound we go, here is a link to some info for you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albemarle_Sound

Well talk about detours, the path we need to take going through this huge stretch of water is like a mine field, I don't think we have EVER seen so many fishing / crab pot markers it would have been impossible to take your eyes off the water for a second and we needed both of us with ours. It could be very stress full for someone to try and sail through here.  I wonder what it would look like if you were to fly over it, a bit like the measles I think.
What a relief to be out of there !

Deltaville

July 17th
We had chosen Delltaville to be the place we could stop for a while and make the changes and improvements to Pearl. Fishing Bay has an anchorage a marina and boat yard. Other cruising buddies have recommended it so that was the plan a fairly well protected place the tides here are very little which makes it more comfortable for us.

When we pulled into the anchorage we could see our friends Kit and Belinda on their boat Quilcene, it was so good to see them again.


This place is so pretty, very peaceful 
Time for a little fun before the WORK starts now.

Until next time folks
BFN
Glenys and Don
from MY Pearl