Into the Unknown

We are in uncharted waters. Quite literally, since our chart plotter went kablooey. But let me back-track a bit…

After three months in the north, we returned triumphantly to our home and hailing port – Baltimore! What a pleasure it was to sail in under the Key Bridge after being so long away. We spent a couple of days on anchor in the harbor, then rented a slip at the Anchorage Marina in Canton. This was an extravagance we don’t usually allow ourselves; slip fees can cost quite a bit for transients, whereas anchoring is free. Plus, being in a slip means being surrounded by a dense thicket of other boats, akin to living in a white plastic RV park. But we had an enormous “to do” list for this week, and having easy access to shore, stores and a car would make things a great deal easier.

First things first...

...and plenty of it!

One of the big tasks on our list was to swap out our beloved Trinka for her uglier but more practical inflatable brother. Yes, we’ve decided to give her up for our trip south. As beautiful as Yalma is, she is extremely tippy. We’ve gotten used to her over these past months, and never feel in danger of accidently going overboard any more. But we plan to do a lot of snorkeling in the Caribbean, and we will do it mostly from our dinghy. Getting in and out of the Trinka from the water would be very difficult, and for me, with my lack of upper body strength and hurt shoulder, pretty near impossible. But we’re not abandoning her entirely – she’s going to winter in our garage, awaiting future northern trips. We had originally thought we would sell the inflatable, but then when we kept vacillating between the two dinghy options, we decided to keep them both.

To make the dinghy switch, we enlisted the help of Rick’s nephew Trevor, who delivered the new Achilles from Rick’s brother’s house in Annapolis. He also brought the new outboard that we think will be powerful enough for the inflatable, yet lightweight enough for our stern rail. We loaded up Trevor's truck with the Trinka, along with all of her gear – oars, sails, mast, etc. – and small outboard. Then we took her to our house where we unloaded the whole shebang into the garage. Goodbye Yalma.

Yalma 

The Achilles (sigh... Not very poetic.)

The rest of the week was a whirlwind of shopping, laundry washing, errand running, doctor visiting, and boat fixing. We had a number of people out on the boat, including my son Dewey and Rick’s grandson Jack, and also friends and neighbors. I would love to have hosted the whole BSO out on our tiny boat too, but that being entirely impractical, I went to a symphony concert instead. The orchestra sounded fabulous (Don Quixote!), and it was wonderful to see all of my friends afterward. I’ve been on disability for two years now, and especially since I don’t know when –or if – I’ll be back playing again, it was somewhat bittersweet to hear such wonderful musicians playing one of my favorite pieces without me. This orchestra has been the center of my creative life for the past twenty-six years, and the players have become like family. I miss them all terribly.

 

Friends Michael and Dyer

Leaving Baltimore this time means that we are moving into unfamiliar territory. Rick has made the trip up to Maine and back eleven times, including this past summer, and he knows the northern waters very well. When I first started joining him on his summer trips a few years ago, I had complete faith in his judgment and sailing ability, and he has never given me any reason to doubt him. I always let him look at the weather, study the charts and tide schedules, and make a decision about where to go next and when to take off. And I loved it that way! Now, we are heading south where neither one of us has ever sailed, and we are in a totally new ball game. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to let Rick do all the real work (I’m no dummy), but the outcomes from his decisions may be less successful from here on out. Rick’s general sailing experience will keep us safe I am quite sure. What may get dicey will be finding places with dinghy docks, grocery stores within walking distance, opportunities for showers, laundry, etc.. I am now going to have to participate in some of the research. Darn.

 

Boat Shelf in Annapolis

For the actual sailing part of navigation, we have a chart plotter. This is a terrific modern improvement on sextants and paper charts. A chart plotter is basically a GPS unit that locates your boat on the preloaded charts, and tells you exactly where you are along with the depths at low tide, and a number of other functions. Our chart plotter is mounted on the steering pedestal in the cockpit, and displays everything on a nifty little TV screen that can be read equally well at night and in bright sunlight. It’s satellite driven, and will work even when way offshore, out of cellphone range.

So what happens if the chart plotter poops out? Rick bought an iPad just for this reason and loaded in a chart plotter for a back-up. AND we also have paper charts in case of an all out electrical failure. So we’re good, right?

 

The West River, just south of Annapolis

Just as we left Baltimore, the chart plotter started to freak out. Rick fussed and fiddled with it, and discovered that a large rectangular area of the charts, about twenty by sixty miles (that’s 1200 square miles, plenty of space to get lost in) appeared to be simply blank on the plotter. We don’t know if this was a recent injury to the software, or if it’s always been that way. Never having ventured down this far, we never knew.

We managed to get the boat to Solomons Island, roughly forty miles south of Annapolis. We used Rick’s iPad, and it worked just fine, except for the fact that you couldn’t read it very well in the sunlight, and it’s not strapped to the console so you have to turn your head away from the action in order to see where you are. My neck is not happy. On the one hand, I’m grateful that we have the iPad as a back-up. But on the other hand, I sure wouldn’t want to use that as our main navigation tool all the way down to the Bahamas and back.

 

Cold Morning in Solomons

Neither of us is particularly well versed in computers. We just want to plug something in, turn it on, and have it work, easy peasy. Rick, somewhere along the line, has gotten the impression that I understand computery things. For example, he thinks I’m a genius because I have figured out how to stream movies on our television set at home. But that’s about the extent of my knowledge. I finally joined Facebook a year ago, and went for months with zero friends because I couldn’t figure anything out. But I’ll admit, as bad as I am, Rick is even more hopeless. He even takes a certain pride in it, as though his ignorance of computers links him to a nobler, pre-digital past. So imagine our chagrin at learning that you are supposed to upgrade your chart plotters periodically. The unit is from 2008 or so and came with the boat when we bought it six years ago. We’ve never upgraded it. Doh.

The new chart cards we need are too big (too much memory) for our old, out-moded chart plotter. In order to upgrade the old charts instead, we need to upgrade the unit itself. Different vendors tell us different things, nothing seems to work, more and more money keeps being spent - around and around we go.  And we’re working with cell phones as our internet source, on a boat, without a car.

I’m not sure how this is all going to turn out. We may be spending the winter here in Solomon’s Island. Not my idea of a great adventure. We’ve had software overnighted from Washington state, talked to a gazillion different people, even had one terrific tech lady hold Rick’s hand over the phone while he downloaded upgrades to a CF chip from his computer. See how educated we’re becoming? But still… It.  Doesn’t.  Work.

And now it’s even worse because the whole rest of the coastline – the part that DID work – has been erased from the original chip, which can’t be bought anywhere any more. I have offered to buy us a brand spanking new chart plotter, but Rick says we would be set back at least two weeks if we decided to go that direction. First of all, there are a mind-blowing number of different chart plotters for sale online. Deciding which one to buy is at least a week long project. Then there is a great deal of work involved in setting it up, like connecting the wiring to the radar, and other things like that. Not to mention, waiting for the thing to arrive. Marine electronics repair people could do the work, for a hefty fee of course, but are difficult to come by at this time of year; all the boats going south are looking for the same repairs.

Rick finally figured out that the online upgrades he learned to do are just too big for our system to handle. He kept shrinking the map for the upgrade, each time taking about thirty minutes to reprogram the chip.  We’ve been doing this for hours. We are currently down to a map that gets us from where we are now down to about Charleston and that’s it; we’ll have to reprogram that chip every time we go to a new place. But it works!

If this seems like a temporary fix to you, well you’re right. We will need to get a new chart plotter eventually, probably sooner rather than later. But we think we can limp through the rest of our trip with the one we’ve got, and worry about getting a new one after we return to Baltimore next year. In the meantime, the various staff people at three different West Marine stores – the people who should know about chart plotters – have sold us over four hundred dollars worth of useless upgrade chips that couldn’t possibly have worked with our ancient unit. So, computer literate or not, the blame is not entirely ours.

The one upside to this whole fiasco is that we successfully used an Uber for the first time. We are indeed in uncharted territory.