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Barefoot Landing, South Carolina, July 14/02.
Hello, Friends:
Mid-July, and Lydia B, her paint-work now definitely
travel-stained from a year’s non-stop voyaging
round North and Central America, is still ploughing her way through
the marshes and swamps of the Carolinas, aiming for Virginia, the
Chesapeake and a well-earned wash-and-brush-up.
So far, we’ve kept ahead of the worst of the
thunderstorms that are a key feature to life around here. We’re never
far from black clouds; daily we see great lightning flashes and torrential
rain descending on somebody somewhere in the far or near distance. At
Beaufort, a hundred miles or so south, we heard NOAA weather radio urging
people around Charleston to take cover immediately from severe
thunderstorms and 70mph winds. But these things are local; we sat tight at
Beaufort and stayed safe. People here seem nonchalant about the seasonal
hurricane threat. I haven’t quite got that way yet and will breathe with
relief when Lydia’s in the north of Virginia and relative safety.
This is the other America. Way since South Carolina
began, we’ve been deep in Confederate territory. It’s where the Civil
War fighting started, and for some the battle’s still in progress. While
the rest of the United States flies the stars and stripes in its backyard,
you’re liable to see the Confederate flag still flying around here. The
language is different, full of c’mons and y’alls. And those grits and
gravy, a sort of pulpy cereal mash they add to meals here like we add milk
to tea. I felt compelled to have them with my breakfast eggs and bacon in
Beaufort, urged to try them. I‘ll stick in future to good ol’ bacon
and eggs.
For the time being I’m single-handing again. Rachel’s
off to Wisconsin. So I’m refining the art of
hand-steering through the narrow channels of the Intra-Coastal Waterway
for something like 12 hours a day, at the same time feeding and watering
myself and generally staying awake. With a bit of planning yesterday on
the stretch from Georgetown to Barefoot Landing I broke records for
down-and-up the companionway to re-heat some Rogan Josh curried chicken
left over from the last night’s anchorage, get it into a bowl and back
behind the wheel without going aground. Yesterday evening at about 6.0pm,
having roller-coasted on a 2-knot ebb current for several hours and
determined to push on another 15 miles, I’d just radioed Barefoot
Landing swing bridge to open for me when I spotted what few sailors have
ever seen – a free dock. So I hastily swung about, fixed bow and stern
lines, called to a fellow sailor ashore to take one and parked for the
night. The dock’s on the edge of a shopping mall and restaurant complex.
So I’ll probably stay the rest of the day, catch up on some writing and
photo-editing and leave tomorrow. Only in America.
Gradually as we go north the scenery’s changing. We
started off with vast expanses of open marshland in the low country of
Georgia and South Carolina. Now, on the verge of North Carolina it’s
closing in. Just after leaving Georgetown yesterday we entered magnificent
old cypress swamp, with trees right down to and growing in the water with
huge root systems adapted to cope. It’s a tough environment. The
waterway shows hurricane scars all along its banks. Whole uprooted trees
line many areas; boats blown from their moorings are abandoned and
rotting. Notices along the ICW announcing hurricane drill and constant
cyclone updates from NOAA weather radio, tailored to individual
communities, remind you that in spite of the pleasure-beach scene that
stretches right down the Atlantic coast, this is tough country.
The wild-life, of course, is astonishing. Yesterday I
passed an alligator in mid-stream, going the opposite way. Pelicans,
egrets, storks, wading birds of many sorts and ospreys in abundance.
Skiffs taking people to work, pleasure boats of every sort (all, since
this is America, travelling at high speed). People fishing, building
waterside houses. It’s hard
to put the camera down. The older towns – Beaufort, St Augustine and
especially Charleston – are nothing if not elegant, full of
beautifully-maintained colonial houses and public buildings. It’s so
different from voyaging on the open ocean. Every minute gives another
glimpse of this fascinating, many-sided country. Spotting dummy figures
– little boys fishing and a whole variety of life-like waterside
effigies perched on walls and in gardens -- I’m even beginning to detect
a sense of humour. Americans don’t smile as we in Europe do, except when
they have their photographs taken. They habitually confront you with a
straight, no-nonsense, say-it-as-it-is look. It was astonishing when we
drove to Atlanta to be met by an Indian motel manager with a gentle,
welcoming smile. It’s La Difference, that’s all.
Love & best wishes
Ian,
Lydia B.
Typical ICW scenery, North
Carolina.
Hard day's fishing on the ICW, North Carolina.
L - Ospreys nesting in an ICW port-side marker-post. R - Lydia B
anchored off the ICW at Southport, North Carolina.
Four Ladies and a lot of birds
Little
Alligator River, North Carolina, July 22.
Hello,
Friends:
No,
I haven’t seen a single one. I’ve scoured the mud of the Intra-Coastal
Waterway for miles of the Alligator River without a sighting (except one
swimming past – but I only saw its nose).. Wild goats, eagles,
butterflies, strange insects galore – but alas, no ‘gators.
Curious, since I was told Cape Canaveral, way back in sunny
Florida, is home to 4,000 alligators. So many, the tour bus
driver said, they’re regarded as a homespun security fence round
NASA’s space secrets. I never saw one there, either. The best defence is
the one you think is there but can’t see.
Lydia
B’s 1,100-mile trek up the Ditch, as this inland waterway up the East
Coast of the United States is affectionately known, is nearly over. Two
more days and I’ll be in Virgina and the Chesapeake, within spitting
distance of Washington and the White House. And in relative safety from
this year’s hurricanes. Every day now NOAA (the US national weather
service) reveals more potential hurricane sources way out in the tropical
Atlantic. With startling dedication – even for a Brit nurtured on daily
weather talk – NOAA tracks these infant threats, promising to send
planes to investigate any that look like developing and coming ashore. So
far none have. If one does, people in Florida and the Carolinas know to
take cover. I’ve passed mile upon mile of the ICW’s banks piled with
smashed trees torn up and washed away by these devastating cyclonic
events.
In
a way, the sheer size, richness and roughness of the place helps to
explain Americans to a travelling Brit. In the last few weeks since
arriving in southern Florida from the Caribbean and making my way up the
east coast I’ve had a glimpse of a seriously big, diverse country. Space
is everywhere, full of life there to harvest – fish in abundance, timber
and so on. The extremes of weather are a constant reminder that life’s
tough. Americans seem to work hard and play very hard. They take
themselves very seriously. (I’m still working on their sense of humour.
Maybe somewhere I’ll meet some Americans who laugh at themselves, like
Paddies, Geordies and Newfies do?). The United States is simply a
fascinating place.
But
I spent the weekend with less threatening matters. This morning I sailed
from Belhaven, a little community just off the Pungo River, which is off
Pamlico Sound, an inlet leading from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. (It
was in the news half-an-hour after I left, when a US military jet crashed
into the Pamlico’s water). At Belhaven – the ultimate American small
town if ever there was one -- they had their annual regatta, “Pirates on
the Pungo”. Duck races to raise funds for Pungo community hospital, a
craft exhibition, hot dogs, Pungo Pirates T-shirts, bric-a-brac stands,
the lot. And the sailboat racing, of course.
Everybody
in America seems to have at least one boat. More to the point, everybody
in America seems to be on the water the minute the whistle goes to stop
work. They sail, they fish, they water-ski, they para-glide, they jet-ski
or they just drive around in power-boats. Very fast, usually – this
being America. It occurs to me sometimes that national self-images have a
habit of going too long unchallenged. Like the one, for instance, that
Britain is a sea-faring nation. It might once have been true; but these
days it seems Brits couldn’t hold a candle to the American passion for
scooting about on water.
The
big local industry in these parts is shrimping and crabbing. All along the
ICW and in its off-shoots floats marking crab-pots abound, while the
shallow, muddy estuaries are scoured
by a big shrimping fleet. Anchoring one night in the little harbour
of Southport I was struck by the resemblance between Southport, North
Carolina and Southport, Merseyside, northern England. Both have huge
expanses of shallow estuary, and shrimps. Only here the shrimps are
plentiful and huge. So did someone bring the name from Southport, England?
It
makes a difference, of course, that the water temperature here’s usually
over eighty degrees Fahrenheit. The record low air temperature for July, I
was hearing on the radio today, is 68 degrees. Today’s high’s a modest
85 or so, until a cooling thunderstorm with torrential rain
overtook Lydia B as she ran before a 20-knot breeze down the Alligator
River towards Albermarle Sound. At a stroke the cooler air revived the
crew while torrential rain washed Lydia’s decks. It's wonderful to see
clean white scuppers again.
But
Lydia now needs more than her decks washed. She hasn’t been out of the
water since before leaving Vancouver Island for Northern BC in May last
year, before her Pacific journey. Her bottom needs pressure-washed to
remove green slime and barnacles, cleaned and given a new coat of
copper-rich anti-fouling paint. And new zinc anodes to protect her
different metals against electrolytic corrosion. Plus, of course,
something more permanent than the bung that went hastily in after a
through-hull fitting collapsed way back in the Caribbean. Her paint-work’s
in a sad state, fried by tropical sun. Lydia’s in fine shape otherwise,
but she deserves some tlc after nine thousand miles of coast-to-coast
voyaging around North America. I'm in for some hard work. (About time, did
I hear somebody say? Just try doing it!)
In
two or three nights I should reach the ICW's end at Portsmouth, Virginia,
home of the US navy. I’ll find one of the friendly little boatyards
that dot the Chesapeake and haul Lydia out in the next few days.
She'll be sharp, gleaming again and eager to go.
Love
& best wishes,
Ian,
Lydia B.
Clam fishermen in the ICW, South
Carolina.
On the ICW -- for 1,200 miles.
Drive-in beach, US-style.
Butterfly on Lydia B in the ICW.
Washington, DC. August
12/02.
Hello,
Friends;
We’re
at the peak. This, surely, is the Most Important Place Lydia B has
sailed to; Washington, District of Columbia, capital city of these
extraordinary United States.
Still
carrying green travel stains from sea-growth around the waterline and
Caribbean barnacles beneath it, Lydia’s anchored in the middle of
town, a quick walk away from the White House, the Capitol building, the
-foot high Washington Monument and a list of monumental marble
memorials, museums, galleries depicting American life and federal
government offices (equally marble and monumental) as long as your arm.
If I’d arrived from Mars with only a potted history of the Earth’s
civilization to guide me, I might have thought, looking at these
innumerable columned porticos, that I was in ancient Greece.
It’s
breath-taking. Of course the cars, the pavements full of suited men with
polished black shoes (you notice things like this after a year at sea)
and smart lady civil servants, the tourists, the cops manning
road-blocks at every sensitive street corner (security in the United
States nearly a year after September 11 is in high alert mode. It’s
hard to over-estimate the impact on the nation of last year’s
terrorist attacks) and the fleet of navy-blue presidential
helicopters, “United States of America’ painted on their
sides, buzzing VIPs from
the Pentagon and the White House to
Dulles airport by the Potomac give it away. It’s the loudly-ticking
heart of (official) America, 2002.
To
get here we sailed up the Chesapeake from the US navy shipyards at
Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia, then up the Potomac River – really a
wide affair, several miles across in its lower stretches. Although each
fresh Atlantic tide brings salt water, here it’s a fresh-water river
flowing through the capital. With a bit of luck Lydia’s slime and
barnacles will die and fall off before – finally – I haul her ashore
at one of the many little Chesapeake yards further south. I’d planned
to have done that before now, but decided Washington
in company with Australian and French friends aboard two other boats was
a bigger attraction.
We’re
a little group of curious international observers. Martine and Olivier
on Noed’coco from Nice and Carol and John on Nerissa from Melbourne.
Each night over wine and tired feet we discuss the impact
-- on us -- of Washington and America. We sit in the 90-degree
heat on the low, railinged wall in front of the White House on
Pennsylvania Avenue (is George Bush at home?); we spend fascinated hours
at the Museum of American history (and see with comic relief that the
saxophone belonging to Bill Clinton, the favourite bad boy among
American presidents, is there in the display. So what’s his tune
now?); the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, the Museum of Flight
and Space, of Natural History; The Spy Museum – one block from the FBI
headquarters; the Renwick gallery of American crafts (where
twigs-stuck-together to make bird-nests and strange shapes reminds me,
sadly, of my own compatriot pseudo ‘art’ stuff); at the monuments to
Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, the Vietnam War, the Korean War (yes, the
monument to the Second World War’s a-building now, opening 2004 at one
end of the Thinking Pool, in the long, imposing, tree-cleared vista
between the Washington monument and the Capitol); the National Law
Enforcement Officers’ Memorial; we
join the huge (marble) three-building Library of Congress and get
official, photo-bearing cards in a vain attempt to find an internet
computer to send our impressions home (no mean feat this. We’ve
undergone so many security inspections in this security-swamped capital
our bags spring open automatically at each new federal door. Nearly all
of the security staff probing inside my backpack with the drum-stick
they all use are black. There’s a self-conscious effort to include ‘Afro-Americans’
in all this Washington history-painting). Marble facing slabs on
towering buildings and huge marble columns are everywhere (where on
earth is the factory, and is there any marble left in the world to
quarry?); they look as though they were put up yesterday, or maybe the
day before, when Congress issued the order to create American history.
American, Chinese (newly outnumbering the Japanese. Now there’s
something to think about!), Latin American and goodness-knows-where-from
visitors – but mainly American, children in tow -- are trooping all
day long up wide marble steps to the enormous, shadowed statues inside
the various monuments to past presidents. For the life of me, I can’t
stop thinking of Mayan temples.
What’s
more, all this is free. Open-air jazz at l’Enfant Plaza, Venezuelan
music at the Hirschhorn gallery – it’s there to enjoy for nil
dollars. It’s too much to take in. Suddenly, after the long haul
inside the Atlantic coast through Florida, Georgia, South and North
Carolina and Virginia to Maryland (and remember, Lydia B travelled
Washington State, Oregon and California – the whole of the Pacific
side -- too), just when we thought we knew a thing or two about America,
we see we know nothing. So many of our perceptions of this enormously
wealthy, able and mightily armed, hotch-potch, cosmopolitan
country (it’s impossible not to see the guns, the muscle and the cops)
have been naïve. We’re trying desperately to work out if Americans
are bold and sage, or timid folk with a lot of money. Perhaps when there
eventually is a true American race (native Indians don’t seem to
figure over-much in this scramble to write history; though they’re
half-way through building a museum for the Indians, too) we’ll get to
know. For now, in Washington, they’re digging hard to build a past,
quickly. Now, that’s what’s different about America – they don’t
hang around; they jump right in.
Culturally
overloaded, the five of us spent yesterday biking (we all have bikes
aboard) to the flea-market at Georgetown, a lovely – Georgian, of
course – suburb of Washington, to
the canal to watch the old mule-drawn barge, laden with tourists and run
by people in Georgian period costume; and picking up some rare bread at
La Madeleine, a French bakery-restaurant on the high street. If there’s
one thing Americans just can’t do, it’s bake bread; they make it far
too sweet. There has to be something Europeans are better at, eh?
Lydia B anchored in downtown
Washington DC.
Cruising crews' curry party in the park in Washington DC.
L - Bargee at Georgetown, Washington DC. R - Lincoln's
memorial, Washington DC.
At the White House with Australian and French cruising friends.
Deltaville, Virginia, Sunday August
25/02.
Hello, Friends:
Well, we made it. To the Chesapeake, that is. To
calm, protected seas in the long, shallow bay that leads over a hundred
miles in from the Atlantic to the Potomac and Washington DC, and to the
big conurbations of Baltimore, Philadelphia and further north. We’re out
of the hurricane area. We’re not too far from New York, as the crow
flies. But here is where we’re staying put for the time being while we
give Lydia B some much-deserved tlc below the waterline and sort out the
next phase.
We – myself and Lydia, that is --sailed back down
the wide Potomac from two great weeks in Washington and were hauled ashore
at Deltaville on Thursday. It’s the opposite of the big city; just a
sprawling collection of houses on an isolated, flat, wooded and
pretty peninsula where the only activity is boats, boats and more
boats. Every corner of every creek houses a marina or a boatyard. They’re
small, friendly, efficient and low-cost. It’s what the cruising sailor
prays for. There are stores for boat bits and food, and a library within
biking distance.
It’s strange being on a boat ashore after so many
miles and months at sea (it being my only home, I’m still living aboard,
hooked up to power and water from a nearby supply in what really is the
middle of a field). My balancing mechanism (the inner ear?) tells me to
brace myself for a roll, but it never comes. We’re sitting solid. Even
last night’s thunderstorm and winds never moved us. It’s quite a
change.
Lydia’s parked among an assortment of travelling
boats from around the world. Her immediate neighbours include French,
Swiss, Norwegian, Canadian, British and American vessels. Most of them
have been left here over the winter while their crew goes for a spell at
home. That’s what we’ll be doing, too, though for three weeks only. We
leave for England – on wings – on Sept 4 and will be back with Lydia
on Sept 25.
Meanwhile, it’s ten days of hull-scrubbing,
checking things thoroughly – and fitting new through-hulls, the openings
that let water and other stuff in and out when you want it, not just when
they fall out accidentally, as one of Lydia’s did in the Caribbean. An
emergency wooden bung was still in place when we came out of the water –
still sound, if a bit makeshift.
It’s a strange moment, seeing the boat that’s
carried you those thousands of sea-miles down the Pacific, through the
Panama canal and up through the Caribbean into the Atlantic, sitting on
the travel-lift, her hull fully visible for the first time since British
Columbia. How’s the anti-foul paint doing? And the zinc anodes? How’s
the hole? And was that noise I kept hearing from the propellor really the
cutlass bearing giving up the ghost? Well, she had a good covering of
barnacles – red-coloured, so they must have joined us in the Caribbean.
I must phone the paint manufacturers and get their opinion before I
re-paint with the same stuff. The bung’s still doing its job – but
another through-hull’s in an advanced state of corrosion (I’ve already
cut it out to replace); this sort of decay from the proximity of
dissimilar metals underwater is accelerated by warm water. The water
temperature up here’s still in the 80’s. And the mid-day land
temperature – well, that’s another story. A couple of days ago it
touched 100F. But the cutlass bearing’s as solid as a rock. The noise
was from a piece of rope twined round the prop-shaft, so it lashed the
rudder with each revolution.
Already the voyaging community has rallied round with
support – eggs, sausages and hash browns (battered, grated potato you
fry for breakfast) from an American couple emptying their fridge after a
week’s charter; the loan of an angle grinder from Veronique, a French
girl single-handing from French Guyana, and extension cable from Mike, her
Polish boyfriend, met on another boat in the nearby marina.
I’m waiting now for French friends aboard Noed’coco,
with whom we had that great time in Washington; they’ll be hauling out
at Deltaville too and flying back to Nice until an Atlantic crossing next
May. That’s why we do it. You just don’t meet so many like-minded,
out-going people in real life. The pool here has nothing to with it.
Love and best wishes,
Ian,
Lydia B.
Good crop of Caribbean barnacles
as Lydia B comes out of the water at Deltaville, Virginia.
Wintering ashore with the big boats at Deltaville, Virginia.
Lydia B, tattered ensign and Chevy camper ashore at Deltaville Va.
Lush, rural Virigina at Deltaville.
(Lydia B wintered ashore
at Deltaville, Virginia from
August, 2002 to May 2003. Ian Laval drove a Chevy camper van 13,000 miles round the United States -- up to Montreal, then
across the priairies back to British Columbia and on over the high
desert of the US West and southwest to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and back to Virginia via
Georgia and the US southeast).
Introduction
0 - Inside Passage and northern British Columbia
1 - British Columbia to El Salvador
2 - Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama
3 - San
Blas to Florida 5 - Brentwood Bay BC &
Chesapeake 6
- Virginia, Atlantic& Azores
7 - Azores to Ireland and England
8 - Chevy
through the US - 1 9
- Chevy through the US - 2
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