Steve Dipietro...rockstar.

November 12(ish). 

After spending a few days in Cape May Harbor working on the boat, we get a decent, or so we thought, weather window for heading up the Delaware Bay to the Chesapeake and Delaware canal.  The night before, our boss and friend, Steve Dipietro, calls us up.  He seems a bit excited and he's got 100 questions.  After calming him down enough to understand him, we talk and I hang up the phone.  Nicole asks what's up and I reply that Steve will be meeting us on the dock at 5:30 AM for our passage to Chesapeake City.

Some background will help paint the picture here.  Steve has a wife, a daughter in her first year of college, and a son in high school.  He owns 4 restaurants that are exceptionally busy throughout the summer along with a catering business.  In the winter he closes these and sails around on his 35 ft Beneteau in the BVIs.  Not a bad life.  The extradinary thing about Steve meeting us on the dock is that by the time we pick him up he will not have been in the country for more than 12 hours.  He'd been visiting his daughter who was doing a semester abroad in Greece where he chartered two boats with a second family and they'd spent 10 days sailing around the islands there.  He landed at 7 PM and was meeting us 10.5 hrs later for a rough passage.  Crazy awesome.

We pick Steve up at the marina dock and head out the canal before the sun's up.  He's got breakfast sandwiches and coffee for us.  I had the GPS and a new float switch wired.  We think the boat is ready to go.  Steve's in a great mood and immediately laughs when he sees our cabin.  "Aren't you going to put everything away before we make way?"  We thought it was.  We were new to this.

After crashing up the Delaware in 4 ft, steep waves we not only lost everything off the shelves again, much to Steve's laughter, but we even lost our anchor out of it's mounts.  Our danforth was originally setup to hang from the bow rail.  Nicole heard something slamming against the hull and as soon as I looked up and noticed the anchor GONE, I ran up to find it bashing against the hull.  Thank god I was smart enough to tie the anchor rode off.

After a long day, we glided into the C&D canal.  Steve's on the bow
snapping photos, Nicole's playing nintendo with the autopilot,
and I'm enjoying the quiet of the foredeck.

1/2 way through the day while still crashing into it Steve says, "Hey I'm not a purist or anything.  If you guys want to fire up the engine and head for the calmer shore we could probably be out of this mess in less than an hour and it'll be a lot calmer."  WHAT?!?!  WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SO SOONER!!!  The rest of the afternoon was spent lazily motoring up to the canal with the autopilot engaged, a line out the back, and planning drinks for the evening.  Awesome day.

--Jay and Nicole

Day two, 11/9/2010 - Ocean City to Cape May

Well, this is when things really got interesting...


Looks awesome right?  Fishing rod off the radar tower, sunny skies, and not a care
in the world.  Kinda...

 We finished loading up our stuff with the help of my mother and Nicole's parents.  Left the dock on the high tide around 11 AM Cape May bound.  We were jumping outside as the conditions were pretty good.  6-8 ft following seas and a broad reach on the sails.  30 miles.  No big deal.  We set the sails and were surfing along at about 7 knots.  Wouldn't know for sure because our GPS was still in the box.  No big deal. 

The coolest part was setting the sails,
shutting down the engine, and gliding
along with only the sound of the hull
gliding effortlessly through the water. 
Behold, the power of the wind.

Still 8-10 miles from Cape May inlet we realize that the sun is definitely going to have set about one hour and 15 minutes before we get there...big deal.  Very big deal.  Nicole and I decide to tie up to a crab pot for a couple of hours, get some rest, look at the charts, and figure out what to do.  We tie up and several things happen very quickly.  The motion of the boat changes and we go from bobbing along to slamming around.  Everything, and I mean everything, starts cascading off our shelves and berths onto the floor.  Nicole gets seasick, she did not know this would happen.  We stay there for 3 hours till we realize that we need to move because we're dragging the crab pot...1/2 a mile offshore since the Jersey coast curves towards the west.

We fire up the engine, set a small headsail, and start heading south.  Since we're too sketched out to navigate the inlet at night (later I would curse myself for not trusting my gut and knowing that I know inlets well since I regularly spearfish inside Barnegat Inlet on the north end of Long Beach Island and that we should have no problem navigating the wide, deep, well marked inlet), I study the charts and tuck us 100 yards off the beach on the south side of the southern inlet jetty.  We went from bucking and rocking in 6-8 seas to pancake flat since the swell direction wasn't allowing waves to get in there and the wind was offshore.  We set the hook in 10 ft of water and put out a scope of 10:1 being nervous.  I had to tie extra rode onto our danforth since it only came with 70 ft of it and we were in 10 ft of water.

I slept in 2 hr snatches, woke up before sunrise and motored into the inlet cursing myself the entire time for not trusting my knowledge over the guidebook which said that the inlet was dangerous and it was best to come up the canal from the backside.  The boat was so level through the inlet from lack of chop or surge that you could have balanced a pencil on it's eraser in the boat (well, not quite that flat, but you get the idea).  We tied up at a marina, got some stuff done, and crashed on the cabin berths out of exhaustian.

That night might've made the harrowing trip worth it.  My father and aunt met us down in Cape May and we went to dinner at The Lobster House.  Being literally right across from our slip helped as after 2 bottles of wine and enough fresh seafood to feed a small army, we had one of the best food comas of our life.

The view from our slip...

Day One on the boat

Ok so let's do a little timeline.  Most people spend months looking for a boat, sometimes years.  We did that and since we had more free time at the end of the work season we'd even scrounge around boat yards in Maryland on the Chesapeake and a few in north NJ looking for a steal or a find.  Once purchased, most people then spend months or even years refitting, outiftting, and trying to fit into their new boat.  Most people.

On October 26th we viewed China Doll around 3 PM.  5 PM we rolled into my father's house and began typing up our offer to email to the owner.  7 PM she accepted our offer.  9 AM I dropped off the deposit.  11 AM I have the survey scheduled for the following week.  November 2nd we started the survey at 8 AM with frost on the ground and the boat.  Noon we launched China Doll for her sea trial.  4 PM we paid the balance to the owner after the surveyor had assured us we were buying a great little boat and headed home to celebrate.  Now it gets tricky.

We differ form most people in that while celebrating the enormity of what was actually to happen over the next week crashed down on us mid-bottle of red wine.  We were not spending months or years getting used to the idea of leaving and our boat.  There was a break in the thumping swell and conditions just one week away and we were going to be leaving on China Doll come hell or high water.  We spent 6 days frantically trying to get everything we owned moved into the boat, provisioning, gathering various odds and ends that we still needed and all the while trying to visit every friend and family member we had to say goodbye for the next 6 months.

On November 7th we got onto China Doll and staged her up at the only semi-open marina after getting a slip for $20 at a private marina for the condo owners and a guy named Bobbie, the dockmaster with a sextant collection probably worth a cool million bucks, telling me that we should pull into slip number 5 and to look him up if we hit the keys as he was leaving to spend his entire winter surfing and diving down there.  Bobbie was the man.

That day several things happened that we now laugh about.  It was blowing offshore at about 30 mph.  In the 12 mile transit from the boatyard to the marina here's the list:
-- a loud pop followed by smoke coming out of one of the hatches in the cabin where we had a semi-melted thru-hull fitting emitting a very foul odor.
--opening our first swing bridge on the ICW - there was about 4 knots of current as the tide was outgoing and the inlet was only about 1 mile away - this was pretty awesome, kinda like being on an episode of modern marvels en vivo
--running aground right outside the marina entrance despite being mid channel - later I realized that it was a blow-out low tide and we were shy about 6 inches of water...we had some wine and waited for the tide to come in while the sunset - the best part was that after we passed the bridge there was a stranded small fishing boat that asked us for help - we told him it was our 1st day ever on a sailboat (not completely true) and we weren't comfortable towing him and that we'd send help as soon as we were shoreside - he got his engine running and half towed us off the bar about an hour later...Nicole and I could not stop laughing.
--pulling into our first slip with NO REVERSE OR NEUTRAL - the next day when trying to reverse out of the slip I realized that the shifter cable had come out of its mounting because the wood backing was rotted out

This was day one.

--Jay and Nicole

New to blogging

For those of you who are just joining us (everyone since we just started this), Nicole and I thought it would be a good idea to tell our entire story, since we very recently started cruising in November 2010.  Thus, each post will recount our trip so far with the approximate date of the stories at the top of the post.  Hopefully we will be able to cover our entire journey so far over the next couple of months and maybe by May, we'll actually be telling the story in real time.  Until then, enjoy the reminiscing.

--Jay and Nicole

Our boat search concludes

It's October 26th.  After searching for months through multiple states and websites, on a whim I respond to a craigslist ad for a Sabre 28 that looks to be in really good condition, has a Yanmar diesel, fridge, and even a radar tower with a swim step.  Nicole and I go see China Doll (shown below).

China Doll  - she'd been launched a few hours earlier for
the survey

With new sails and most of the essential work being done by the previous owners (stanchions, grab rails, new running rigging, re-done windows, and rebuilt chainplates for the standing rigging) she was in virtually sail away condition.  The greatest part was that the previous owner gave us many of the little things that would make China Doll a functional voyager.  Flares, horns, fire extinguishers, offshore harnesses, sun shower, a dinghy with engine, and an autopilot are the most notable features. 

Plus, check out the radar tower.  That thing is freaking awesome!!!  Now we have more gear stored and used on it than you'd believe.  A bilge pump for the dingy, our outboard, 3 fishing rods, the grill, our folding bike, a bucket for doing dishes and washing clothes, fishing harness, offshore lifejackets...crazy how much stuff we can fit on there. 

Having 6 points of contact for support and strength the radar tower is super durable and rugged.  Frequently I will sit on top of it.  If I'm driving I'll connect the remote for our tiller autopilot and steer from up there.  If Nicole's driving, I'll have 2 lines out and I'll sit backwards watching small fish check out my lures and making sure that we're not snagging weeds.  Wicked fun though and when it's settled weather it's the best seat in the house as you can see flying fish, turtles, and dolphins for about 100 yards in every direction because of the elevated view.  Imagine just ghosting along in a calm, doing about 4.5 knots with a light breeze, sunshine feels hot because there's no apparent wind, you're sitting up there looking at this indigo blue water you only see in photoshopped advertisements...and then it hits you that this is your life.

--Jay and Nicole