Our First Night Sail

Location: Broad Creek, Solomons, MD
Date: 13 Oct, 2006
Current position: 38 20 23.62 N, 76 27 32.04 W

At about 4pm on Tuesday, 10 Oct, we quit work, hoist anchor, shout our goodbyes to our friends at the dock and are on our way. It's cool and clear and we're both excited and a bit nervous.
This will be our first trip on Rachel at night and we're traveling 60+ miles from Deltaville to Solomons Island, MD at the mouth of the Patuxent River.

We're supposed to have 5 to 10 knot winds from the East, which will make for an easy beam reach for most of our trip. The moon is waning but is still about 3/4 full, and moonrise is expected to be around 9:30pm.

It seems the weather gods have tricked us once again and there is virtually no wind, so we set the engine to about 1500 RPMs and, making about 4.5 knots, watch the sun go down behind us. It gets chilly fairly quickly, so we don our foul weather bib overalls and jackets. As the sun sets a vee of geese fly low out of the sun right over the boat, honking us on our way.

It gets darker, a low fog begins to move in - we can see the stars quite clearly overhead, but not much around us. Mark fires up the radar so we hopefully don't get any surprises.

We clear Windmill Point, and the Bay is calm and flat as we make our way North. We see a few ships out in the shipping lane to the East, but nothing near us, and, except for a couple of fishing boats we can see, the radar is clear. It gets pretty black, the sun's gone, the moon isn't up yet, and we're on our own. About all we can see is the lights from our instruments and the stars directly overhead.

After a while, Julie comes up from below and notices a (small) blip behind us on the radar. She says to Mark "Have you checked behind us lately?".

Mark turns around and looks (for the first time in maybe 15 minutes - lesson one - 15 minutes is too long!) and sees what looks like a brightly lit city closing in on us directly astern. We watch the approaching "thing", look at the radar to see if we can tell how close it's going to come, stare into the lights trying to see if we can find a red or green navigation light so we have some indication as to what it's heading is - nothing, no clues - it just keeps getting bigger.

Then we begin hearing the deep rumble of large diesel engines. This thing is getting closer and closer and we still don't know which way it is heading or what to expect. We are about ready to start drooling and capering about.

Julie realizes that "it" has finally changed direction slightly and she can now see a green navigation light (Mark, being color blind, is rather useless at this exercise, so he's in charge of capering). We realize it's going to cross behind us at an oblique angle and pass us to port. It turns out to be a menhaden boat - a large commercial fishing boat - with the decks awash with light so the fishermen can see their work. Oh, and it is, actually, smaller than a city.

Whew. That should keep us awake for a while. We calm down and then, off our starboard bow, we see the moon rising. It's gorgeous and glorious and friendly and we can see again. Not a lot, but the mist is lifting, we're beginning to see the horizon, and it's comforting to know that we'll have more light for the rest of the trip.

Still no wind, so we continue motoring, hour after hour, trying to time our arrival at the Patuxent so we don't arrive before dawn. Up past Smith Point, and across the mouth of the Potomac River Rachel's little 30 hp. diesel engine thrums along like clockwork.

At about 3am the breeze picks up. We can sail! Julie's at the helm, so she throttles down and heads into the wind, and Mark goes forward to raise the main. The main's up, Julie heads off the wind, back onto our course, and after we set the two head sails, we shut down the engine and are finally sailing on an easy, fast beam reach in an almost flat bay. Woohoo! We're making
6 to 6.5 knots and are having a ball.

We realize that we'll get there too early at this rate, so we ease the sails to slow down a bit, and just relax and enjoy ourselves. There's little to no shipping along our course for this part of the trip, so we take turns at the helm and catnap our way North. This is the way it's supposed to be. We look at each other and smile. We think of that line from the movie "As Good As It Gets" when Jack Nicholson says "What if this is as good as it gets?".

That'll be fine w/ us.

We finally arrive at the mouth of the Patuxent River at about 5:30am. It's the day after the Annapolis sailboat show, so we know the anchorage will be packed with boats heading to Florida and the Bahamas for the winter. We decide to heave-to until it gets light, figuring that by then a lot of boats will have left the anchorage to continue on their way South, freeing up some space for us. After a short sleep, we head in, we shout hello to a couple of friends who are leaving as we pass by. We circle around the anchorage and find 'the perfect spot' drop the anchor, cook up a pot of porridge to warm us up, and bask in our accomplishment.

Doesn't take much to keep us happy.

Mark & Julie
s/v Rachel