Captain's Log: The Incredible Shrinking Timeline

It snowed in Wilmington, NC for the first time in recent memory, and left about 4 inches of the stuff on Stinkpot's decks which remained for over a week!

It has been four months since I last recounted our cruising adventures, primarily because, until recently, we haven’t been cruising. We spent the winter aboard Stinkpot in the same marina where we purchased her in 2018, while fruitlessly shopping for her replacement. This endeavor had me traveling around the East Coast inspecting boats, even as unexpected snow blanketed the decks. We survived it all and even enjoyed some pleasant weather in Wilmington, though we hear the best of it occurred while we were in Seattle for the Seattle Boat Show with Argo in late January.

Despite bouts of chilly weather, we made the most of our time in Wilmington, indulging in the town’s marvelous restaurant scene—a hobby which I thoroughly enjoy, but is Stacey’s raison d’être, and not without reason. We’ve come to realize that she attaches memories to food—to such an extent that I often need to recall what we ate to help her remember places we’ve visited.

Stacey has a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, commonly known as face blindness. The brain typically maps people’s faces for recognition, but individuals with prosopagnosia lack this ability entirely. It’s not just facial recognition they struggle with; they also experience a form of lifelong topographical disorientation. Stacey suffers from both symptoms, so if she doesn’t recognize you, it’s nothing personal. She literally doesn’t recognize me if I walk away and return wearing a hat. Chances are good she has no idea where she is, either. Sure, she might tell you the name of the town (for the moment), but without extensively studying a map, she couldn’t tell you where in the world it is—and even if she did study the map and find it, she’d likely forget everything about that study five minutes later, making her an unlikely traveler.

Returning to our narrative, Stacey forms memories of places around the food she enjoys there. So when I say to her, “Do you remember when we were here last?” she will ask me what she ate. This, of course, presents a bit of an issue because I remember places, and despite an absolute love of cuisine, I’m less likely to remember what I ate than where I ate it. This turns a “remember that” conversation into a 20-minute exchange of what we ate, what we did, what we saw, and how many crullers were consumed before we can strike upon a sufficient collection of mutually remembered fragments of a visit to enjoy a memory of our travels together. Of course, this blog also helps with all of that, and since I started it three years ago in April 2022, we now refer to it frequently to help us mutually knit together our memories.

Speaking of which, three years ago at this time, as I was scribbling the opening paragraphs of this very blog, we were docked at the Hopewell City Marina in Hopewell, Virginia, awaiting installation of a generator that was gifted to us by our dear friend Robert, who also owns a Bayliner 38 very similar to Stinkpot. As I write these words now, we are in the same marina. We’ve moved, and, for the TL;DR crowd, what follows is what brought us here and why.

Suffice it to say, as we were enjoying our winter stay in Wilmington and traveling the country from there for fun and profit, we also attended to Stinkpot’s maintenance, as we tend to do. As winter progressed toward spring, we had no hard and fast plans. Initially, we thought we might get underway in early February and head south for awhile, but as the winter chill gripped the entire East Coast, severing our connection to shore power and its guarantee of warmth seemed less inviting. So we stayed into March, then extended our stay to April 11 (exactly four months after our arrival), figuring that would allow us to enjoy my birthday in Wilmington before casting off.

Plans were formulated. Early in the week of our departure, I would relocate our car back to our friend Kim’s driveway in Maryland and bum a ride to the airport (BWI), where I would fly cattle class back to ILM (Wilmington). I bought the plane ticket on Avelo for about $39.

I began addressing some maintenance aboard in anticipation of getting underway again. I had noted some decaying hose clamps in the bilges under our forward stateroom, so I ordered a bunch of “fresh” ones to replace them. When they arrived, I set to the task, and when I reached the raw water (sea water) connections for our air conditioning system, I realized the hose was also at the end of its life. No worries—it’s a short hose, and I have many pieces of short hose left over from other projects stored in the lazarette. I popped the aft deck to find a piece, and when I looked at the bilge water in the aft compartment/engine area, my heart sank. It looked like there was far more than water in there. I dunked a finger and sniffed it. Diesel fuel. Not good. Not good at all.

I quickly undertook an inspection of Stinkpot‘s fuel system and determined the only possible cause could be a leaking fuel tank. This is really a worst-case scenario when finding diesel floating free in the bilge, but not at all unexpected. It’s a common problem on this particular Bayliner model, and it is a bullet we were hoping to dodge as we sell her and move onto our next boat. It was not to be. This is our problem to solve.

My first order of business was to mitigate the mess in the bilge before the bilge pump saw fit to dump it overside and turn insult to ecological injury. Stacey and I gathered up our collection of sorbent materials (oil-absorbent pads) and I loaded them into the bilge water. These materials are made to absorb oils and fuels without absorbing water, and they quickly removed the floating fuel from the top of the bilge water.

And before anyone asks, we’re sure we never pumped even a drop of diesel overside. Our automatic bilge pump apparently hadn’t been working until a week prior, when I discovered and fixed the problem. We’d returned to the boat after a trip to find the bilge full of water (but no fuel). I pumped it out and then descended to diagnose the issue as a corroded wire and butt splice. I cut out the bad wire, replaced the splice, and deemed the problem solved.

In the intervening week, we’d had no rain, and the standing water in the bilge had washed back from the area under the fuel tanks. I surmised that the high-water situation—when the pump wasn’t working—had lifted diesel from a slow tank leak that had previously been “high and dry,” essentially isolated ahead of the limber holes. When I pumped the bilge, that sequestered diesel washed back into the main bilge area via the limber holes, where it sat until I found it.

Had the pump wiring not failed, we’d still be blissfully ignorant of the leak. I believe it’s slow enough that it’s probably been happening for a while, with any leaked fuel evaporating to the engine room before it could collect enough to foul the bilge water. The pump failure clued us in to a problem I was more than happy to remain unaware of, but that wasn’t to be.

With the diesel sopped up, the sorbents tossed, and fresh ones deployed, I returned my attention to the hose replacement that started this whole misadventure. I had to run to West Marine for a new hose. Once that was done, I turned to our clearly untenable travel plans.

The fuel leak was slow and manageable for the moment, but things like that can deteriorate quickly—so I wanted to move fast.

I called Robert in Hopewell. He’s a talented welder who has made quite a few fuel tanks for boats, and I figured his experience, combined with his knowledge of our model, would be invaluable. Robert helped us start making plans for our arrival. I messaged Kim, filled her in, and apologized for having to cancel our rendezvous. The marina in Wilmington kindly let us leave our car there for a week or two. We hit the markets nearby to restock Stinkpot’s stores. Once all that was sorted, I requested a final pump-out courtesy of the honeypot (there’s a euphemism for you) boat, and we dropped lines in the early afternoon of March 28th, catching the current all the way to Wrightsville Beach, where we anchored for the night.

I met Robert for lunch on my way to look at a boat in Maryland. Little did I know I'd be seeing him again so soon.

What followed was a breakneck run of long days that brought us to Hopewell by Wednesday, April 2nd—345 nautical miles in five days, running 8 knots for 45 hours total. Day two was a 12-hour push from Wrightsville to an anchorage just off Adams Creek, north of Beaufort, NC. On day three, we ran to South Lake on the bleeding edge of Albemarle Sound.

Astute readers will recall that Albemarle Sound is Stacey’s Kryptonite, so we always aim to cross when the weather is settled. Monday, March 31st was the only calm day in the forecast, so our mission was to be anchored off South Lake by the evening of the 30th—which meant another 12-hour run to get there. The run down the Alligator River had us in 2–3 foot seas on the stern, but a following sea is way far more comfortable than a beam or head sea, so we took the push and made time.

We were happy to see construction underway on the new fixed bridge that will replace the Alligator River Swing Bridge. Just after clearing the swing bridge’s fenders, I glanced to port and spotted a fire on one of the crane barges staged for the construction. At first I assumed the crew was burning something, but there was no one aboard. Stacey picked up the radio and called the bridge tender to report the fire. Authorities were contacted. What happened next is anyone’s guess, but about 30 minutes later, the bridge tender hailed us to say thanks.

Overnight, the wind laid down. We weighed anchor early and made a completely uneventful crossing of the sound. We took the Virginia Cut instead of our usual Dismal Swamp route due to a bridge closure. We had planned to go as far as we could that day, but weather and current forecasts for the James River—and a report that the High Street Landing free dock in Portsmouth might be full—had us rethinking.

As it turned out, our friends Chris and Cherie (Technomadia) were tied up at Atlantic Yacht Basin in Chesapeake, so dinner with them won out over pressing on. We tied up on the free dock just before the eponymous Great Bridge Bridge (the drawbridge named, slightly redundantly, for the Battle of Great Bridge). We might’ve preferred to get through and tie up on the south side at the alternate dock, but that would have meant waiting nearly an hour for the draw. The decision made itself.

It was great catching up with Chris and Cherie. They’d already scoped out the food scene and suggested a nearby Mexican joint that would satisfy the crowd. At the appointed hour, we all piled into “Blooper” and made the 3-mile run to El Toro Loco. The company and conversation were top-notch, the fajitas decidedly average. After dinner, we grabbed a couple pantry staples from the nearby Food Lion, then shuttled back to Stinkpot. We wrapped the evening with a stroll through Great Bridge Park and hugs all around.

Next morning, we skipped an o-dark-thirty departure in favor of casting off just before 8am for the hourly bridge opening and the lock-through. Great Bridge Lock equalizes the water level between the tidal Elizabeth River and the non-tidal North Landing River (and Currituck and Albemarle Sounds beyond). The locking process took less than half an hour, and then we were underway again, aiming to hit the mouth of the James River just after the flood began—which we did. The James was a bit lumpy until we passed the remnants of the “ghost fleet,” but we pushed on and anchored at the mouth of the Chickahominy River to regroup for the evening.

Our goal was to arrive in Hopewell with as little fuel as possible, so I did some quick math based on our last fill-up—just off Adams Creek in December—and our typical burn rate. Sure enough, our fuel supply was tight. I called Robert for local intel, and he pointed us to a place about 8 miles behind us where we could take on fuel. Late the next morning, with the last of the ebb, we headed back and took on 25 gallons, then spun around to ride the flood to Hopewell. We arrived around 4:30pm to a welcoming committee on the t-head dock. We waited until the wind and current were friendlier the next morning to back into our assigned slip—after friends cleared some lines hanging in the water. That all happened on April 3rd, and we’ve been here since.

As I write this ten days later, we’ve emptied the guest stateroom into a storage building Robert offered us next to his shop. Over a couple days, Robert helped us pump the remaining fuel—about 37 gallons—out of the tanks. The fuel constantly clogged the sediment screen, so that earlier stop wasn’t for nothing; without it, we’d almost certainly have plugged up our filters underway.

We finished pumping the last of the fuel on Thursday, April 10th—my birthday. By then, Stinkpot reeked of diesel. A while back, my old high school friend Jason had offered us use of his excess hotel points if we ever needed them. Stacey remembered and reached out, and Jason’s gift was swift and appreciated: two nights at the nearby Hampton Inn, which we enjoyed while fresh sorbents worked to absorb the remaining liquid and smell.

While we were away celebrating, we enjoyed some local food and king-sized accommodations. We returned yesterday to find Stinkpot just as we left her, with only the faintest whiff of diesel lingering in the guest stateroom where the now-empty tanks remain.

I’m writing this update as a clear act of procrastination. The real work still lies ahead—and it won’t do itself—so I suppose I’ll have to place the final period on this…maybe later?