The OCC & Salty Dawg Sailing Association Drinks Party in Hampton VA USA

First up on Lydia and Bill’s list of fun things for us to do involved a 40 mile drive down to Hampton.  We loaded up the with all sorts of goodies and made our way to the Bluewater Yachting Centre, a marina at the entrance to the Hampton River opposite Norfolk, just west of the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay.

Here the floating docks were absolutely crammed with sailing yachts waiting to head south to the Caribbean on the Salty Dawg Sailing Association’s annual Fall Rally.  Seventy yachts had signed up for the rally and nearly all of them were ready to go in Hampton.  The plan had been for them to start in a few days’ time but the weather really wasn’t playing ball.

The skippers’ VTC weather briefing by Chris Parker

The Salty Dawg Rally participants get a daily weather briefing from Chris Parker (East coast USA sailing weather guru) and we were able to watch their skippers’ briefing with Chris Parker beamed in on a video link.  It was really good for us to hear the details because our plan is to follow pretty much the same routing as the Salty Dawg Rally but in a few weeks’ time.  With tales of the last of the hurricane season’s named storms causing trouble in the Atlantic [Ed: hopefully ‘the last of the hurricane season’s named storms’!], some nasty depressions pushing strong northerlies against the northbound Gulf stream and kicking up some really unpleasant seas, and some generally unhelpful wind directions, there wasn’t much good news for the rally participants.  We’re braced for the thought that we will probably have similar issues when we try to make the passage south.  By then the hurricane season will be officially over but our later departure increases the likelihood that we will be affected by a series of winter storms generally making the passage troublesome.

Having heard the professional advice we reached the same conclusion as the majority – stay in port! Fortunately, unlike the ARC, the Salty Dawg rallies don’t have a fixed start time, so the skippers were quite at liberty to hang on as long as necessary, and still able to get help from the support team, before leaving Hampton in the most favourable weather window. In our opinion that’s a great selling point for the Salty Dawgs, especially as there were a large number of crews making a long offshore passage for the first time.  And that was why we were the Bluewater Marina.

Our role was to help with a drinks party hosted by the Ocean Cruising Club (ie by Bill and Lydia who are OCC Rear Commodores and by Greta and Gary who are local OCC Port Officers) for the 170-odd crewmembers on the Salty Dawg Rally.  Sailing non-stop from Hampton to the Caribbean would be a passage of over 1000 nautical miles between ports (measured on a great circle route!) which meant that a lot of the Salty Dawg Rally participants were likely to achieve the qualifying passage distance for full membership of the OCC.  Our job was to explain all of the benefits of being a member of the OCC and why we had personally found it to be both beneficial and lots of fun. Funny old thing, with platters of food and gallons of wine laid on by the OCC, plus lots of talking [Ed: Reg’s favourite pastime?!], not much happened in the way of taking pictures of the party.  Pam and Tom on Stealin’ Timewere on the rally but had not made it to Hampton by this stage so, sadly, we didn’t see them again, but Kate and Andrew on Wildsideand Maria and Allen on Lady Jane were there and on good form.  We’ll track the progress of Stealin’ Time, Wildsideand Lady Janeon the rally closely and hopefully meet up again in sunnier climes.

Drinks party over and everything cleared away, we wished all of the rally participants the best of luck with their passage and promised to look out for them when we made it down to the Caribbean in December.  And then it was time to move onto the next stage in Bill and Lydia’s entertainment for us, but for that we needed to drive 60 miles northwest to Richmond.

Hampton, Virginia, USA