Corrotoman River VA USA

Bill and Lydia’s home on the Corrotoman River

Bill and Lydia had planned to do a yacht delivery trip from Newport to Deltaville whilst we were in Great Falls with Phil and Lesley.  Had that worked out as planned, then we would have met up with Bill in Richmond on Monday 12 November, where he had work and a Veterans’ Day engagement, abandoned the hire car back at the depot and returned to Weems with him.  However, technical faults meant that Bill and Lydia left the yacht in a yard, close to where they had collected it, and returned home in a hire car.  Consequently, and fortunately for us given the volume of stuff we had accumulated at Phil and Lesley’s, Bill and Lydia each had a car in Richmond when we arrived to drop off the hire car so the hour’s drive back to their home wasn’t the squash we had expected it to be.

BV and Dragon Run(aka ‘The Twins’) on Bill and Lydia’s dock.  BV is on the face of the dock, bow to the left in the pictures.  Note the very different mast heights – and Dragon Runhas gone through the upper section of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) albeit working the tides very carefully

The volume of bits was representative of the amount of work we needed to do on BV – hence leaving Phil and Lesley’s with a couple of items still outstanding.  For the next few days it rained pretty steadily but we didn’t see much of it, spending our time contorted into odd shapes whilst marine DIYing.

New galley tap

First on the list of jobs was plumbing. To start with I fitted the new pressure reducing valve (PRV) to the hot water system.  Given that BV was built and fitted out in the UK, all the fittings are metric and getting hold of a metric PRV in the US had proven to be a step too far, hence the need to have it sent out from the UK.  Previously, we had a one-way valve where I fitted the PRV but that meant that when we ran the pump for a long time and the water pump kicked in and out, we sometimes had a surge of hot water, which was particularly noticeable when you were showering.  The more advanced PRV smooths out the boluses of hot water and, hopefully, means that there will be no more squeals from a near scalded shower occupant.  PRV successfully fitted, I moved on to replacing the leaking tap in galley, though I left the tap in the heads for an as yet unknown time in the future when I am feeling particularly masochistic. Fitting the galley tap was bad enough in terms of trying to fit enough of me to do the job into a small space, hands above head, back on a lip of teak no more than 1cm wide.  As a working position it wasn’t in the slightest bit comfortable but it was a veritable feather bed in compared to the position I will need to adopt to do the same job in the forward heads.

Whilst I was busy practising my best Anglo-Saxon vocab, Nicky collected and then fitted the newly dry-cleaned curtains. They certainly look a lot better for their clean, though the blackout material didn’t stand up to the chemical treatment as well as we would have expected.  Perhaps that’s the long-term effect of being sun-baked on a daily basis……

The new multiplexer fitted (centre of the picture with yellow and green squares on its bottom edge).  Now all I have to do is make sure that it is correctly programmed – a task that ended up taking the best part of 2 weeks!!

Task number 2 (whilst Nicky tried to stow all our food purchases and other spares that weren’t immediately about to be fitted), was to fit the new multiplexer.  The multiplexer is a wiring interface which basically allows all the electronics – the radios, the GPS receiver, the instruments and chart plotters – to talk to each other.  The previous multiplexer (think Spectrum ZX81 vs the latest Mac) had recently started to die, a state of affairs manifested by the fact that some of the cockpit data displays only intermittently showed the information they were programmed to display.  So, I spent another few hours in a new stress position (stretched across the chart table, working at arms’ length with a screwdriver in the electrics locker, without leaning on [Ed: ie breaking] anything critical.  Rewiring complete, and old boxes removed and disposed of, and all that was left for me to do was to connect the multiplexer temporarily to my computer to programme it so that it ‘knows’ which data source is feeding which instrument(s).  So far, that job’s taken me the best part of 3 weeks and whilst it’s more or less complete, there are still some irritating snags that I haven’t yet quite sorted out.

(Top left) old brass socket – they all looked similarly tatty.  (Other pics) New sockets fitted – a major improvement in the smartness stakes

Task 3 was much more mundane, something to let the poor little grey cells recover from the multiplexer reprogramming marathon – a half-marathon of fitting new sockets.  The brass sockets that we had fitted to BV shortly after we bought her (to replace the really tatty looking ones that were fitted) were showing their age.  Plus, having fitted the inverter, I wanted to fit an extra socket as a dedicated to taking the inverter’s output.  Happily, I can rewire sockets in my sleep, though drilling a big hole in the teak to take the additional socket was a bit of ‘measure twice, cut once’ moment.  The pictures don’t really do them justice but the new sockets do look an awful lot smarter and having the additional socket for the inverter is great.

The new 11lbs propane bottles (legal for the US and Canada).  It took a long time to hunt down ones that would fit in the locker but fit they do and with room to spare!

Task 4: confirm the fit of the new propane bottles.  A bit late this one as we had already had the bottles filled, but then we were confident that they would fit the locker – I’d done a lot of careful measurement and research online to find bottles that would fit.  The ones I bought are an unusual 11lbs size, which had taken quite a bit of work to track down and order.  The standard size in the USA is a 20lb bottle and they are easily exchanged at most petrol stations.  However, the 20lb bottles are far too large for our gas locker but the two 11lbs bottles fit into the space that our two 6kg (13.2lb) Calor Gas propane bottles fitted into which was a relief.  In fact they fit into the space very easily, more so than the 2.2lb difference in propane content would suggest, but the important thing is that they have the correct valve system to make them legal to be filled in the USA and Canada.  On our Calor Gas bottles if you opened the valve gas would come out, however, the North American valves will only let gas out if a regulator fitting is attached.

Task 5:  wait for a break in the rain and measure the height of the mast.   We had been meaning to do this for a while but the rather grotty weather forecasts were forcing our hand a little.  It was looking more and more likely that the winter storms would mean that we would be taking the Intracoastal Waterways route down at least as far as Beaufort, North Carolina.  When we had measured the mast back in the UK, we had been reckoning on big European bridges and so had ‘added a bit for safety’s sake’ at most of the steps.  Consequently, we reckoned the air draft (with burgees and aerials) at 20m (about 67ft), rounded up ‘for safety’s sake’.  Well, ‘for safety’s sake’ doesn’t really cut it on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) where the US Army Corps of Engineers has specified a minimum bridge vertical clearance of 65ft (though one or 2 are as low as 63 or 64ft). Knowing that Dragon Runhad run the gauntlet of the bridges from Norfolk to Beaufort and, from a cursory inspection of our relative mast heights from the bank above Bill and Lydia’s dock believing that BV’s air draft was less than Dragon Run’s, we knew that we needed to remeasure BV.  So, in a still (and dry) couple of hours, we hoisted a 30m tape measure up the mast on the burgee halyard and measured from the mast step to the burgee halyard block – 53ft 6in.  The burgee staff rises a further 4ft 6in above that – 58ft.  Then, from the mast step to the waterline – 4ft 10in.  So, a total air draught of 62ft 10in with the burgee up or 62ft with the burgee down.  Perfectly doable on the ICW.  Hooray!

Christ Church in the rain

Our final task was less of a task and more of a pleasure.  When we had first arrived with them back in Mat 2018, Bill and Lydia had both said that we should visit the historic Christ Church which lies about 10 minutes’ drive from their home.  We’d never quite made it there but we wanted to so on our final day on their dock, in the pouring rain, we stopped off at the church in the mid-afternoon, not expecting the museum and the ‘docent’s’ tour to be quite so detailed – we really didn’t leave ourselves enough time to do the exhibits justice.

With time not on our side, for once we had to whizz through the museum exhibits.  Suffice to say, the first Christ Church was a wooden building built in 1670 thanks to funding provided by the powerful landowner John Carter.  In 1730, his son, Robert funded the construction of a more impressive, brick church, built on the foundations of the wooden building.  At the time it was the third of its design in Virginia but today it is the only one left standing.  And that’s primarily because in 1786, the Anglican church was disestablished and then in 1802 the Glebe Act authorised the state to seize church property, so that those churches that had been funded by individuals returned to private ownership.

Robert Carter, who funded the construction of the current (brick) Christ Church

Three tiered lectern in the centre of the
Christ Church.  The bottom lectern was
used for reading parish notices etc. 
The middle lectern was used for conducting
 the service and the top lectern, ‘next unto God’,
was used by the minister for preaching the sermon

After a whistle-stop tour of the museum the ‘docent’ [Ed: Great word.  Means nothing in English but translates as ‘extremely knowledgeable museum attendant’] took us into the church itself.  Having remained in private hands and then been unused for so long, much of the church is original, including the now very rare high-backed family pew boxes (high-backed pews and pew boxes in most churches were cut down to a more ‘normal’ height during the time that Christ Church was essentially out of use).  ‘High-backed’ is something of an understatement.  The wooden walls of the pew boxes reach to eye-height so that the occupants of the pew box, when seated, couldn’t see out of the box and be distracted from the church service.

Christ Church was designed and built as an Anglican Church, very much in opposition to the style and excesses of the Catholic Church of the time.  So, there was no organ (psalms were chanted rather than hymns being sung) and there was virtually no decoration either inside or out.

It’s a very plain and sombre church but still rather lovely and another reminder of the history of this area.

Goodbye to Bill and Lydia

That was our final day on Bill and Lydia’s dock.  We had a lovely last dinner with them that evening and then, happily, Friday 16 November dawned bright and clear [Ed: and very cold!], with a good sailing wind from the northwest – a perfect day for heading south.  We topped up the tanks with a good slug of lovely soft well water, prepped BV for the off, and bade farewell to 2 people, amongst so many, who have looked after us so well and helped us so much.  We were sad to leave – we’ve had so lots of fun with Bill and Lydia – but we know that we are likely to be back in 2019 or, worst case, to meet up somewhere exploring Maine or New England next summer instead.

Corrotoman River, Virginia, USA