Sailing from Cape Lookout to the Chesapeake Bay

Cape Lookout on another beautiful day

Thursday 9 May, Liberation Day in our home Channel Islands, was a beautiful day in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  Perhaps we should have stayed, dressed overall, to enjoy the weather but we had a passage to make and a good forecast for it, so we left Cape Lookout Bight at midday to head north to the Chesapeake Bay.

Leaving Cape Lookout Bight

We negotiated the sandy entrance and then turned south to clear the miles and miles of Cape Lookout shoals.  The shoals extend 10nm from the lighthouse, 8nm from the tip of the point, so it felt like a long motor south, in wind that was too light to sail, before we could turn to head northeast towards Cape Hatteras .  In the end we did nearly 5 hours of motoring at the start of passage, much of which was quite stop-start as the wind temptingly seemed to be enough to sail but wasn’t.  We met nasty short seas around the shallows off Cape Lookout and on the approaches to and around Cape Hataras, even in these benign conditions; we certainly don’t want to be anywhere near these capes in storm conditions.

Dawn on Friday 10 May

Overnight we had south-southeasterly winds of up to 20kts – good sailing conditions – and we made commensurately good progress.  A flying fish flew over the cockpit and landed on the deck, giving Nicky a bit of a shock, and a small one also landed in the cockpit.

We rounded Cape Hatteras at 0130hrs and bore away downwind towards the Chesapeake Bay.  At dawn the wind started to drop off, which was frustrating, but there was sufficient to keep sailing, albeit much more slowly.  More frustrating were the number of sport’s fishing boats with no AIS and the almost incessant, gabbled radio calls from the US Coast Guard.  Their calls are made so quickly, presumably to try to minimise time on channel 16, that their transmissions are completely ineffective.  It’s virtually impossible to make out the main content of the message and you certainly don’t have time to write any of it down if you can discern it.

You wouldn’t want to get between this tug and its tow

As we approached the entrances to the Chesapeake Bay the shipping became much busier.  There were warships doing manoeuvres and commercial traffic working to deadlines and, mixed in amongst all that, commercial fishing boats, sports fishing boats and grotty yachties like us.  We had lots of dodging to do.

In our opinion, areas of the Chesapeake Bay rival Maine for the number of pot-bobbers per square mile, so we didn’t intend to go too far into the Bay at night.  But we didn’t plan to spend the night holding clear until daylight, not with that amount of shipping in the vicinity of the entrance.  We entered the Bay via the northern entrance, where the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel is a bridge.  It’s quite low but higher than most on the ICW and it kept us clear of the big ships which tend to use the southern entrance over the tunnel.  The biggest problem is resolving the geometry of the bridge (actually 2 bridges) and making sure that you aim for, and pass through, the correct span.  It’d be jolly embarrassing expensive otherwise!

Kiptopeke anchorage and breakwater as seen the morning after we arrived

By this stage the wind had dropped to almost nothing so we were under power, heading up the eastern shore of the Bay to Kiptopeke where we knew, from a visit the previous October, there was a good anchorage close to a State park and protected from the main body of the Bay by a barrier of sunken concrete WWII ships.

Part of the Kiptopeke breakwater as seen the morning after we arrived

Daylight photo of the unlit fish weirs (fish traps) close to the southern entrance to the Kiptopeke anchorage

We arrived in the anchorage at 0025hrs on Saturday 11 May having made a very slow and careful approach through the southern entrance with me on the foredeck with a big torch.  Our ‘steamer-scarer’ was invaluable to search for the unlit fish weirs (traps) that we knew were out there……

Pot-bobbers galore.  Less of an anchorage more of a crab culling zone

……  and the myriad pot-bobbers we knew we would find.  It was a more stressful approach than we would have liked, and finding space to drop the hook in the anchorage [Ed: now more a ‘pot-bobberage’!] was very hard work, but we took it carefully, got BV secure and crashed out for what was left of the night.

We were woken the following morning by a very irate crab fisherman.  Apparently we had anchored too close to his pot-bobbers and were in the way.  We should have been ‘in a marina with all the other yachts and rich people’!  Welcome to Virginia!

Kiptopeke’s an odd sort of place with the breakwater formed by sunken WWII ships; a small ferry dock, all that remains of the busy ferry and railway terminal that was here before the bridge/tunnel was built and now mostly used by anglers; and the State park ashore.  After our resounding welcome from some of the local populace we weren’t planning to stay long.  And then we received a message from Lydia.  A mini-OCC party that evening in George and Frances Sadler’s new (to them) Fleming 55, Twin Cove, on their (Bill and Lydia’s) dock.  Could we make it?  It was only 45nm away.  Of course we could!

Leaving Kipropeke

Kiptopeke Beach, Maryland, USA