Fishing Bay Deltaville VA USA

Dragon Run on Bill and Lydia’s dock, where we were moored the previous night

We met up with Bill & Lydia in the morning for an indulgent cooked breakfast and then left their dock at 1010hrs on 23 Oct.

Leaving the Corrotoman River

With a clear blue sky above us and the trees turning to autumn colours the orange morning light made it all look lovely.  It was warm again too; unusually warm which is probably why the trees were turning much later than is normal.  There wasn’t a great deal of wind, so it was a motor down the Rappahannock River to our next stop, Fishing Bay.  A passage of 12 nm as the crow flies but 20.4 nm by boat!

Fishing Bay – busier than we had ever seen it

SY Innamorata II

When we got there, just after lunchtime, we found that Fishing Bay was busier than we had ever seen it before.  Over the afternoon and evening the maximum number of anchored yachts we saw was 29, somewhat up on the usual 4 or 5 we have seen before.  The annual migration of yachts south tends to start at the end of October and the Salty Dawys rally was about to start assembling at Hampton so we guessed that many of the yachts were on their way there.

We were delighted to see that Steve and Carol were on the water again in their yacht, Innamorata II.  They had actually launched that morning and so were part way through the business of bending on sails and attending to all of the other jobs needed to get a sailing yacht ready to go to sea again after a few months on the hard.  We dinghied over and briefly caught up with the news from them on our way ashore to collect our mail.

We had hoped that my new camera had arrived back after its trip to the UK for a warranty repair but, sadly, that was not the case.  However, our small pile of parcels and letters did include a new credit card for me from the UK as well as some goodies from Amazon.  We had been talking to Chris and Bill Burry, along with several other yachting friends, about a computer-based chart and navigation system called Open CPN.  This is similar to the commercially available systems but has been written largely by long-term cruisers.  We’ve not used it before, but it offers a number of advantages over a ‘normal’ chart-plotter system so we felt that we should try it out and had ordered a Rasberry Pi (a small computer) from Amazon as a test bed.  It will take some time to get set up because it’s not a high priority for us but we think that it might offer some interesting features and options that will complement our existing navigation suite, as well as being an independent stand-alone back-up system in the event of a catastrophic failure.

No trip to Fishing Bay would be complete without a run to the fabulous Hurds hardware store.  So, whilst I did a mad cycle dash in that direction, Nicky cycled up to the supermarket to ensure that we also restocked the wine cellar and larder.

Between us we achieved quite a lot during our short stay in the anchorage, including saying hello to Mark and Lisa on Wild Iris who were just about getting ready to launch after a difficult and delayed time on the hard tackling some unexpected rudder issues.

Measuring the Aquadrive CV shaft so that we could order a replacement

We too had been dealt our share of unexpected maintenance chores because our shake-down cruise had highlighted that we did have an issue with the Aquadrive unit on BV’s drive shaft.  The instructions say that it is likely only ever to only need maintenance greasing if used on a high-hours commercial vessel.  We clearly have now achieve that level of use but despite repacking the CV units with grease [Ed: somewhat overdue!], we had still heard its disconcerting intermittent rattle when under power.  Adam Huyler at Mackboring, the Aquadrive supplier in the US, had been offering useful guidance and had also confirmed that when worn the units are unlikely to fail, “they just get noisy”.  However, it seemed time to measure up to get a new one manufactured for us.  At the same time we packed the CV joints with even more grease and hoped that they would keep going for the 3 weeks or so that it would take for the replacement put together for us.

Pit stop and mail collection almost completed we spent the evening chatting with Doug Selden on Ithaka, in the course of which we talked about heading across to the Mathews Yacht Club the next day for the OCC dinner that evening.  Doug pointed out that the tide runs quite fast through the narrows between Gwynne Island and the mainland and that, in turn, prompted us to check again on the tide times.  So we reset the alarm and planned an earlier start in the morning for our move down to Mathews Yacht Club.

Fishing Bay, Deltaville, Virginia, USA