We visited Yorktown, VA today, the site of the decisive 1781 American victory over British forces in the Revolutionary War. There are many original Revolutionary War cannon and earthenworks fortifications still here and a National Park visitor's center.

The town of Yorktown is very small and it looks like the houses and grounds have help from the National Park Service and/or the state of Virginia because everything is perfect and looks newly restored, newly painted and newly landscaped. Some of that may have come from reconstruction after the pounding this area took from hurricane Isabella in 2003, but today the streets are all nice brick paved, the curbs are all cut granite stone and the lawns and shrubs look like they all have the same good landscaper caring for them. There are quite a few original and restored original buildings like this house of Thomas Nelson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, participant in the battle of Yorktown and Governor of Virginia until 1781.

There is also the Colonial Grace Church, built in 1697. The walls are original, but the roof and interior were replaced after a fire in 1814. The church has been in continual use since 1697 and they're still using the original silver communion service made in London in 1649!

The battlefields at Yorktown are owned and operated by the National Park Service, so they're reasonably well preserved and taken care of. The earthen artillery fortifications here as well as the French siege cannon and the American field cannon are all original from the siege of Yorktown in 1781. What happened here was that British general Cornwallis had established Yorktown as a deepwater port for English ships. At the time, British forces in America were split between here and New York City, which they also controlled. George Washington decided that the war was "inconclusive" and he needed a major victory so he pulled the vast part of his forces down here as a surprise attack on Yorktown. When they were almost here, England found out and sent many warships here from NY, but the French navy had sent 24 ships to help the US independence cause and they stopped the British from reinforcing general Cornwallis here. Then, Washington's army, with 12,000 Americans plus Lafayette with 5,000 French and a few hundred German mercenaries sieged Yorktown and won.

The Park Service information shows that the help of the French was absolutely critical to winning this decisive battle. Kathy says that even though the French support was critical to the victory here in Yorktown, Washington could have won the overall war without the help from the French because in prior years he had to keep waiting for promised French help that usually didn't show up.

We went up the Chesapeake from Norfolk to Yorktown and are staying in Yorktown for 2 nights.

Leaving Norfolk, we passed the US Naval base there and it was an impressive sight to see 2 aircraft carriers docked next to each other, large rocket launcher platform ships, many huge supply ships and others. There were also US CBs with machine guns in small boats and Norfolk Harbor Police boats with their lights on to keep boats out of the Navy base waters.



Then, as we exited the Norfolk "Class A" channel (OK for really big ships), we saw the Tall Ships sailing on the Chesapeake, bound for Jamestown, VA for the Quadra Centennial Celebration of the founding of Jamestown. There were 3 tall ships and a dhow... a the small type sailboat Captain John Smith used to explore the bays while the big ships stayed anchored in deep water. The celebration is next week, including a visit from Queen Elizabeth herself. So we got the Jamestown tall ships parade early.

We saw some of Norfolk, VA today by just walking around the downtown area within a mile or so of the marina.

I said Norfolk is a Navy town........ well here's a view down one of the main city streets. That's the battleship Wisconsin in the bay at the end of the street. It is part of the Nauticus Maritime Museum that we visited. The museum itself was very school field trip oriented with lots of hands-on displays and learning stations. It was also, appropriately, full of school kids on field trips. Not much fun for adults, but great for kids and some of the displays were still interesting, like the hands-on "how a sextant works" for navigating.

The battleship Wisconsin is huge and imposing, but since we had spent a day visiting the battleship Alabama in Mobile, we didn't go through it.

Then we visited the Chrysler Art Museum, which was excellent. No sense posting pictures of art here, but they had excellent paintings, including number of paintings by the masters, a very large and interesting collection of art glass (I liked the Tiffany vases and lamps), sculptures from the antiquities through today and a really excellent American sculpture exhibit. The picture above is an 1868 sculpture in marble by James Meade entitled "The Soldier Returns Home". It is beautifully executed and poignant in the expressions of the father and daughter.

Tomorrow, we'll start up the Chesapeake Bay.

We're in Virginia!

We crossed the Currituck Sound and the ICW to Norfolk, VA today. Another day with almost no waves in a large sound, but it was quite foggy when we started out this morning. Kathy made me go slow because it scares her to rely on the radar and GPS charts and positioning when you can only see the channel markers when you are this close to them.

The fog lifted about 11:00 AM and we cruised through the Currituck Sound, followed by the ICW in a picturesque landscape of salt marshes and fir trees. Interestingly, we don't see any more liveoak trees and Spanish moss that were so common and striking just 100 miles South.

We would have made it to Norfolk by 3 hours earlier except we got caught by very poorly thought out bridge opening times, like each bridge opens only on the hour and they're only 2 miles apart, and then we had to wait 2 hours at the last bridge which they will not open from 3:30 to 5:30 PM for rush hour. Oh well, that's boating sometimes.

Norfolk is a major Navy port. They're everywhere! Some of these ships are absolutely huge. In the channel we went through, there were two aircraft carriers and many other very large Navy ships. Reid would love this! There was a fast Harbor Police boat guarding the line of floats here. They'd run up and down the float line like a hockey goalie as boats went by along the ICW past the area.

This was an extremely large supply ship or something in a dry dock and on the right is what looks to me like an old aircraft carrier that has been converted to carry containers on the decks and in the lower aircraft bays. Photographs can't convey the size of these ships well at all. Just imagine your jaw dropping....that's how big they are.

We'll stay in Norfolk tomorrow to see the sights and then begin cruising in the Chesapeake. Our marina is right on the waterfront downtown so we can walk to lots of interesting stuff, like the Chrysler art museum, the battleship USS Wisconsin. a 1730 church, Nauticus (a maritime museum) and 2 or 3 hundred restaurants.

We went up the Albemarle Sound and ICW to Coinjock, NC.

It was a beautiful flybridge day with temps in the 80s and almost no waves, which is good because the Albemarle Sound is very large and can develop big waves if the wind kicks up.

The ICW south of the Albemarle Sound was a river with the darkest "tea stained" water I have ever seen. It's not muddy at all, just tea colored from running through plants and plant material in swamps.

Coinjock, NC itself isn't much, just a few houses and two little marinas on the ICW (and the name sounds to me the description of an athletically inclined numismatist).

We visited the Hatteras Yacht factory in New Bern, NC today, and it is totally awesome! I certainly want to thank Nancy Ray and Chad Voorhees at Hatteras for arranging and providing this tour.....really great hosts. Chad is the custom yacht designer, which means that if you pay $5 mil for a boat, maybe you'd rather have the galley over here, an extra stateroom and a different kind of cabinets, or maybe a crew quarters that's out of sight for a professional crew....Oh and do you want that in cherry or mahagony? He's also very knowledgeable about much of the production process and he walked us through every step.


They start with two huge molds, one for the entire hull and one for the decks and superstructures. The hull is made in a swimming pool size mold like this where the inside of the mold is extremely finely made and smoothed because it will form the outside of the hull.
Then workers hand lay woven fiberglass mats with epoxy resin until they have built up the desired thickness in every specific part of the mold. The metal beams and hangars here are walkways for the workers to be able to reach the mold surface without stepping on it as they lay the fiberglass. Other manufactures use "chopper guns" to spray chopped fiberglass and resin with a hose, but it's not nearly as strong, so Hatteras uses this better process. They have also developed a new process that adds the resin to the fiberglass mats with vacuum infusion and they are just starting to use that also in order to improve quality.


When they extract the hull from the mold, it's a huge, gleaming white raw hull like this. It still needs lots of work before it is moved "across the street" to another building for finishing. It's very hard to get a sense of perspective for size from these pictures. These things are huge.


The top mold with the deckhouse, the decks and other structures is made the same way, only upside down in a mold. Then it is turned right side up after it is cured and out of the mold.
Then they start adding all the tubing, wiring, a pair of huge engines, interior walls, appliances, etc. A yacht is like a city....it has it's own electric power generating, storage and distribution systems, it's own water systems, sewage systems, etc., plus engines, propellers, rudders, hydraulics and navigation systems. It's staggering to see how much goes into one of these. They also install some of the larger cabinet walls and woodwork and the large items like refrigerators, stoves, generators, etc.

Then they put the top onto the hull. and it starts to look like a boat.

After the top shell is on, the interior cabinetry, wiring, air conditioning, lighting, control systems, plumbing, and hundreds of additional items are fitted in place and tested. All the things you see them working on here would have gone through Chad Voorhees' computer.
After the interior cabinetry is completed, the almost complete boat goes through the painting processes and comes out a Hatteras beauty like this 77 ft. Convertible.

Then they go into the water at the factory for final finishing and interior trim. There they are tested and run on shakedown cruises before delivery to the buyer. The factory is located on the Neuse River which we crossed on the ICW on the way to here. I understand that sometimes the shakedown cruises can include going to Cape Lookout where we were 2 nights ago.

I found it very interesting that almost everything for Hatteras boats is made right here in North Carolina, USA. Of course, they buy many of the installed items, like refrigerators, air conditioners, props, electronics, etc. but they build everything they reasonably can here and the whole process appears to be quality oriented. When the guy that runs CAD/CAM computer design for interior cabinetry will take the time to walk Hatteras owners through the factory and can tell you why Hatteras fiberglass hull process is better quality than their competitors and how their new process will improve that even more, it just shows that quality is instilled into the whole team.

They even gave us Hatteras logo shirts when we left the factory. Now I want a bigger new Hatteras, I just can't afford one. Hey Kathy..................

We cruised across parts of the Pamlico Sound and Neuse River today and are now in Belhaven, NC, which is a very small rural town on the river.

The ICW is framed with very tall pines and marsh grasses in the narrow parts, very pretty, actually. The open bays were calm today due to nice low winds recently.

There were dolphins surfing our wake again today. This one's doing a "look-see" to check us out I believe. They usually just jump, but occasionally they just surface for a second like this and then dive under again. I think it's just enough to get their eyes out of the water, but who knows? I love watching the dolphins surf and play. It seems like the dolphins in the bays surf more and even thoug we frequently see them near our boat in the ocean, they just don't usually try surfing.

Another sighting! This is the first solar powered boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean. They're going from Basel to New York and hit the continent somewhere south of Myrtle Beach (where we saw them the first time) and they're taking the ICW up to NYC. They go really slow, due to the solar power mechanics I assume, but they're obviously going to make it, and that's the important part. We passed them days ago and since then we spent an extra day seeing Beaufort, NC and an another day going out to Cape Lookout to anchor out, and now today we caught up with them again. At least it was a very bright, clear, sunny day today. I can't help but wonder if we'll see them again. We're taking another day for fun tomorrow.

Belhaven, NC may be just a teeny town, BUT it's the closest town where we can get a rental car to go visit the Hatteras boat factory tomorrow! I called Steve McPhereson at SAMs Marine, the Hatteras parts company and he gave me a contact name at the factory. Nancy Ray at Hatteras arranged a personal Hatteras boat factory tour for us tomorrow! How cool is that?

We went out into the Atlantic for a cruise from Beaufort, NC to Cape Lookout at the bottom of the Outer Banks so we could anchor in a kind of a large natural harbor formed by the cape enclosing calm waters protected from the wind and waves.

I now have a new favorite anchorage spot! This is a spectacularly beautiful spot. It's part of the National Seashore and has the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, which is a major operating navigational beacon. The cape is hook shaped, almost completely enclosing calm interior waters. There are miles of beaches both on the inside waters and the Atlantic Ocean side. Daisy loved the beaches and water too, particularly when I threw a stick in the surf on the Atlantic side for her to chase. I had to hose her off with fresh water back on the boat to get rid of all the salt and sand.

At low tide, wide expanses of beach are exposed. At high tide there's still about 20 yards of sand beach and then grassy sand dunes between the interior and the Atlantic beaches. Daisy is standing about where we anchored the dinghy when we came in at high tide around 1 PM.

Since this cape is an island, you can only get to it by boat, so there are not nearly as many shell hunters and beach walkers. In fact, this was a beautiful, warm Sunday and the beaches were practically deserted. Therefore, the shelling on these beaches is the best we have ever seen, anywhere. Kathy's sorting out some of the shells we kept. We probably kept too many again.

And just to close out a really nice day, there was an excellent sunset. Yes...I do have too many pictures of sunsets, but what makes this one special is that from our flybridge you can see the interior beach and the sun going down in the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the cape.

The Azaleas are in full bloom here in Beaufort, NC and they're everywhere.

We've moved far enough north that the Azaleas are just out in full bloom today. In Beaufort, SC, Charleston and Georgia, they were past their prime and fading a week to 10 days ago when we were there. Fortunatley, the liveoaks are also in their strange bloom, which is before they fill the air with green pollen that settles on everything and start dropping "worms" (flower stalks) all over everything, like they were when we were farther south.

Huge yacht! This 170 footer,"Four Wishes" was docked at the end of our dock yesterday and todayand it left this morning. I'm sure it cost $ tens of millions. Can't do the Great Loop Route in that one! (too tall)

OOPS! Forgot a passenger! After the big yacht left, one of the passengers came running down the dock. They had left without her! Luckily, there was a TowBoat US boat (like a car tow truck for the water) at the dock and it radioed the yacht and took her out to it. That little red boat has the passenger (in a pink T-Shirt). The yacht never stopped though because the current was behind it so she probably had to jump aboard while underway at slow speed.

It still looks great for going out to Cape Lookout tomorrow. The forecast is for sunny with temps aroung 80 and 2 to 4 ft. seas in the Atlantic tomorrow and the next day here. Of course, we won't really know until we just get out there.

We're in Beaufort, NC. "That there's pronounced Bow Fort, son...." It was a really short trip up the ICW becaue we want to stop here for a day to wait for the waves to calm down in the Atlantic so we can try going to Cape Lookout, which we may do the day after tomorrow. Check out Cape Lookout on a map. It's the very southern cape at the bottom of the Outer Banks that ring Pamlico Sound. It looks really interesting and it's a national seashore that you can only get t0 by boat. Inside the hook shaped cape, there's calm water for anchoring and you can dinghy around to see the beaches and lighthouse.

Beaufort, NC is a quaint little seacoast town, but not as little as Swansboro yesterday. We're at the town docks marina which is right in the middle of the historic downtown waterfront district.

We visited the North Carolina Maritime Museum, which is interesting now, but it has plans to become very large and much more interesting.

This is a display of a "menhadden boat", a large wooden fishing boat used locally to catch menhadden fish in the first half of the 20th century. They were over 100 ft. long with 3 large 12-man rowboats that went out to net the fish. They would find a large school of menhadden by watching for seabirds above the school and then quickly row a purse sein net around the school of fish and the big boat would come over to help contain the nets and all 4 boats would haul the nets and "bail" the fish into the big boat's hold. It would only take one good catch to fill the entire boat with fish and then they'd quickly head back to port where the fish were turned into fish oil and powdered protein for animal feed.

I liked the boatbuilding part which was not a museum, it was people building wooden boats like they used to before the days of fiberglass. This is about an 18 ft. skipjack sailboat with a small cabin. These boats were very common 100 years ago, but are almost gone today.

So here's my Great Loop Route map. The red line now includes two more states and is definitely more than half complete. We are within days of where we planned to be when I did the original cruise plan 2 years ago. What an adventure!

We're anchored in the White Oak River next to Swansboro, NC this evening.

ON the way up the ICW today from Wrightsville, we passed "Camp LeJune", which is a military amphibious assault training camp. They can come "attack" this mock shorline from the Atlantic Ocean beach, cross the ICW and "land" here. The only problem with that for boaters is that when they do those practice landings, they shut down the ICW sometimes for hours, sometimes for a day or more. I'm glad nothiung was going on there today. They have signs with flashing lights that operate if there's an exercise or "live fire" in the area.

We anchored at Swansboro because it's a quaint little town. In fact, this "main street" along the waterfront appears to be the only shopping in town, but it has a few cute art stores and knicknack stores. We responded appropriately, and bought fudge.

The other end of the street sports this "gourmet" cafe, beyond which you can see Nonchalance anchored in the river. We took the dinghy to a town "welcome dock" which is in ruins and dangerously unusable, so we docked it at a broken concrete seawall which had water just deep enough for the dinghy. So much for welcoming boaters to their town dock! However, there is a restaurant here that's written up as a good one here, which was closed when we went in, but is supposed to open up at 5 PM for dinner. We'll give it a try.

We'd love to go to Cape Lookout National Park to anchor tomorrow, but the forecast is for high wind and 3 to 5 ft seas, so we probably won't go the 9 miles in the Atlantic Ocean to get there. Maybe we'll go to Beaufort. NC and stay a couple days and then come back to Cape Lookout.

We're in North Carolina!

We cruised up the ICW in calm but cool weather today, and we're now anchored for the night at Wrightsville Beach, NC. This picture is on the dinghy ride back from town. All of those houses and condos you can see to the right of Nonchalance are actually on the Atlantic beach, or very close to it, since Wrightsville Beach is built on the barrier island and it's only 2 or 3 blocks wide. The town has a very nice free dinghy dock near the stores and beach walk, but it's a rather small beach town and it's not really open for the summer tourist season yet.

Just as we left Myrtle Beach this morning we found that a strange boat that had come in to our marina late last night and was just leaving at 7:15 AM, had just completed an Atlantic crossing as the first ever solar powered boat to cross the Atlantic! The boat is very interesting. I believe it's two 21 ft. narrow hulls made into a catamaran with a large aluminum frame that has a very large roof which is covered with solar cells. I can't imagine how long it took them or what is was like when they got into big waves, which I'm sure they did. It was a very slow moving boat when we saw them, early on a perfectly sunny day.

I don't know where they made landfall in the USA, but their goal is to go from Basel (England?) to New York, and they said they're on their way up to New York now. Maybe like other pioneer sailors, they sailed the Atlantic and the currents and winds brought them to the Southeast coast of the US first. I don't think there has been much of a flap about it yet, so maybe they're planning a media event for their New York City arrival. But you saw ut here first!!

Wrightsville Beach is an actual Atlantic beach town. We walked up to the beach from the ICW dock, which is only 3 blocks across the barrier island to the ocean side beach. It's a very nice beach, but too cool today and they don't allow dogs on the beach after April 1st (just winter dogs I guess), so we didn't walk the beach. However, I did stop to pick up one seashell to add to our collection.

I'm grilling lamb chops on the grill tonight and Kathy is making a rhubarb pie for desert. Yum..... Tomorrow, we're heading north again.