Whitehall Marina Vibes
Plus Fastnet, Wind Farms and an Angry Octopus...
Last Sunday, Ivar and I moved Moondust from Herrington Harbor North in Deale, where she had been stored all winter, up to Whitehall Marina near Annapolis. The forecast had been for light winds from the southeast, so I had been looking forward to trying out the new used asymmetrical. Instead, we got 15-20 knot northwesterlies, gusting almost to 30. If I had known, I would have brought along the old used #3 jib, which would have been perfect. Instead, we had only the racing genoa. I didn’t want to beat the crap out of that on a delivery, so we threw a reef in the main and sailed most of the way north with mainsail alone. Best laid plans, and all that.
Whitehall Marina is tucked up in Whitehall Creek on WhiteHall Bay, which is at the northern entrance to the Severn River from the Bay proper. It is a bit of a slalom course, dodging shoals, to get there, but as long as you don’t hit a shoal mean depths are around 10 feet. We were pretty glued to the chartplotter on the way in, which happily proved accurate, but I am sure it will become familiar soon enough, like any transit from homebase. We chose Whitehall Marina because it is Annapolis-adjacent (so easy enough to get to race starts), without being Annapolis proper. That saves thousands of dollars in slip fees, which is a pretty hefty premium for being downtown. You can see Annapolis, the Naval Academy and Chesapeake Harbour, where the boat was last year, in the lower left of the image below. Chesapeake Harbour was as convenient as it gets, but alas the sweet deal I got on a slip fee last year went away this year.
Every marina has its own vibe and nuances, and you can never really know what to expect. On my first trip back to Whitehall to do some odd jobs on the boat, I realized I was looking forward to being there. Why? Because, I realized, Whitehall is an old-school, family-owned, Chesapeake Bay marina. Chesapeake Harbour was a great location, but it was also condos, and a resort-style marina, with no real charm. It had a loud, powerboat-heavy, dock bar with mediocre fried food. Whitehall is just docks, slips, friendly neighbors, and a bath-house. Nothing flashy, and all kept shipshape by John White and his family. Apparently, the birds and ospreys like it, too, as there are various devices around the docks apparently meant to discourage them.
It is also blessedly quiet. Though while I was working on the boat the peace was rudely disrupted a slightly panicked voice angrily shouting “Take up the slack! Take up the slack!” I looked up and saw a sailboat backing into a slip across the way, with a skipper who apparently has never learned that shouting doesn’t really make things happen faster (or boating any fun).
Later, as I was leaving for the day, I encountered a portly man berating a worker for not wearing a mask, and pointing out a well-placed notice at the dock entrance stating that masks must be worn. He then turned to me and, detecting a newcomer to the marina community, introduced himself. We chatted for a bit and he explained he had just retired and pointed to his 35-foot sailboat tied up in a nearby slip. Parked behind him was a gleaming superduty diesel pickup, which he said he had just purchased, in addition to a 30-foot RV. He laid out his planned summer itinerary—sailing the boat up to Boston and back, and then RVing around Maine and New England—while a woman sat silently in the pickup. It then occurred to me that he was likely the skipper who had been shouting his head off at his…wife. I said a silent prayer for her, and went on my way.
I’ve had the luck (or instinct) to mostly avoid sailing skippers who shout and get overexcited. I did sail often with a family friend who drove his crew a little crazy by responding to any report of just about any difficulty from a crew member with a simple admonition: “Try harder.” This became a kind of running joke among his family and sailing friends. But the funny thing was he was usually right that the only solution to whatever difficulty was being encountered was to…try harder. Not a bad mantra for many aspects of life.
Doublehanding 2X: The number of boats racing DH in the Rolex Fastnet Race more than doubled between 2009 and 2019, to 64 yachts. And this year it has exploded another 40 percent, to 89 entries. I’m not sure why it has taken the sailing world so long to grasp the benefits of two-handed racing (fewer crew to manage; lower costs; more challenging, etc). And maybe it took a pandemic, and the need to social bubble and distance, to tip the balance. Or the new Olympics DH class. But if you haven’t tried it yet, you are missing out. Doublehanding is double fun.
Fast Around Fastnet: Speaking of the Fastnet, an MOD70 just set a new record for sailing the Fastnet course: just over 25 hours, which is three hours faster than the previous record. I don’t really care about the record itself. But it is always interesting to go inside an intense sailing effort, and sailing speed king Paul Larsen takes us inside run:
The blast into the Scillies was fantastic. As the smallest glow of pre-dawn faintly warmed the horizon on my left, the sliver of a moon rose directly on course giving me the perfect beacon to aim at. The true wind angle opened up to around 120 degrees and PowerPlay was alive. It has these modes where once you have accelerated and managed to contain the heaves of roll and pitch, it settles into a fast and flat state where you can lean on it hard as you like.
The nose stays high as with any good horse and it just bolts off into the mid-high 30’s. The rumble you feel through the tiller goes hard. It’s as if you’re now rolling down the highway in a hard wheeled trolley as against carving through water. You need to get the centerboard height and foil pitches right but once there… it kinda looks after itself. Seeking out and setting up these fast, safe modes is what allows single handed sailors to do the incredible things they do on these boats under auto pilot.
Having the moon low on the horizon dead on course is one of the greatest luxuries in sailing. It took my mind off the cold and discomfort and made me ponder how grateful I was to be launching this beast one more time. There will be a time when even this is purely a memory and these moments are the sweet ones that will bring a smile of a life lived.
Read the whole thing on Sailing Anarchy. It’s comforting to know that even the pros get seasick.
East Coast Windmills: The Biden Administration unveiled ambitious plans to greatly expand wind farms off the Atlantic Coast. Many boaters dislike the idea of big turbines posing an eyesore and hazard offshore. But if you love the ocean, and want to help protect it (and the planet) from climate change, this is the right move. And it’s like anything else: once something new has been there a while, everyone gets used to it. Last summer, when I was on Block Island, the locals generally had positive things to say about the Block Island Wind Farm supplying a lot of their energy. And the local fishermen are loving the fact that fish are aggregating all around the structures.
Moment Of (Un)Zen: Get off my lawn, I mean beach!
Data Worth Noting: We are now officially about halfway toward doubling pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. From the Washington Post:
For the first time in recorded history, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or CO2, was measured at more than 420 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii…
…When the station began collecting CO2 measurements in the late 1950s, atmospheric CO2 concentration sat at around 315 parts per million. On Saturday, the daily average was pegged at 421.21 parts per million — the first time in human history that number has been so high. Previously, it had never exceeded 420 parts per million.
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