I’m going to back track just a bit from the last post.
I had spent a couple nights in Slade Creek off the Pungo River before heading up to Havens Wharf Marina in Washington, North Carolina. There I had arranged for a dock through a connection with friends so that I could leave Mollynogger in a safe spot while I flew back to Michigan for a week.
I motored my way up the Pamlico River and just before the same water turns into the Tar River, Keith, the dockmaster and his wife, Marianne were waiting to help me tie up Mollynogger at a long face dock on the east side of the marina. Havens Wharf is a lovely little marina near the end of the Washington waterfront. In fact, three or four years ago when I was in town aboard Ruth Ann I had noticed the place as I walked around town. After tying up and introducing myself, Keith recruited me right away for Trivia Night at the Two Rivers Alehouse. We almost won it all that night and I’ve been a regular at Thursday Trivia ever since.
Keith and Marianne are friends with Gaylen and Allison who sold Mollynogger to me. They are also musicians, plus Keith is a Karaoke DJ every Friday down the road at the El Loco Social Bistro. We were hitting the Down On Main Restaurant for their Thursday Boiled Shrimp almost every week. Just before Keith and I head over to Trivia Night, Marianne goes to the Beaufort County Traditional Music Association Jam at the historic Turnage Theatre; joining us at Two Rivers afterward. I had been playing music with them and Marianne had invited me to the BCTMA jam. Luckily for me, there was a Saturday morning jam as well. I could expand my music brain and play with a bunch of fine folks on Saturdays while maintaining my trivia addiction on Thursdays.
Steve and Lisa were another couple at the marina who knew Allison and Gaylen. There were a bunch of good people there and we had all kinds of community stuff like potlucks, a pig roast on the Fourth, Tuesday night grilling at the marina pavilion, and lots of drinking. Whew. I don’t have a drinking problem other than my metabolism is so slow that I seem to gain all the weight for everyone else involved. Then again it is a great way to make close friends quickly. In fact, Spencer and Dina are down the dock on Blue Skies. One Friday over a couple beers at the pavilion in late June, Spencer told me that we were going to his house the next morning – 35 miles away – to pick up an air conditioning unit that he had in his garage. He knew I was going to need it on Mollynogger. We even stopped on the way back to get the correct vent hose and then set the whole thing up on my boat. It was 100 degrees on the Fourth of July which would have been brutal if it weren’t for that borrowed AC unit.
My niece blessed me with the nickname Bubba over twenty years ago when she was 5 or 6 years old. That eventually morphed into Bubba the Pirate. Gaylen and Allison play music as The Sail Bums. We each try to promote the other on our social media. So, they introduced me to their friends in Washington as “Bubba the Pirate.” It has been surreal, as a yankee, to hang out with a marina full of people with various Southern drawls who were all calling me “Bubba.”
Cheers to all my other Washington friends as well: Will and Norma; David and Misty; Claudio and Cindy; Corey and Rebecca and Diego; Robbie; Annie; Jerry; Ashley and Sarah at the Two Rivers Alehouse; and all the Trad Music musicians; especially Linda, the leader; and Rob, one of the “fiddle tune nerds.”
Washington is a great little town that is quite nice to vagabond cruisers. The city waterfront includes many boat slips, showers, laundry, etc. and is a couple blocks closer to downtown than Havens Wharf. There are several good restaurants, an active Arts Council, an historic downtown, and many historical houses around. I spent almost a month here with Ruth Ann mostly because boats can tie up at the waterfront 48 hours at a time for free. That does not include any hookups but water is available nearby and both Ruth Ann and Mollynogger can survive on solar panels anyway. I anchored out in what I call the “lagoon” for several days and whenever I needed groceries or anything I’d tie up on the waterfront for a couple days and run my errands.
There was a West Marine store here as well, but sadly it is closing with their current restructuring. I almost got hired there the last time I was in town, but the person who I was going to replace decided to stay. Happily, I didn’t get stuck here or I never would have gotten Mollynogger.
I’ve done a couple open mic nights here and played with marina folks on the dock or at the pavilion several times. Along with the music and the trivia, I’ve been trying to get through my project list on the boat. I wired a light in the head; cleaned and refreshed a bunch of woodwork on deck; installed a composting head, installed a new compass, fixed the compass cover on Molly’s binnacle at the helm, and much more.
The most interesting project was also a West Marine story. Molly’s anchor chain had a stretch of flaky rust and some of the links were stretched a little; that happens on older chain. That rust and stretching caused the chain to skip on the gypsy of the windlass and made raising the anchor difficult. I discovered that shipping 320 pounds of chain was quite expensive, but I could get it shipped to a West Marine store at no charge. The trouble was that the Washington store had already been scrubbed from the ship-to-store list because of the impending closure. Still shipping to the store was going to save me almost $500. The nearest store remaining open was in New Bern, about 40 miles away. For a little over a hundred dollars I rented a Uhaul truck for the day.
It was a strange day to walk over to the Carolina Avenue 76 and pick up a truck to drive. I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a land vehicle for more than four months. I grabbed a coffee and a bagel on the way out of town and trucked down to New Bern. The manager there had just transferred from another store that was closing and was a bit emotional when I asked how everyone was doing. Nevertheless, they were quite happy that I had come to pick up the barrel of chain so soon after it had arrived. Luckily, they had a little forklift to put the barrel on a pallet into my truck. I had meant to get some rope to tie the barrel down, but I just headed back right away and made it OK.
After trekking back to Washington, I set myself up in the parking lot. My new chain was a galvanized steel chain. That galvanize coating can get “sanded” off dragging it across surfaces like cement. The main part of the lot was gravel. I decided that if I carried as much chain as I could, as far as I could, the gravel would be gentler than the paved areas. I tipped the barrel over to hang it out the back of the truck to mark the chain so that I could keep track of how much I let out when anchoring. I gingerly stretched the chain out into the gravel and then looped the rest of the 200 feet of chain thirty feet at a time. I had purchased marking ribbons when I had picked up the chain. And after checking what the previous owners had done to mark the old chain, I was able to use ribbon markers which are cheaper but are really designed to be used in the braid of rope. The genius idea that the Sail Bums had used was to put a couple stitches in each ribbon to hold them on a link of chain.
Then I had to get the chain back into the barrel to get it out the dock to Molly. The dock floors are cement at Havens Wharf, so I didn’t want to drag the chain as it would scrape off my galvanizing and likely leave marks on the dock. I had rented a two wheel dolly along with the truck, so after gingerly carrying the chain back to the barrel, I rolled it down the dock. Donald from sv Destiny came along and helped me schlep the chain onto the boat. The chain was getting caught down below, so I had to pile the chain on deck before sorting that out. After investigating, Molly’s bow is just tight enough on the inside that the chain was getting caught and bunched up rather than falling freely. I will soon install a baffle with some plywood and fiberglass below the chain hawse to keep the chain moving down.
I had intended to take the old chain to a scrap yard while I had the Uhaul truck, but Keith put the word out along the waterfront. We ended up giving the chain to someone who needed it. There was really only about thirty feet out of two hundred that was significantly rusty. It felt good to help someone out rather than just scrapping the chain. So all is good in the universe.
I’m at the end of my time here in Washington. I had a couple boats at Torresen Marina in Muskegon each for a summer season, but this feels like the longest I have ever been at a dock in a marina because I’m here full time. I’m not just sailing on the weekends and random weeknights and I don’t have a job to distract me from the boat. Still, I haven’t left the dock here either. With my dinghy on the foredeck, the AC unit taking up space in the cabin, the scattering of tools, and the flow of projects, it is not so simple to take off for an afternoon. The very opposite of the summers in Muskegon where I was escaping work to jump on a boat that I kept ready for sailing.
It will be bittersweet to leave all my friends here; new friends that feel like old friends. I’ll likely be back at some point, but my plan has always been to wander. I need to get back to that for my heart to get back to where it longs to be. I will be stopping at a boatyard for a quick haulout to refresh Molly’s bottom paint and do some minor maintenance. After that we will be heading south, probably with a stop in Northern Florida before heading back to the Pendarvis Cove near Stuart and likely a jump to the Bahamas this winter. After that anything could happen.
