Heading south....

I had intended to post occasionally as we make our way south, but two things have prevented that... one, the wireless connections at some of the marinas we've stayed at have been less than spectacular, and two it has been so cold that I could hardly bring myself to type anything. Seriously, the southeast has been going through record low temperatures for this time of year. We've had several nights where the low was in the mid 20's. Mid 20's on a boat with no heater. Cold front after cold front. Brrr.

But, despite the cold, we've been having a great time. We've managed to go offshore a couple of times, and had some great sailing both during the day and some night sailing as well.

So, instead of a few posts here and there, I'm going to put up a bunch of photos with captions and let those tell the story thus far. We are now in Daytona Beach, Florida, and while it isn't exactly balmy here, at least I can sit here in the sun and upload some pictures without going hypothermic.



Typical Virgina ICW. With nasty stump sticking out of the water waiting to tear a gash in the side of a boat. Which, unfortunately, we saw had happened to a very nice catamaran.





Aforementioned stump.





The cold begins.





Our eyes and ears were treated to a squadron of Navy F/A-18's landing right above our heads. Very cool to see, but my ears are still ringing.





F/A-18 and Mayari's radar.





Another F/A-18 shot.





Me trying to figure out where we are.





Fog starting to roll in. That was very eery, but very cool evening.





Fog. This after it had lifted a bit. Photo by Colm O'Reilly. The man has talent.





More fog. We eventually decided it wasn't going to lift, so we departed. And it did not lift that entire day.





Sailing in the fog. We sailed across Pamlico Sound in dense fog. So we aren't all that bright, but it was a great sail. With the help of the radar, we narrowly avoided running into any boats, including a 500 foot long barge.





Camp Lejeune (U.S. Marines) straddles the ICW and sometimes they decide to shoot things. Fortunately, they didn't choose the day we passed through.





Colm laughs at the cold.





The Waccamaw River in South Carolina was my favorite section of the ICW. It was beautiful, though this photo doesn't do it justice.





Colm still laughs at the cold. I think his face is frozen in that expression.





Me. Cold.





A huge container ship running us down at about 35 knots just after we entered the Charleston ship channel. It is a pretty narrow channel and that ship got pretty close.





More of the container ship.





More of the container ship.





More of the container ship.






Mayari flying wing on wing off of the Georgia coast.




I'll post some more after I download them.

From Hampton

Quick update.... Mayari departed Annapolis on Saturday the 8th, loaded with food and crew, and we headed south. I'm writing this from Hampton, Virginia, which is just northwest of Norfolk. We have now sailed most of the length of the Chesapeake, and will enter the intra-coastal waterway at Norfolk. The weather has been decent but cold. Saturday we were forced to motor much of the way due to the wind coming straight out of the south, but yesterday and today we were able to sail. Mayari and crew are both doing great thus far.

Mayari

Say hello to Mayari. She's a 39 foot sloop sailing vessel, and I bought her about 2 weeks ago. Since that time, I have working hard getting her ready to head south. I didn't find a boat I wanted in Texas or Florida, but stumbled upon this boat in Annapolis MD. I looked at a lot of boats, but this was the one I kept going back to. She's not new, and needs some work here and there, but I've had fun doing the work thus far. So enough blabbing, here are some pictures (I don't have pictures of here sailing yet, but once I get down to where the water is blue I will get some shots and post them.):

Stern view

From across the dock

Straight on

During haul out for the survey.

Me, cleaning really nasty stuff.

P.S. The name Mayari is in honor of the Tagalog Goddess of the Moon. Here's Wikipedia's account of Mayari: Wikipedia Mayari

Sandbar Shark Bump

Sharks don't seem to like bright lights being shined at them. My friend Steve found that out for certain on a dive on Stetson Bank recently.

We'd been seeing several Sandbar Sharks during the days diving at Stetson. Sandbars are not shy sharks, they seem to come in closer than many other sharks, and don't seem to be as scared of bubbles being exhaled. I got some pretty nice shots, a few of which I will post next, but my shots were only during the day. We got to do a night dive, and Steve took his video rig including his ET-phone-home-brightness video lights.


Steve wasn't hurt, and said that after the bump, the shark just swam away. He was a little shaken up but not much, considering. He was reluctant to tell me about it since I had given him a hard time about being worried about Lemon Sharks in Florida. But when I saw the video, I knew I couldn't give him a hard time anymore. I asked him if I could share it on this blog, and he graciously agreed. I think it's just about the coolest 5 second video clip ever.

Road Post

Can I post to blogger with my iPhone? If you are reading this, then the answer seems to be yes.

I should be out in the gulf right now, but Gustav, the hurricane, had something to say about that. That is especially unfortunate, as the Flower Gardens, especially Stetson Bank, have been spectacular over the past couple of weeks. Sharks. Mantas. Turtles. Spotted Eagle Rays. Coral spawning.

Damn Gustav.

Moving this blog

After being hacked a second time, I decided that I'd had about enough of managing my own blog software, and so decided to move the blog off of my own site and onto a service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com. I looked at both, and found that while it would be easier to migrate to Wordpress.com, I like Blogspot better. Plus, I don't exactly trust Wordpress given that security holes they had. They did fix them, but there could definitely be more to come. Not that Blogger does't have security holes as well, but they seem to be paying attention and fixing them pretty quickly. And, I like the options that Blogspot has for video, since I have some video clips that I want to be sharing soon.

I don't yet have it looking as spiffy as I want it to, but if more hurricanes show up, and it looks like they will, I should have some more time to work on it.

The official http address for the new blog is http://blog.chrisparsons.net. I'll redirect the old link to that address, so the old one should still work. If you have subscribed to the old blog, you'll need to re-do your subscription on the new one.

BTW, I used a java tool (on my mac) to parse an export of my Wordpress blog and make the equivalent posts on Blogger. Pretty cool, though I haven't yet been able to move the comments from the old blog to the new... I'll try to do that if I can. The tool (written by a guy in China) is here

Thanks for your patience... and check back soon for some video posts.