On Saturday, November 11, we sailed back to Norfolk. Larry had gotten the engine working again, and we had a very nice south-west breeze to sail back with. The sun was setting as we spotted the entrance buoys to the inlet, and we motored the long way back in the inlet in the dark. The weather forecast was for south and east winds of 20-25 knots after midnight into the next day, so we anchored in the south-east corner of Willoughby Bay to get protection from the winds forecast. We dropped anchor just before midnight, let out 90 feet of anchor chain, and battened everything down for a breezy night.

The wind, when it came up, was instead from the northwest, blowing directly across the bay, allowing the waves to build. By mid-morning it was a full gale of 35-40 knots, blowing sheets of rain across us. Our anchor was holding well, but it was a wild ride. It did not start subsiding until Monday morning, when the wind was down to about 15-20 knots, with a steel-gray sky. We decided to pull up our anchor and get going down to the boatyard.

The force of the wind and water on the anchor was hard to describe; in hindsight, we should have waited one more day for the wind to die down before moving. Using the engine to help motor up to the anchor, and our windlass, Larry tried to get the anchor up. The bow roller that guides the anchor chain started to flex as the chain came in, something we had never seen before. Finally the roller twisted into the shape pictured above. Larry also got his hand caught between the chain and the post, crushing a finger, even as careful as he could be. Things just happen very quickly when the wind is blowing. He could have lost a finger very easily. The anchor wouldn't come up, when we came to the end of the chain; it was solidly set and wouldn't budge.

At that point we were in a real predicament. The roller was compromised and could shear off at any moment; the bow of the boat was bucking like a bronco; and we knew if the roller came off, the anchor chain would start to take out the bow of the boat. We could lose the boat quite easily. We tried to hail TowBoat/US on the VHF radio, but they didn't answer. Neither did anyone else. So, we used the ham radio to contact Maritime Radio 14300 KHz, who saved the day. They contacted TowBoat/US for us and put us in a patch via the radio to them. It turns out they were on another emergency call and couldn't get to us for over 2 hours. So we braced the bow as well as we could and waited. Finally, the motion of the boat broke the anchor free, and we carefully raised it and lashed the anchor in the twisted roller.

We held our breath with every rolling wave that washed over us and motored down to Great Bridge. In the morning, the boatyard was extremely accomodating, cleaning up the diesel in our bilge, and even replacing our bow roller. We also had their machine shop put a steel plate to reinforce the bow roller.

Things could have been much worse, as we read up on bow rollers and their vulnerabilities and importance in an anchoring system. We got several good lessons in safety at very little cost.

Friday night, November 10, about 22:00 hours and still becalmed about 80 miles south-east of Hampton Roads, I noticed a vessel's lights and started tracking it. What we do is take hand-held compass bearings on vessels; if the compass bearing relative to our own course does not change, and especially if it becomes larger, we need to take action to prevent a collision. We were completely becalmed with no wind. First I tried to hail them on VHF radio, channel 16, with no answer. Then, as we became increasingly concerned, we decided to turn on the motor and get out of the way ourselves; as a sailing vessel, we do have right of way, but that is often ignored on the high seas. The engine started, then sputtered, and died. It would not restart and sounded starved of fuel. We thought we had close to a full tank.

The priority now was to draw attention to ourselves. We got out our big spotlight, shone the light on the main sail, and also pointed the beam straight out at the ship. That got their attention and they changed course. We realized we were on the south and west side of the Gulf Stream, and shipping heading south will use this corridor to get out of the Stream's pull north-east.

Now we had to figure out the engine. On taking the cover off, we immediately spotted diesel fuel - the engine pan was full, and the bilge under the engine was full of pink diesel fuel. We spotted the secondary fuel filter casing, which was just hanging on by a thread. After our engine work in Chesapeake, the mechanic had neglected to tighten up the fuel filter casing, and our tank's diesel fuel had dribbled out into the pan and overflowed into the bilge. The bilge pump had probably gone on while we were motoring out the inlet and we hadn't heard it. We had just lost over three-quarters of all the diesel fuel we brought with us. The fuel canister is pictured above, after we tightened it.

After tightening the fuel filter, we used our new sipon pump to put a jerry jug of diesel from our deck jugs into the main tank, tried to bleed the engine of air, and restart. No go that night, and after discussing our options, we decided we had to turn back. Without enough back-up diesel to use and only 80 miles out, we had lost our ability to motor for a day or two if we needed to, in a storm or calms. So we reluctantly turned our bow north west and waited for some wind.

The next morning we reported in on our ham radio to the Waterway Radio Club and talked to our friend Rick in Charleston. We had him call TowBoat/US to alert them of our condition (engine won't start and no wind), and had him call the boatyard where the work was done. As the wind filled in that day, we had a fine sail back to Norfolk, while Larry worked on the engine. After bleeding the injectors, he finally got it started. We transferred all fuel in jerry jugs on deck (about 22 gallons) into the tank for our motor in the inlet.

On Friday, November 10, our breeze died in the afternoon. We rolled up the jib, pointed our bow southeast, and tracked the swell, which was taking us very slowly in the right direction. We had an unexpected visitor; about 50 miles offshore, a red-winged blackbird came onto the boat. Here he is about mid-ships, looking at our fuel jugs and folding dinghy. We offered him a bowl of fresh water and a cracker, but he ignored us. The forecast was for the wind to fill in from the south-west on Saturday morning, so we left the motor off to conserve our fuel. We only carry about 2-3 days of fuel for motoring and need to carefully weigh when to "turn the key" and motor.

On the afternoon of Thursday, November 9, we sailed out the Hampton Roads inlet into the Atlantic Ocean, headed again towards Bermuda and the eastern Caribbean. As we motor-sailed past the US Navy base, the submarines, aircraft carriers, and battleships were bathed in the rosy glow of sunset. We had spent the night before at the Portsmouth Boating Center, stowing everything below and tightening all straps, inspecting sails and rigging. It was a fine day, with a westerly breeze, with a good forecast of a south-westerly wind the next day, after a low-pressure system had moved out to sea. We had an uneventful first night out and headed south-east.

Our friend Diana from Charleston drove up to visit us just before we left Ches- apeake, VA. We had a lovely visit, including a dinner party with steaks aboard a friend's boat. I had missed her a great deal and so much appreciated the visit. Diana and I took a walk in crisp, sunny, fall weather over to the locks park too.

The last two weeks of October were spent in a flurry of activity preparing the boat and ourselves to go offshore. One of the tasks that Larry took on was to suit up and dive on the bottom of the boat to scrape off growing weeds, barnacles, and replace zincs. The weather was chilly, in the 50s, so a hot shower here at the boatyard was a welcome end to the job.

We also had provisions to buy, last-minute purchases at West Marine and Boater's World, and everything on the boat had to be stowed and secured for any weather. The list of small tasks that needed to be done seemed enormous, but finally we got it all done.

In October, we took a short trip back to Minnesota to visit family and friends. We celebrated Debby's mom's 81st birthday. It was a wonderful time to be in Minnesota, with the leaves starting to turn color. We had every sort of weather, from temperatures in the 80s to the 20s, with a sprinkling of snow too. We headed back to Viriginia to get the boat and ourselves ready for another offshore voyage to the eastern Caribbean. We planned to start looking for a good weather window after November 1, when the hurricane season is winding down.