We found the boat. We bought the boat.

Now, we had to MOVE the boat!

THURSDAY, 4/4/2019

We met Josh’s brother at his house after work to hitchhike a ride to Deltaville, VA.  FOR THE LAST TIME, thank god!  It’s not that we didn’t like Deltaville, but, the 5-hour drive to and from was pretty miserable.  We left sometime after 6pm and arrived in Deltaville around midnight.  Thankfully, the marina hadn’t moved the boat since we there the previous weekend so we didn’t have to a hide-and-go-seek in the dark again.  After getting out of the truck, we all headed straight to bed.

FRIDAY, 4/5/2019

Friday morning, we got up pretty early and did our best a preparing the boat for our first adventure.  We stowed everything that seemed like it may become a projectile while underway.  We checked the weather and charted our course.  The forecast wasn’t great…49° temperatures with 25 – 30 knots of wind out of the north with some rain…equaling a small craft advisory with the wind on our nose.  Not ideal conditions for the first voyage in a 42′ boat that we’re completely unfamiliar with, but, they someone Josh’s brother says fortune favors the bold, so, we were going.

We filled the water tanks and pulled up to the gas dock to top of the diesel.  Side note: Our diesel gauge doesn’t work, so, we figured we’d put diesel in it until it was full, completely in the dark.  Turns out, we only needed 3.7 gallons, which only cost us $8.62.  What a bargain!

We said goodbye to our new friends at Nortons, making sure to thank them very much for how kind they were to us while we were there and untied the lines at 11:35am.  So there we were…just us…and our 42′ new-to-us boat…embarking on a 85 nautical mile journey to Kent Island, MD.

We made it out of the channel and into the bay, with the wind blowing 20 knots on the nose, and headed north.  All in all, it was a pretty uneventful motor.  The conditions weren’t conducive to a couple of newbies putting sails out, so, we relied on the trusty diesel, which gave us no problems at all.  The wind made the water angry, though, and it was a turbulent ride.  Only a few items down below became projectiles, so, we did a pretty good job prepping before we left.

At around 4:30pm, the wind finally laid down and things got much more comfortable.  Our original plan was to get to the halfway mark of our journey during Friday, but, rain was in the forecast and we realized that we weren’t going to make it to the halfway mark before we lost daylight.  Since it would be our first time anchoring, we decided to change our tactic and pick an anchorage slightly further south than what we had originally planned.  We pulled up Navionics and Active Captain on our phones and found the Honga River Anchorage which we’d be able to make it to safely before it got dark.

We pulled into the anchorage around 6:30pm and set the anchor in 9 feet of water.  Since there were no other boats, we put out around 90 feet of rode.  We ate a quick dinner and realized how exhausted we were from the day’s trip.  Neither of us realized how much effort it took to just stay on our feet during the turbulent trip.

We Alexis decided to download a few free anchor alarms for her phone, just to give us a piece of mind through the night since we had never anchored before.  Suffice to say, it was a pretty irritating night.  We would not recommend the Android app “Anchor Lite” to anyone who wants to get more than 10 minutes of sleep at a time.  We set the Anchor Lite app before going to bed and were awoken, one hour later, by the alarm saying we had drug anchor.  For the first 4 hours of hourly alarms, Josh got out of bed and went to check things out.  We weren’t dragging.  We hadn’t drug.  And Anchor Lite is a lie.  Later in the night / early in the morning, we turned off Anchor Lite and turned on Navionics and Sailsafe.  Navionics charted the movement of the boat while Sailsafe maintained a geofence.  These two worked great together and we got a little bit of sleep that night.

SATURDAY, 4/6/2019

Saturday morning, we woke up early and were greeted on deck by some pretty dense fog.  It was pretty difficult to see anything in the distance.

After some coffee and course charting for the day, we picked up the anchor at 7:15am and got on our way.  We used our radar and our chartplotter to backtrack out of the foggy Honga River back into the bay.  We went slow and steady and made it back to the bay with no problems.  We turned north into the bay and had a much, MUCH calmer ride with very little wind out of the north.

Finally, at 11:30am, the fog burned off and the sun came out!  We took off our many layers and enjoyed the sun’s warmth.  Encouraged by finally beautiful weather, Josh decided to hoist the sails and do some motor sailing.  Since we were on a pretty direct mission, Alexis demanded that we continue to make significant progress (and not play around) so we motorsailed for about an hour.

As we were preparing to make our turn to come into Eastern Bay, we rolled up the sails and continued motoring.  As we entered Eastern Bay, we passed the marina that we’ve fished out of many times and started to recognize things.  It was an odd feeling knowing that we had two hours of motoring left, but could drive a car between the two locations in less than 25 minutes.  As we got closer to our final destination, we started getting the fenders and docklines ready for docking the boat.  We pulled into Lippincott Marine at 5:30pm, with friends and family waving to us and waiting for us on the dock.

Josh did a masterful job at maneuvering the 42′ boat into it’s slip inside the marina with no dramatics and we were soon tossing docklines to our helpers.  We wasted no time securing boat in the slip and then having a few celebratory cocktails!  Sleep came realllyyyy easy that night and we were pretty proud of ourselves.

SUNDAY, 4/7/2019

Sunday morning, we woke up, had some cockpit coffee and headed to our favorite local hangout for some breakfast.

Once we got back to the boat, we got to work on boat projects.  First project was installing three replacement carbon monoxide detectors, which was a pretty easy success.  Project number two was changing to name and hailing port on the stern.  Much to our surprise, the previous owner had the name and hailing port painted on the stern, which we did not anticipate.

Of course, we didn’t have anything except a scrubby pad and black streak remover at our disposal to get the old paint off, so, Josh got a work out Sunday!

Here’s the official announcement: the boat’s new name is MOXIE!  And, she hails from Marysville, PA (since we couldn’t declare the entire Perry County as our hailing port).

moxie [ mok-see ]

vigor; verve; pep; courage and aggressiveness; nerve

“That girl’s got moxie!”

After we got done changing the name and hailing port, we cleaned up the boat, packed the truck and headed home, feeling pretty damn satisfied with our first adventure.