What Am I Doing?

Friday, July 22:  I have sailed for over thirty years.  Racing as captain, but mostly crew, in small boats in the early years -- coastal cruising, including charters, in bigger boats for the past decade.  I live on the Chesapeake Bay, just a short distance up Virginia's Rappahannock River. 

My wife and I do most of our sailing in the river and the Bay, however, last fall/winter/spring, we traveled the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway south as far as Marathon in the Florida Keys, and back, in our trusty Hunter 36, Wetted Bliss.  This trip included seven day-sails in the ocean, but never an overnight.  (If you want to know more about this trip, please check out:  http://www.sailblogs.com/member/sv_wetted_bliss/ )

I am not a blue water sailor.  Don't want to be.  Have nothing to prove.  In fact, our trip down the ICW made me appreciate even more how wonderful our Chesapeake Bay is for sailors.  I could be happy sailing the Bay and other protected waters for the rest of my sailing career.

So, why have I signed up to crew on a friend's boat (a 38-foot Prout sailing catamaran, Bottlenose) to sail directly from Hampton Roads, VA, to Block Island, RI? 

I am not quite sure. 

Maybe it is because Ted, Bottlenose's owner, is an experienced blue water sailor.  In fact, he picked up Bottlenose in England and sailed her across the Atlantic to the Chesapeake, when he first bought her.  He is very convincing that a four-day passage in the ocean is really not THAT big a deal.

He has a properly registered EPIRB, and modern cruising catamarans are pretty much unsinkable (although they said that about the Titanic, didn't they?).  We (there will be three of us, including our other crew mate, Coleman) will wear our PFDs and clip-in to the boat, while standing watch alone.

All that is fine and dandy, but the real concern I have is the weather.  I absolutely am not interested in sailing in really rough weather.  I've seen plenty of film on storms at sea, and that is definitely not my idea of fun.

Yet, as we all know, weather forecasts are not worth a whit.  They will tell you the night before what the weather is going to do the next day and... guess what?  It could be right on or the exact opposite, when you actually get out there!

All we can do is wait for a decent forecast and then have some places we can duck into, if it gets nasty.  That is the plan.

We provision tomorrow (Saturday) and leave the Rappahannock River for Hampton, VA, on Sunday.