Friday, Sep. 19 — We again wanted to get an early start on our passage, so we got up at 0530. Much to our dismay, the mid-stateroom toilet was broken. Unfortunately, there was no time to worry about it this morning. Fortunately, we have two heads (bathrooms), so we were fine. Here was the crescent moon and a nearby planet glowing brightly pre-dawn.

Today the skies were clear, so when we pulled up anchor at 0620, there was enough light to see where we were going. That said, the anchor chain was very muddy, and we did need a flashlight in order to wash the chain. It was a glorious morning, with the sky taking on a rainbow of colors throughout the pre-dawn.

It was also a beautiful sunrise. 

Unfortunately, once we poked back out in the Chesapeake Bay, the water was a little rough. However, since it wasn’t long before we rounded the corner into the Potomac river, the rough patch didn’t last long. 

We’ve never gone up a river very far before, so this was a new adventure. At first, the Potomac was incredibly wide — it looked more like a bay than a river. But it did slowly and steadily narrow and eventually looked like a river. Even though it looked wide all along the way, the navigable channels were relatively narrow in certain spots. The river also winded a bit, so we had to frequently change course to stay in the channel. Eric had entered 129 autopilot waypoints for the almost 100-mile stretch between the mouth of the Potomac and the marina in DC.

Like yesterday, the temperatures were pleasant, the wind was light, the water was calm and the currents were mostly in our favor all day. We ran at 1850 and averaged in the high 6s/low 7s. The scenery along the shore was mostly trees and an occasional building. Here are a couple shots:

Shortly before 1400, the military called us on the radio. The solider explained that they were doing live-fire exercises in the river, so we needed to change our course to give them a wide berth. They gave us a list of buoys and told us which direction to take the buoys… basically, they wanted us to stick to the starboard shoreline. Eric reset the autopilot according to the instructions, which added just a little more distance to the course (as we were following a meandering shoreline instead of making a direct a line). It also took us closer to shallow spots than we’d have preferred.

Starting at 1400, could hear deep booms that we believe were the artillery practice. Some of them were really loud. Whatever they were shooting was probably big. Someone called on the radio and asked the military where the debris was landing and the person on duty answered that he didn’t know. 

The new course pushed us into a bazillion crab traps between buoys I and O. The buoy markers looked like discarded fountain drink cups. Being small, they were hard to see to begin with, and we were struggling to differentiate the markers from birds and debris. We were doing a lot of swerving and nearly hit one, missing it by inches.

At 1440, the military called and told us they were done for the day and we could go back to our original course. We were so relived at being able to get into deeper water and away from the crab traps. We passed a power plant not far from our intended anchorage in Goose Creek.

Goose Creek was on the other side of this bridge.

We arrived at about 1600. The first time we dropped anchor it didn’t set properly, so we had to reset. All went well the second time. Here is a map to show you where we were.

And a zoom out to see how far we’ve come/how much farther we need to go.

Looking east

Looking north

Looking south at the bridge and power plant

Once we were situated, Eric got to work on the toilet. We keep meaning to write a detailed post about the ordeal we went through when we replaced our toilets, but the very quick summary is that we had both toilets replaced in 2021 with Planus Arctic marine toilets. All has, for the most part, worked fine until recently. For the last few months, the toilet has been having intermittent issues with flushing. It would not flush, then we’d reset it and it would flush again. Eric believed the fact that it was intermittent indicated that the control box was dying, and was now completely dead.

Eric had a spare control box onboard, in a relatively easily accessed location under the sink. Eric thought the wire connectors were installed behind the toilet, so he got to work moving stuff out of the way to access them.

We’ve said this several times: it is often harder to access the item in need of repair than it is to do the repair. Since several people have told us that they don’t understand what we mean when we say this, we took photos to show what we’re talking about. On our boat, many of the access panels to service equipment are located inside closets or lockers. In order to service the item, everything must be removed from the closet/locker. Then the person doing the servicing has to squeeze into the awkward space, usually needing to do the service from a weird angle. Here is some of the stuff that came out of the closet.

Once Eric got into the panel, he was frustrated to find that wasn’t the easy access to the wiring he thought. 

There was another access panel in the closet. Since it was so easy to access right then, Eric opened it up and inspected everything inside it to make sure all was fine. All good!

He found the wire connectors that the toilet was attached to.

Switching the wires to the new control box relatively fast and easy.

But the cable ran under the floor and behind the sink. So he had to take out the drawers and all the stuff stowed under the sink in order to rethread it. It also required some boat yoga to reach it.

Eric was relieved when he tested it and the toilet worked! Woo hoo! All in all, the entire repair took an hour in a half with the majority of the time spent taking stuff out and putting it away again. 

The rest of the evening was quiet. It was a calm anchorage, which made for a pleasant evening. Here was the sunset in the west.