The sunrise on Wednesday, August 6 was blocked by the clouds, but had a neat golden lighting effect.
It was a mellow day. Eric and Christi took care of chores while Keith went to camp, then after camp we ran some errands to prepare for our upcoming passage. One of the errands was a trip to Trader Joe’s in Virginia Beach to stock up on passage food.
On Thursday, it was cool and windy in the morning. We needed to put in sweatshirts to go out! However, the cool didn’t last long. By late morning, it was hot and humid again.
In Deltaville, Eric had noticed that the power supply to the radios wasn’t properly secured. There was only one screw in them, and they did move around when he pushed on, which meat they’d moved in big seas.
The day that we went to the game store to play Magic the Gathering, we saw a flier for an upcoming Dungeons & Dragons one-week half-day camp at the store. Keith had gone to a D & D camp while we were in San Diego and he’d loved it. He asked if he could go to this upcoming camp, so we registered him for it. Camp started on Monday, August 4 and ran from 1000 – 1400. While Keith was gone, Eric and Christi did chores around the boat, then ran errands after we picked him up. We had dinner onboard, then went over to Blue Heeler for games in evening. The duck was performing for us while we played.
On Tuesday, the sunrise was almost apocalyptic. This was as dawn was beginning to break.
The clouds just kept getting redder and redder, and looked like this as the sun rose above the horizon line.
Sunday, August 3 — The water here in Little Creek was 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27.2 degrees celsius). When water temperatures were this warm, we generally cleaned Kosmos’s bottom once a week. However, we’d just gotten new bottom paint, and with new paint, you were supposed to wait a full two months until it was fully cured before you clean it. We found out the hard way that cleaning it early just takes the paint off and significantly shortens the life of the paint.
The two months were just about up. Kosmos’s bottom was so full of growth that she looked like she had a bushy beard. We couldn’t believe the growth was so bad on brand new paint. Generally speaking, neither Christi nor Eric were willing to do the bottom in a marina, especially this one, which had brackish water from the creek (there was a possibility of electrocution if one of the boats were leaking electricity into the water). Maybe if the water in the Chesapeake were clearer, we might have taken Kosmos to an anchorage and done her bottom ourselves, but since the water was totally murky, neither Christi nor Eric wanted to do it. So we hired a diver. He charged $150 per hour and had estimated it would take 2-hours.
He came this morning. Instead of a wetsuit hood and goggles that divers usually wear, he wore a full head mask so his entire head was covered. He had lights attached to the mask to help him see. As anticipated, he said the bottom was really bad. It took him 4.5 hours to do the whole bottom, but he kindly only charged us for 3.5. And he confirmed there was a big crab living on the bottom. We’ve seen a lot of crabs in the marina around the boats and we’d suspected for a while that the crabs were living under the boats.
Since the diver was working, we turned on the AC, which had been running 24/7 since we’d pulled into this slip. The temperatures were so pleasant today that we left the A/C off even after he’d finished.
Once he finished, we met Blue Heeler at the Trail Center in First Landing National Park, which was a large state park that encompassed the tip of Cape Henry (where the Chesapeake Bay met the Atlantic Ocean). Karen had pointed it out to us when she’d given us the tour of Virginia Beach, but up until now, it had been way too hot to go hiking in the forest. But the weather was glorious today, so it was the perfect day for a hike. We apparently weren’t the only ones with that bright idea — the lines to enter the park were quite long, especially the beach entrance. The parking fee was $10. We miraculously found a parking spot. Next to where we parked was a Chesapeake burial ground. According to the sign, in 1997, the 64 bodies had been unearthed during excavation for a bridge in the city of Chesapeake, and the bodies had been reinterred here in a traditional ceremony.
Thursday, July 31 – The last 11 days have been quiet in Norfolk.
We spent Monday the 21st doing chores and work at the boat. One of those chores was cleaning the sea strainers for the two air conditioning units that we run most frequently (pilot house and downstairs). The first strainer we pulled out had a small fish and a couple of weird little gelatinous balls. The balls didn’t just fall out when inverted, but they did come out with a little bit of shaking. Then we pulled out the second one. It was completely full of those gelatinous balls. Very few fell out when inverted and shaken; we had to use a scraper tool to get them out. And it did take a surprising amount of scraping to get them all out. We’ve never seen anything like this before.
Keith finished his science fair project, so he was now officially done with school work (though Christi still had grading to do).
On Tuesday, July 22, Eric and Keith flew to San Diego in the early afternoon. Christi spent the morning getting them ready to go. In the afternoon, she puttered around the boat. It was a particularly colorful sunset.
