Activities in Hampton, Virginia

 We have now been in Hampton, Virginia for over a month. I like living in a marina. I enjoy the quiet weekdays and ease of getting on and off the boat. You might think we would get bored. Some times we do, but that is fine with us. We like to catch up on reading and getting some long walks in. We also have a swimming pool at this marina and we have been keeping cool by swimming many days. We don't have a car, which does limit our activities. We have some new friends that have offered to let us use theirs, so when we have the need or desire, we can make local trips to see attractions or get things done. 

I would classify our activities into three areas.  Boat work, Attractions and entertainment and logistical activities. 

One thing I like to do when I have time is to fish, or in the case here in Virginia, crab. I have been somewhat successful catching crabs with chicken gizzard on a string and scooping them with a net. We had dinner of crab one night and I made a gumbo on another. 

Crabs have to be 6 inches point to point. This guy was 7 inches. These are blue crabs.

Picking the crab is a lot of work, but they are very tasty.

I picked these three and put them in my gumbo.

In the area of boat work, we have been doing some repairs and some scheduled maintenance. We had a eye fail during our sail from Miami to West Palm Beach.

This eye failed from galvanic corrosion. The eye is made of stainless steel and it is housed in the base of the Hoyt boom which is aluminum. Add in regular douses of salt water and you have a perfect recipe for corrosion that leads to failure. I replaced it with a much larger and stronger part. 

 I have also replaced both fuel filters and the engine oil and filter. I have cleaned both sea strainers and generally gone over the entire engine. I did replace the raw water impeller. When I checked it, most of the vanes were cracked and ready to fail. I am really glad I did that. 

The other thing we did was more repair work on the canvas. When we had much of it down in Hilton Head we saw other problems. So, we ordered some zippers and replaced three of them and put in two more patches. Kim did her usual awesome job on the sewing machine. Hopefully we are now good to go for a while. The good news is that we are getting better at taking it all down and putting it back up. That may come in handy if we need to do storm prep one day. 

Just like much of the US, it has been very hot in the Chesapeake Bay this summer. We can't get really excited about sailing around the bay and anchoring out at night when the low temps are well up in the 80's. It is very hard to do when we have a slip here at our marina, that is paid for, that allows us to just turn on the AC at night and be very comfortable. I guess we are just getting soft. 

We did find one nice low wind day to take the dinghy on a little adventure. We took it out the inlet and around the corner to the beach. There was enough swell to make the landing and departure interesting, but we made it and didn't get too wet. 

No blog entry would be complete without a Kim on a beach picture

Our Dinghy on the beach with the breakwater that makes up one side the inlet behind.

Here is the inlet into our marina. You can see our friends on their Island Packet 38 coming out on the calm day.

I just liked this shot. We had the beach all to ourselves. 

 The area is filled with history. You could easily call this the cradle of European expansion (or invasion depending on your perspective) into what is now the United States. We would like to go learn more about that history while we are here. Our first stop would be Yorktown. Yorktown was the site of one of the deciding battles of the Revolutionary war. It is also an important place throughout the history of this place because of it's location high on a rocky bluff overlooking the York river. 

Yorktown is a National Monument run by the National Park Service and therefore our National Park Pass got us in for free. We started our visit with a movie at the visitor center. Nice on the hot day.

This monument was built 100 years after it was approved by congress.

Beautiful site overlooking the York River. Too far to see, but there are sailboats out in the river.

Many of the houses in the colonial town are inhabited today.

Kim enjoying some shade.

Thanks to our friend Dave, that lives on his boat behind us at the marina for letting us borrow his car for the day. After visiting Yorktown, we had the best Philly Cheesesteak I have had in a long time and then went to do some provisioning. 

We also went to check out a boatyard to see if it would work for us to leave our boat so that we could get some work done, while we travel back to Missouri. We had planned to visit two yards, one of which we had talked to, and sent requested information about our boat, but had never called me back after they said they would. We went to another yard that was recommended by the dockmaster at our marina and it just felt right. We have come to rely on our gut feelings and it ticked all the boxes. We now were ready to make future plans. 

What are those plans? You may ask...Well, I will tell you about those in my next entry. I will tell you now, it is going to get complicated.