Tues, June 5, 2012
    I woke up to strong northerly winds. Working on my strategy for heading to Norfolk, my feelings at present is that I will head out tonight, before sunset. According to Wx weather we will have NE winds 15 to 20 knots part of the day then changing to the East, and also diminishing. This also should give me a pretty good push going South. During the day I dinghyed over to a fisherman's pier, filled up a 5 gallon Gerry can with diesel fuel, and also grabbed a bite to eat. At a fishing supply store I enquired as to the next best inlet to pull into south of here. The reply was Virginia Beach. Think of that for the next 80 or more miles there are no safe inlets to pull into. There are inlets, but you take your life in your hands trying to pull into them.
    I go out the OC inlet at 6 PM. Because of the strong NE winds there were breakers, and white caps everywhere. In order to go out in the safest way, it is advised to head for the OC #1 bouy, about a mile out.
  This is positioned  so that you stay in the deepest waters while getting away from the inlet. While heading over to this buoy, because of the strong NE winds, the boat would be climbing a hill and then falling into a valley. this went on for about 15 or 20 minutes. Eventually I turned South and the ride started to smooth out, with swells coming at my port side. I adjusted my sails and psyched myself into the long trip ahead. As night was starting to fall I decided to turn on my navigation lights. I turned them on, went to the front of the boat to check them out, and they were not working. My stern light was also out. Great. Down below I have this portable red/green dinghy, battery operated, running light. I grabbed it and tie wrapped it to the front of the boat. for an all around stern light I used a bright solar lawn light. All set, now with the auto pilot doing the steering I can just lay back and enjoy the ride. Winds were dropping to around 6 knots. I am using my engine and my mail sail and sta-sail.
   I have often talked about when I get tired at night I would take a 20 minute power nap. Just enough time to get rid of some of that sleepiness without putting you into a deep sleep. So before I left on the trip I stopped at Target and picked up a kitchen timer. This one looked nice, larger then the usual plastic ones and it took an AAA battery. Nice, easy to change. I even tried it out in the store. I broke the packaging and set it for 2 minutes. It worked great. So now on my trip I am feeling sleepy so I set the timer for 20 minutes, and go off to sleep. after 5 minutes this thing lets off two loud beeps and wakes me up. I go what the heck, and I go back to sleep. 5 minutes after that another 2 loud beeps. This continued until the 20 minutes expired, and then it did its alarm. Now realize, this was not relaxing, it was more like Chinese water drop, on the forehead, torture. I gave up trying to get any further rest until the morning when visibility was good and I could be seen by other boats. At that point I used the timer on my IPhone.