STORMY DELTAVILLE, VA

He Said:  Hello from ever changing Deltaville.  Here we are in Deltaville, VA.  We stopped in here for a day or 2, and we have been here 10 days.  If we had to get weathered in somewhere for this length of time this would be the last city on our list to stay this length of time.  

Some of the good news is that we arrived here safely a week ago last Sunday.  The shitty news is the sun never shined for 8 straight days.  For you AZ folks, this is something you probably have never dealt with.  The temps have been mid 60’s for a high.  The winds are blowing like crazy, and it’s kind of just flipping miserable.  We knew when we decided on this trip that we would have weeks like this.  Hopefully, as we head south the weather will warm up and clear up. 

When we have 20 plus winds it normally creates 4-6 foot waves - no thank you.  Wednesday should be 5-10 winds along with 2-3 foot waves.  This we can handle, so we plan to head out early Wednesday morning for our 50 mile trip to Norfolk.  This is where the IntraCoastal Waterway begins.  Norfolk has about 250,000 people and appears to be a pretty cool city.  We will be at the Waterside Marina.  The location is right in the middle of town, YES!!   

Back to Deltaville.  We are in a very small marina that is located about 2 to 3 miles from just about anything.  There are 3 restaurants, a 7-11, gas stations, a few little cute stores and a grocery store.  The closest laundry facility is in Glouchester, and of course we have been there.  It’s about 18 miles away.  When is the last time any of you traveled nearly 40 miles to do laundry?  It is part of the deal that we signed up for.  I almost forgot, while the clothes are washing we headed to Wal-Mart.  That is about as good as it gets.  

The owner here at the marina has been terrific and has a courtesy car which I of course kind of just took over.  How about a big blue 1978 four door Benz?  The old diesel style that we have to wait to warm up before starting.  How particular can we be?  It has worked out perfect. 



 

We discovered the Sunset Grill on both Friday and Saturday nites.  Karaoke on Friday and a live band on Saturday nite.  I would guess about 100 locals were the on Sat. nite and the 2 of us.  Here in VA you can fire up your cancer sticks as long as they have a non-smoking room attached.  I don’t need to tell you how nice we smelled after about 4 hours of hanging.  Oh well, at least we heard some good old Southern Rock.  It was a fun nite.  We hope as we travel south that we meet more people doing what we are doing and maybe a few less locals.  Nothing bad about the locals but we hope to find people to kind of travel with - sort of like we do on the HD’s. 

The really Big news is our Windlass has been repaired.  The mechanic fixed it in about 2 hours.  It was motor related, but only took some repairing.  The motor would have been about $400 bones - we dodged the bullet and of course are happy of it. We are going to have the oil changed in both diesels before we depart on Wednesday.  We went and bought our own oil at WalMart.  It saved us a fair amount of $$.  We only hold 22 quarts on each side, plus 2 filters each.  You can easily figure they aren’t exactly giving away oil changes.

Not much more happening here.  Keep your fingers crossed that we can depart and arrive in Norfolk by about 3PM the same day.  Hope all is going well. 

 

As we were getting ready to leave Deltaville, this guys decided to come along for the ride.

She Said:  It was a long trip to Deltaville, VA and as predicted the winds and seas were getting rougher as we traveled so we turned up the RPMs.  It still took over 7 hours to make the 60 mile trip.  We arrived and docked without incident.  Deltaville is on the Rappahannock River and our marina is on the first creek – very easy to get to and well protected from the weather.  Deltaville was once known as the “boat-building capitol of the world” and it’s a great place to get work done on the boat.  The windlass is finally fixed and we got the oil changed.  Other than that, there’s not much to say about Deltaville.   

This may have been the longest 10 days of my life.  We knew that the weather was going to be bad, but we had no idea just how bad it would be.  It was our first (and hopefully our last) Nor’Eastern.  We did not see the sun for 7 days.  We turned the heat on for some part of almost every day.  There was a small craft advisory for over a week.  There were gale force winds for a couple days (around 50 MPH).  It poured rain for 24 solid hours.  The rain would let up for a couple hours and start raining again.  During one of the breaks in the rain, Jack bailed out the dinghy – he took out over 40 gallons of water.  The strong winds created flooding along the waterways.  It’s not so much the rain that causes the flooding, but the winds.  The winds create a surge in the bay and the water levels raise (tidal flooding).  We were on a fixed dock and the water was so high that some of the docks were under water.  The strong wind was blowing MTB away from the dock making the “jump” from MTB to the dock really far.  And the high water level made the “jump” from the boat to the dock even farther.  We literally couldn’t get off the boat. 

When we could get off MTB, there wasn’t much going on.  Our marina is a good 1.5 miles from the main street of town.  Once on the main street, everything is spread out over about a 5 mile area.  Even if you condensed all of those 5 miles into a 3 block area there isn’t much to talk about.  It’s really a very rural area.  One day we heard a bunch of birds squawking in a nearby tree.  The next thing we hear is gunshots – some guy in his backyard apparently didn’t like the noise and was shooting at the birds.  Like I said, this place is really rural.

 The rain and winds were so strong Meant To Be sprung a leak.  We had leaks fixed in Boston, but this rain was worse than we experienced in Boston and the rain found a new place to come in.  It’s nothing to worry about, but it was a pain in the neck to keep things dry.  . 

The irony of the situation was that with all the rain, we did not have water onboard MTB (we hold 70 gallons).  When we left Solomons Island we did not fill up with water because we knew we were going to be in a slip in Deltaville (slips always have water). What we didn’t know was that the water here is very high in iron.  That meant that our water tank would turn orange if we filled our tank with their water.  The fire station in town has good water available for a donation.  We borrowed a 6 gallon container from the marina and bought a 5 gallon collapsible container.  Everyday, in the rain, we went to the fire station and filled up our containers and poured 11 gallons of water into our tank.

Jack getting water at the fire department alongside the donation box.

The marina owner, Costa, is a great guy.  He has an old 1978 Mercedes that’s available to boaters at the marina.  We’re about the only people here so we have the car pretty much to ourselves.  The car has been a godsend – I don’t know what we would have done without it.  We weren’t far from colonial Williamsburg, but with all the rain it wouldn’t have been a fun excursion.  There was a golf course nearby, but with the rain that wasn’t an option.  We did go out to dinner one night to a wine bar, Merrmoir.  It was really cute with a great view and good food.  We also traveled 40 miles round trip to do laundry in the town of Glouchester – a very cute town.  We went out for happy hour Friday night then picked up Chinese food to-go for dinner.  You know there’s not much going on when we stay in and eat Chinese on a Friday night.  There was an art fair and seafood festival on Saturday, but because of the weather about half of the vendors didn’t show up.  We did find a southern rock band at the Sunset Grill Saturday night.  You can still smoke in restaurants/bars in Virginia - establishments must have at least one area where you can’t smoke.  Sunset Grill was packed, and I think most everyone smoked.  We made it until about 11pm and then the smoke just got to be too much for us. 

Sunset from Merrmoir Restaurant and Wine Bar
 

 Back on board MTB, cabin fever was really setting in.  I don’t know why, but we had a bunch of flies on board and they were driving us crazy – especially Jack.  He was obsessed with them.  There were times when I though Jack Belt was going to become Jack Nicholson in The Shining.  Clouds, rain, wind, no sun and flies are not a good combination for Jack.  Thank goodness we saw the sun on Monday.

 We had plenty of time to do some itinerary planning.  Our rough plan is to spend the rest of October in North Carolina (after leaving Norfolk).  In November we’ll be in South Carolina and Georgia.  It should take us all of December and January to travel the Atlantic coast of Florida.  We’ve got our name on a waitlist for a slip in Marathon, FL for the month of February.  We hope to see friends along the way.