Mill Creek

Saturday June 15
37 47.641 N
76 19.598 W

Bit of a frustrating day but it ended well.

We had agreed to travel with a boat we had met in Hampton with an ETD of 8:00AM but for some strange reason we were a bit late getting underway. As we pulled out of the river we saw a nuclear sub making its way out from the Norfolk side with a Coast Guard escort. The rule is that you have to maintain 500 yards distance and if you get within 100 yards they willl use 'deadly force". Well, it seemed they thought we were too close and over came the Coast Guard with the guy at the front manning the 50 mil machine gun. He shouted us some instructions which we could not hear, but we just "turned away" into the shoal that borders the channel and "got out of Dodge"

It did not seem that close at the time!

We were now in shallow water (10'-15') with lots of crab pots with the crab boats servicing them. They stop and start and wander around so they are a bit hard to predict. One of them stopped right in our path, a couple of hundred yards distant. I kept on course expecting him to move on after he had done his thing at that spot. By the time I decided I might run into him I was a bit choked in by crab pots and was not able to turn starboard until we were "a little close". Well, the "crabbers" were  not at all happy with me and there ensued a stream of abuse!

On the bright side it was a superb day, low 80's and only a slight breeze. But Tide Hiker seemed unwilling or unable to "go". Our usual cruise speed is about 7.1 kts at 1650 RPM and we were barely doing 6 kts. At times we even fell back to low 5 kts. And she did not want to go straight - the auto pilot needed 8 degrees of "set" to keep her on course. I checked the tide tables and they said we were running with the flood! I was very bothered.

Please do not point that thing at me!

There was just no reasonable explanation other than we had picked up a crap pot on a stabilizer fin or the running gear. I imagined the crab pot being dragged thru the water or along the bottom and the poor crabs drowning in the flood of water. So we stopped and as we drifted I tried to probe the running gear with a boat hook. No dice. We continued on with the same symptoms.

An hour or so later my frustration got to a point where I decided to swim under the boat and look for myself. So we stopped the boat and shut down the engines and I donned the shorty and goggles and jumped in. I am not concerned about drowning but I am now concerned about the shock of the water giving me a heart attack. So I dived on each part of the boat but with no result. Dissapointed, we resumed.

Rafted Up

Amazingly, the boat was now OK! She went straight up to 7.2 kts and drove straight. This is a mystery.

Our friends were an hour ahead of us and by 4:30 PM had anchored in Mill Creek. They called on the radio and invited us to raft up and dinner. We were rafted up by 5:30 and enjoyed fun dinner.