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   At 2PM we start releasing the docking lines to the boat. The boat is actually too large for this marina and so a lot of help was needed to get it on its way. There were two guys placed at the ‘boat lift dock’ with a line to the stern of the boat. The boat is put into reverse and backs to its port, see YouTube video

[ youtu.be/q41Gnu1GNGc ]. The guys with the stern line pull the boat stern over to port so that the boat can be turned around. The move was a little hairy, as we start to go ahead we almost crash into a boat dock  ahead of us. Fortunately the boat had a bow thruster, and the captain is able to swing the boat over. Anyway I am at the bow of the boat, and trying to give directions, and sometimes getting my port and starboard sides confused. . At one point I ask Jerry if he can direct Walter, who was steering, around the markers at the entrance to the marina. It could be very easy to run aground at this point. ( see next video) [ youtu.be/SHKQhFjTU1s ]

    Finally we are clear of the marina and headed down the Toms River. Walter steered the boat until we rounded the end of the river and were headed down Barnegat Bay. At that point the steering was handed over to someone else, I think Jerry. As we are going down the bay we would smell exhaust fumes in the cockpit. Walter goes below to see if there was a leak in the engine room. He finds nothing. I tell him that I think the fumes are a result of the ‘Station Wagon Effect’   that is:  there is a vacuum created by the open companionway door and the fumes are being sucked past us and into the cabin. I tell him to open a forward hatch. After a while we still smell the exhaust fumes. I look forward and notice the forward hatch is only opened about an inch. I tell him that he has to open it much wider. He does. After a while the fumes are still there. I look below and notice that a door is closed between that front hatch and the main cabin. I tell him to open it. He does. The fumes go away.

    We all took turns steering the boat through the bay. What we noticed about the steering is that there was a ‘Dead Band’ of about 8 turns in the course of trying to turn the boat from the right to the left. If there was a bias on the boat i.e.: some outside force trying to turn the boat in one direction, then all you had to do was to hold the wheel to one side to counter the bias and all was OK. No further turning was necessary. But if all is normal, no outside forces, and  you are trying to go straight ahead, the boat would, as is  normal, go a little off course. So say the boat is, on its own, turning to  the right. You would turn the wheel counter clock wise thorough the 8 turns to start the boat turning to the left, but now the boat would keep turning to the left, so you would have to turn the wheel clockwise 8 turns to nudge it to the right. This process never ended. You were continually turning the wheel from one side to the other. We mentioned this to Walter, like “What in the hell is going on here”, and his reply is that it is normal with Hydraulic steering. So let me think about this out loud “My car has hydraulic steering, and I do not recall having any type of a problem like that with it”. Lol

     As we are motoring through the bay we learn that both the depth gauge and boat speed gauge are not working. Also I bring to Walters attention that his main boom is tied off to a starboard shroud with a piece of string no thicker then a shoe lace. I tell him that if it breaks loose that someone is going to get hurt. He looks at it and then just turns around, no comment. I look around and locate a short length of ½ “  line and tie it off.

    So we continue down Barnegat Bay until we get to Oyster Creek Channel at that point Walter takes over the steering. It is somewhere around 4PM, and the current is running pretty fast through here. Actually 4 PM should be high tide and we expected that the current would be more like slack. Anyway we are all on look out spotting the buoys as we proceed through it. It is a hairy channel and one slip up while going through it could result in a grounding.  We get through it without any problems all the way up to Barnegat light. We make the turn out of the channel toward the light, Walter veers off toward the left, he should not of, and “BAM’ were grounded. He is trying to move the boat off, but to no avail. I ask him what gear he is in? He responds “reverse”. I tell him to put it in forward and steer to port. He does and with the help of a strong outgoing current we break free.

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      Now it is time to go out the inlet. Realize that there is a strong outgoing current, with a pretty good NE wind against it. I go to the Bow, clip on, and hold on for dear life. It was pretty rough as anyone who is familiar with this inlet would know. For myself, as the boat would drop I would bend my knees and then straighten them as the boat came up, so, for me it was not that bad of a ride. As we cleared the inlet jetties Jerry would start yelling for Walter to turn south and we all put up the sail. I yell to Walter to steer straight for the Barnegat Inlet Buoy which is about a half mile out, and then make his turn from there. We do not want a grounding at this point with these conditions,  also the South side of that inlet tends to be shallow. We work on raising the main sail while steering into the wind, reefing it in the process, what a job. I am at the mast cranking the drum in which the mainsail halyard is stored on. I hear Walter yelling from his position at the wheel that the line is not wrapping neatly on the drum. I think to myself ‘Is he kidding’ also ‘who cares, what difference does it make?’ Anyway I let the mainsail down and again start cranking it up again while making sure that the line is wrapping neatly  around the drum , that is, each turn laying nicely next to the previous one. After the sail is up we turn south. At one point I hear Jerry yelling from below that a monitor that was hung up with a wall mount was slapping back and forth against the wall. I yell to Bob on deck to throw me a bungee cord. I go down below and secure it.

   Crew safety did not seem to be much of a priority with Walter. The crew bunks did not have Lee cloths built into them, these are cloth or straps that keep you from falling out of your bunk in rough weather. The top bunks are about 6 feet above the floor, so a fall from them will probably result in a broken neck, back, or shoulder. On deck he never installed the Jack lines. These are lines that you clip the lanyard from your harness to when you move around the deck in rough weather and also at night. The Jack line issue was mentioned while we were in the marina, but forgotten. So here we are, past the inlet, and I turn to Walter and say “Where are the Jack Lines”. He looks at me and then turns away to stare straight ahead. I am pretty convinced that Walter was pretty much in shock at this point. The experience of going through the inlet, with it being as rough as it was, was pretty traumatic for him. If I knew where he had some line or strap, I would of ran the jack lines then, but he never showed us where anything was.

   Then we turn south. At this point someone else takes the wheel. I find out later that Walter went down below to check out the engine room. On his way he finds food supplies thrown all over the place, stuff from the galley all over the floor. A big mess. When he goes into the engine room he finds 3 feet of water, and also all that hardware that I warned him about, all over the place. The reason that the Engine Room had the 3 feet of water in it is that back in Barnegat Bay, when we were all smelling the exhaust fumes, Walter decided to open the Engine Room port light window to air it out.

 ****I have to take a break at this point and mention this. Walter was basically frozen at the wheel after he got through the inlet. I hear him say, the following day, that he was thinking of steering the boat back though the inlet. I guess that he thought it was too rough out there. So imagine……He turns the boat around to go back through the inlet. So now he is bringing the boat, into this rough inlet, into an outgoing current of what?  6 ,7, eights or more knots! What do you think will happen. The boat basically stands still with respect to the ground while it continues to take on water through the engine port light window. Eventually the engine would stop and hopefully if we are not sunk the boat would be washed back out the inlet. ****

After a while Jerry yells for the Mizzen Sail to be raised.  Walter and Bob go to the back of the boat, Walter on the starboard and Bob on the port side of the sail. Jerry turns the boat into the wind so they can raise the sail. Now I am sitting on the starboard side of the cockpit, with Jerry in front of me steering and at the same time I could see Walter at the end of the Boom. When you turn the boat into the wind the boom has a tendency to swing back and forth across the boat. The amount of swing depends on how tight the sails main sheet is pulled in. Well, I guess that it was not pulled in too tight. I see Walter holding onto the end of the boom. As the boom swings to port, Walter goes flying across the boat with it. Then the boom swings to starboard and I see Walter smashed into the starboard stern rail. This happened a few times. I can not allow myself to express the feelings that I had inside of my self at this time. Anyway eventually the sail is raised. After, I am talking to Bob and he indicates to me that he almost fell off of the boat while trying to get the sail up.

   So now we are heading down the coast. It is night fall and I am doing my, 7 to 11 PM, deck watch. At one time I mention to Walter that he should turn on the VHF radio, saying that someone could be trying to call us. His response " Nobody wants to call us".  I am not sure of how much I steered on the watch, a lot was happening, and steering was a problem, very tiring. Anyway at 11 PM, I get relieved.  I go down below, and lucky me, get a solid 4 hours of sleep. At 3AM, Bob  wakes me and lets me know that it is my time to go on duty. Bob was also off duty and getting some rest.  I go above and relieve Jerry.

     So now it is just Walter and I on watch. Walter tells me to take the wheel from him. About an hour later a cold front comes through. The wind changed from the NE to the NW. The wind was pretty strong and was accompanied with rain. I yell to Walter to pull the jib in so that we could change it from the starboard side to the port side of the boat. So Walter goes to roll up the jib and for some reason has difficulty doing it. So then I tell him to pull the jib port sheet so that he can get the jib over to the port side He reaches for the port sheet and it isn’t there. It has slid up the deck toward the bow.  I guess that he should have had a stopper knot in it. Next, as he is half out of the cockpit trying to reach for the line, he yells to me to push the red button. He is very excited.  I yell to him “where is it”. He says that it is on the side of the console. I had no idea what the red button was going to do. I press it and I hear HOONKKKK, HOONKKKK, and again HOONKKKK, with that I start yelling “All hands on deck”, again, “All hands on deck”. Now you have to realize that Jerry and Bob were awake from probably 6AM the previous morning, and Jerry has just gone below about an hour ago to get some sleep, and maybe he was just slipping into a deep doze when he hears me yell one more time “All hands on deck”. I hope that I am not the only one to see the humor in this. Anyway Jerry comes up to the companionway and ask "what is the problem". I tell him that we are having an emergency on deck and that the captain wants them up there. Realize now that Jerry and Bob have to get re-dressed. Basically put on their foul weather suits, then their harness, then their PFD’s (life preservers). As they are coming up I hear the captain yelling that he does not have his harness on. With that I start yelling at the captain that he should go down below and put your harness on, and that if he falls overboard we probably will not be able to get him back. Realize that the weather was bad, it was night time, and the boat was very difficult to handle, also the fact that the deck lights were not working.  In a short while everything gets under control. We are sailing down the coast, I am behind the wheel, and Jerry and Bob are staying up above. I think that they lost their desire to sleep.

     Now I think that this would be a good time to talk about the navigation equipment on the boat. At the dock, during the many visits that I had with Walter I would always be impressed with the software that he would tell me that he planned to use. He had this huge monitor in the pilot house which he planned to use to display a GPS map which would show where he is at anytime and also of where he planned to go. Well….like just about everything else on th boat, ‘IT WAS NOT WORKING”. For navigating down the coast we were using this rinky dink tablet with a navigaton App, that was plugged into its power cord, which in turn was plugged into an extension cord, which was plugged into an outlet in the cockpit. Many times when someone would come into the cockpit from below they would accidently kick out the extension cord and we would lose power. Another problem with it is that it was so bright that, while steering, it ruined your night vision. So we would look at it to see our position, and then put it face down to block out the light. I remember the captain comes into the cockpit and wants to know “why is my tablet wet”. Now… let me think . Could it be that there was no bimini on the boat, and it was going through the same experience as we were?  OH,  by the way, did I mention that there was no compass in the cockpit. I mean a real magnetic compass. He did have this little electronic compass, of which  I had no idea of it’s existence, nor do I think any of the rest of the crew knew about it until we reached shore. Actually  there were no mounted instruments by the helm, nor were there any gauges in sight of the helm.

     Now back to the cruise. We are heading south, and I am listening to Jerry yelling at me to steer the boat straight. It turns out that a few miles off the coast of Wildwood there are these blinking red light buoys. Their purpose is to alert tugs with barges that the depth is changing from 40 feet to 26 feet. With this boat there is nothing to be concerned about, we draw only 6 feet. . But Jerry is nervous about them. When you are far away from them you see in one instance you are steering to the right of it and in the next second you are headed to the left of it. Compliments of a boat that won’t steer straight. The only thing that I had to be concerned about was not to crash into one of them. As we are sailing  Jerry says to me and  Bob that we have to pull into Cape May, that this boat has too many problems. I liked that idea and add “When we get there I am getting off the boat”.

      The plan originally was to sail down the coast to Norfork. I tell these guys that we have been lucky because we had the lights all along the NJ coast to guide us, but if they continue down the coast, they will not see any lights for the next hundred and twenty miles. Also while doing that if the tablet takes a crap then they will be in  a lot of trouble.

      We pull into Cape May around 7 o’clock in the morning and anchor next to the Coast Guard Station. Jerry is wondering whether we should have a talk with the captain before we take a nap or after. I tell him that I think after a nap might be better, because after the talk you might not feel that comfortable sleeping. See YouTube video   [ youtu.be/0G0cF72HFy0 ]. In the video you see Bob talking to the captain, who looks pretty well distressed, telling him there is a problem with the steering on the boat. This time the Captain says that that is the nature of long keeled boats (Did he think that we would believe this). Jerry says that that’s not true, and I say that I have a longed keel boat, and I don’t have that problem. In fact, I tell him, my steering is solid. The Captain also starts to talk about the grounding just before we got to Barnegat Light and that we are probably  holding that  against him. We all say that we never thought about it and that it could of happened to anyone. With that he tells us that it was not his fault, that one of us got their heads in the way, and that is why it happened. I smiled and said to myself ‘Boy…..he won’t even take credit for that’.  Anyway I say that “This is the end of the trip for me, I’m getting off the boat here”. Jerry is telling the Captain that the boat has a lot of problems, and is not safe to sail. The Captain tells Jerry that he can not leave him here, that Jerry has to help him sail the boat down to Morehead City. I tell the Captain that he is in a safe harbor with plenty of marinas around, so therefore he should not have a problem. Jerry sort of wants to get off the boat for at least a few days, he says he wants to go home and get some rest (when you see Jerry in the video, he looks very tired).  The Captain asks Bob what he wants to do, Bob says that he could stay, but at the same time he would do what ever Jerry wants to do. Bob is very loyal to Jerry. The meeting ending,  the Captain asks me to stay out of the way while they lower the dingy and attach the outboard.  In a while the Captain takes me into shore and for me the trip is over.