I made it to the club in plenty of time and spent some time talking with the club members. I see how people enjoy this hobby. There are many technical aspects of amateur radio and the world-wide community you can connect with. There were about 12 people there to take different exams. They were ages 14 to 70.
I did pass my Technician test and as expected, I was not fully ready for the General license. With the Technician license I am able to start using HAM radio, but in the higher frequency bands of VHF and UHF. For the cruising off-shore boating community, you need the General license so that you are able to use the HF frequency band. The HF signals carry further (as far as around the world) compared to the HHF and UHF band that travel on about 50-60 miles. My HAM license call sign is KDOFEA.
If you are familiar at all with marine communications, there are two specific radios for boating. The first is the most common on coastal waters and lakes, the VHF radio. This radio is tuned to specific radio frequencies and are designated to only be used on the water. The second radio is the Marine SSB. It also has specific radio frequencies that can be transmitted on. It is really a specific HAM type radio that is used on a limit frequency base.
One of the areas of debate on which way to go on this trip is whether to use a Marine radio or HAM radio. The pros of using the Marine radio is there is no testing for a license. All you need to do is send in your $100 for a license, buy and set up your radio system and off you go. You will also be able to communicate with other cruisers using the Marine SSB. The down sides are the radios can be larger, less options for manufacturers, limited to marine transmissions, more expensive to buy and to use email services.
The pros of Ham radio are there are smaller radios (good for a boat my size), lower cost of radios and services. There are actually free email services on the HAM bands. Also you can talk with a world-wide community. If I would need to contact a family member or other, I have a good shot at contacting a HAM operator and having them pass on a message for me. The down side is that I needed to pass a couple of tests to qualify for my license and they do not communicate on the marine frequency bands. I am eliminating the license issue with studying and taking the tests.
After talking with a HAM operating cruiser, he indicated that there are radios that can be used on both the HAM bands and Marine bands. I will look into this also. The one thing about these radios is that you can listen in on all the frequencies, it is only the transmitting that is specific. So with that in mind, I can listen to all of the nets, Marine, Ham, Shortwave, etc., but only transmit on the radio I finally decide to go with. Decisions, Decisions.
After the testing, I needed to finish out the bike trip. The weather has heated up here in the last week. The humidity and temperature are both up. It was a hot ride back to the boat. I still don’t miss having a vehicle.
9/14 After attending church service at the local chapel in the marina, I went sailing again. I am working my way south for the next week or so. I sailed across the bay to Cambridge. I was a great sail (as always). As I was tacking down the bay, I came upon a large contingency of racers heading north. There could have been more than 100 boats flyin
g their spinnakers. They were hugging the eastern coast, so I kept tacking towards the middle of the bay to not interfere in the racing and also avoid all of the fishing boats. It is becoming high season for a lot of the local sport fishing and the bay is full of sport boats.No, Pisa has not flooded over. This is the Sharps Island Light off of the Choptank River on the eastern shore. More about this light can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharps_Island_Light. Oh the best laid plans of mice and men, and nature will always win.
I was able to sail up the Choptank River all the way to the entrance of Cambridge Creek. I motored up the creek into town and anchored right off of Snapper’s Waterfront Café as indicated in the cruising guide. I went ashore and was able to catch the late football game. There is a lot of boating history in this area as in most of the Chesapeake. After I anchored, a skipjack boat came in a tied up o
n the wall close to me. I talked with the owner. This is a 1948 boat that he has restored. These boats were used for dredging oysters. He indicated that these boats are the only sailing fleet still used for fishing in the US. There are a couple of the boats that are used for business, but most left are hobbyist and they will be racing in a couple of weeks here in Cambridge. My understanding that sailboat racing was really started but fishing boats that would challenge each other as recreation in the older days.9/15 Today I jumpe
d on the bike and made another road trip. I wasn’t expecting it to a long ride today, but I need to ask the important questions, like how far is the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge from town. It turned out to be 12 mile ride each way. The down side was it was another warm day, but the good news is that it is flat here. The refuge is also known as the Chesapeake Everglades. They had a nice visitor center there with displays of the birds and local animals. They also have an observation deck and room with another bird display and spotting scopes there to look for and at birds from the comfort of the air conditioned room. I would expect this place to be heaven for bird watchers. I took a bike ride through the car road that is place for viewing animals in that habitat.
On the way back I took a couple of pictures of some of the local history. The first was this home in the town of Church Creek. The wood work around the porch caught my eye. The other is this one room school. It was originally built in 1865 and used contin
uously until 1966. Talk about growth in an area that can support a one room school for grades 1 thru 7 for over a hundred years. Tomorrow I expect to leave Cambridge and make the short trip over to Oxford for the day.9/16 Today was one of those great sail days. I left Cambridge around 9:00am with a north wind around 10 knots. The skies were overcast and the air was cool, around 65. It reminded me of my favorite days of sailing in Colorado. Those would be the days that it just wasn’t nice enough to go boating for most people and I would have the whole lake to myself with a good breeze. It took me about two and a half hours to make to Oxford.
Oxford is a quiet little community and that is the way they want it. It has a few noteworthy accomplishments. It was found 325 years ago this weekend. They were the first community in Maryland to be recognized as a seaport. That gave them the ability to collect taxes and imports and they have the oldest running, privately owned ferry. The ferry started in 1683. Service was discontinued during the Revolutionary War and resume and operated since 1836. There are also many old homes in the town. Pictured here is the Robert Morris Inn. The original structure was built in 1710 by Robert Morris, known as “the financier of the Revolution”.9/17 I am sure it sounds like a broken record, but again I had a great sail. I had a northeast wind blowing around 5 knots when I left Oxford. I set off for Solomons Island on the western shore. The air lightened up for a while, but I am practicing “no rush”. When I came out of the Tred Avon River I had a beam reach and decided to break out the spinnaker again. I might not be racing this boat, but as they say “a sailor is always racing when there are two boats on the water”. I started to chase down the boat ahead of me. I was slowly catching him and then passed underneath of him with no problem. Then there was the next boat and the next boat after that. When I made it out the Chesapeake, the wind started to build slowly. I was able to catch a couple of nice wind shifts and only required five jibes to cover over thirty miles of sailing.
I am still learning how to sail this spinnaker with the boat and have my concerns about bringing it down by myself, along with a little assistance from the auto-pilot to steer the boat while I am on the front deck gathering in all that sail cloth. At one point I look at the speedo and it indicated I was sailing close to ten knots. I looked behind me and saw that the wind had definitely built and so were the seas. The wind was gusting to 20 knots and the seas had built to 2-3 feet. Not a real problem for this boat, but I needed to get the spinnaker down. I was able to blanket the spinnaker, take all of the pressure out of it and down it came with no problems. I plan on moving the halyard rope clutch to the mast for this purpose. The primary issue I have run into in the past is the halyard getting knotted up or jamming somehow in the clutch and then I need to run back to the cockpit and have all kinds of cloth blowing about with no control. This time though, no problem.
I made it into an anchorage in Solomons Island and I am enjoying the relative peace and quiet. It amazes me how it appears most all tourist environments in the area are pretty much shut down after Labor Day.
This weekend there will be three tall ships here on the island. One of them I saw in Cambridge, and met some of the crew, the Maryland Dove. I saw them today sailing on the Pautuxent River. Also tied up a couple yards from me is the Kalmar Nychel from Delaware.
One of my best friends from my days at Motorola will be joining me. I will blame him for giving me some of my first sailing lessons when I bought my first boat, a Merit 22, named Vivace. He sailed with me for a couple of years and we both crewed on the first boat I raced on for a year.
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this is a test
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