Our trip from Charleston, SC north to Hampton, VA was uneventful. A spot or two of heavy rain, but mostly we managed to dodge any significant storms. Winds were light, and we did motor a good bit to keep on our schedule. Schedule? What is this “schedule” thing?

Well, now that we have arrived here in Virginia, we hop on an airplane tonight and fly right back south to Fort Lauderdale where we will pick up a Hylas 54 and deliver her, with her new owners, right back here where Harmonie is staying at Bluewater Yachting Center in Hampton.

In another case of “it’s a small world” the new owner of the Hylas is a former student of mine from when I was teaching sailing full time back in California.

We did get a chance to pause during our trip up here and do some fishing. It’s always fun when I stop the boat out in the middle of the (apparently) featureless ocean, and say there are fish HERE. And then very satisfying when I drop my lure down and hook my first fish before it hits the bottom.

In this case the victim was a Lesser Amberjack. As a family, the Jacks are really tough fighting fish, and the Amberjacks are the toughest of the tough. Pound for pound these guys will tow any other fish backwards around the ocean all day and not break a sweat. This rather modest sized one took me almost 40 minutes to bring up to the side of the boat.

Unfortunately for us, we don’t find Amberjacks to be especially good table food, so this guy was sent back to the 300 foot deep wreck where he lived. I hooked several more Jacks of various species before we got moving again.

The approach to the mouth of the Chesapeake is always an interesting challenge. Up and down the bay there are large ports so the amount of commercial shipping is significant and continuous. At to that the largest US Navel Base on the East Coast in Norfolk, and it takes a lot of attention to a lot of things to stay safe and out of everybody’s way.