We recently went aboard America 2.0 with Captain Tom. We sailed out of Key West Bight Harbor for an evening sunset cruise. We highly recommend this trip.
Click on the photo to see the image gallery from our trip.
Splashing Our Boat with Tom Callan
Tom wants to ensure every Nordic Tug owner he encouters absolutely loves their boat.
Tom Callan is the owner-operator of Nordic Tug Yacht Service. He’s a man with a mission: to ensure that every Nordic Tug owner he encounters absolutely loves their boat. Tom makes himself available on electronic message boards, so his reach extends far beyond Connecticut, his home state. His reputation is impeccable.
That’s how Joe first met Tom—online. Joe found Tom’s knowledge of the inner workings of Nordic Tugs to be encyclopedic. Joe reached out to Tom via an old-fashioned method, the telephone, and asked him to help us commission our new boat and get her ready for cruising.
Three months later, Tom met us at the Brunswick Landing Marina Boatyard in Brunswick, Georgia, the day our boat arrived. He hopped out of his van, ready to work, sporting boat shoes and contractor’s knee pads. Tom made the two-day drive from Connecticut to help us splash our boat, a 34-foot Nordic Tug we named Blue Wander—splash, as in drop in the water for the first time.
Blue Wander crossed the country on a flatbed trailer. She arrived covered in road dust with her bow wrapped in plastic and her pilot house window wipers taped down. Blue spent her first night in Georgia propped up on jack stands waiting for high tide.
In the yard, Joe and Tom inspected her exterior, then pulled off the road-protection plastic and looked for any evidence of hull pitting from roadside gravel. She looked good! They climbed up to her aft deck using a step ladder and went aboard. I followed. Inside, the galley’s L-shaped bench seat cushions were wrapped in plastic. Maneuvering in the living quarters was challenging as the tug’s signature stack was secured to the galley floor with blue painter’s tape and a bungee cord. Stack is short for smokestack. On our Nordic Tug it’s a cosmetic touch. The pony mast and the two VHF radio antennas were secured to the stateroom mattress. Not only did Blue look hatless without her stack and mast, but she would need a few hours of prep work before she was ready to operate. On a motor vessel, the pony mast (a term for a small mast) is the perch for marine electronics. Ours provides mounting points for the anchor light, Garmin GPS antenna, Garmin radar, and satellite radio antenna.
The next morning, the boatyard crew used the hydraulic boat hoist to move Blue Wander off the jack stands and over to the boat well. The hoist is equipped with two slings for cradling a vessel as it moves from land to water. Watching the boat roll across the yard while held aloft by the slings reminded me of scenes from Toy Story—inanimate objects coming to life. The large blue metal hoist frame dwarfed the operator, and it wasn’t immediately apparent that he was using joy sticks on a small controller to move the hoist. Before gently placing her in the water, the yard crew power-washed off the cross-country road dust Blue picked up on her journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Once in the water, we thought she was ready to motor over to our assigned slip at the adjacent Brunswick Landing Marina. Well, she floated. But when Joe plugged her into shore power, we heard a series of popping sounds. Her electrical systems blew breakers in the boat and at the marina dock. We had a big problem. The circuit breakers safeguard electrical systems from power surges and, in our case, crossed wires. They serve as overcurrent protection and stop the flow of electricity. The breakers saved Blue by preventing an electrical fire.
The thought of almost losing our boat was terrifying. Without Tom’s expertise and help, Blue Wander might still be at the boatyard in Brunswick. Tom traced the electrical issues and rewired Blue’s circuits as needed. Within a few hours, she was on her way to her new home, slip O on dock four.
Tom and Joe worked tirelessly over the next two and a half days assembling the mast, stack, and antennas before testing Blue Wander’s systems. At just over five feet tall, Tom’s compact size was advantageous as he worked in Blue’s tight spaces and engine compartment. My job was to stay out of the way, refrain from my innate need to clean and run to the local West Marine store for parts. After my third visit, I introduced myself to the store manager. She taught me to always return to the boat with the broken part or empty part box so there would be no questions about my purchases. I also went to the local UPS depot to retrieve the six large boxes of goods we shipped to Georgia before we drove down. While unpacking the gear, I might have engaged in some covert dusting and mopping. The dirt-adverse part of my soul is hard to control. Joe and Tom were down in the engine compartment, so my alleged actions lacked eyewitnesses.
We rested during meal breaks, laughing as we swapped life stories. Tom’s tale about a window air conditioner prone to jumping out of an upper-story window at his home had me laughing so hard I cried. At our first meal together, Tom mentioned a recent trip with his wife to celebrate a milestone birthday. I asked Tom, “How old are you?”
“Seventy,” was his reply. “Seventy,” I repeated, my voice tinged with surprise. Tom pulled off his ball cap so I could see his iron-gray hair. I hope I’m as agile and spry as Tom when I reach his age.
When Tom left, Joe was exhausted, but Blue Wander was ready for her first cruise. Tom is at the top of Joe’s cellphone favorites list. His boating know-how is just a text away. During our first boating season, Tom called every couple of weeks to check in and see how we were doing. In our short time together, we made a lifelong friend.
Ask Capitain Chris
Captain Chris’s actions onboard Blue Wander were gentle lessons on how to live comfortably aboard a vessel.
In need of East Coast mariner knowledge, we hired Captain Chris Caldwell. He’s famous in boating circles for his YouTube channel, Ask Captain Chris. He’s the calm, reassuring voice behind the camera, imparting his boating know-how to his viewing audiences on topics ranging from docking tips to vessel maintenance. He and his wife, Alyse, teach classes at cruising conferences and out of their home in Vero Beach, Florida. As new boat owners, we needed onsite help, so Captain Chris came to us for a four-day seminar at our boat slip in Brunswick, Georgia. Captain Chris is over six feet tall, and his presence matches his encouraging voice. He tailored his material not to overload me, a landlubber trying to find her sea legs, while keeping Joe engaged and interested. His beard is sprinkled with a little more salt than what is visible on his website headshot, but he won’t be auditioning to play Santa for at least a decade or more. He opts out of cleaning his silver-framed glasses and accepts his water-spotted vision as part of the job.
On our first day of class, Captain Chris crawled over our Nordic Tug from stem to stern, checking out our safety equipment and looking over our boating systems. Captain Chris arrived with his own lifejacket – a double-duty item that also serves as a winter coat with highly visible, reflectivephotoluminescent stripes.
He started his equipment review with our life jackets, and we received an education. Only two of our six PFDs (personal flotation devices) were approved by the US Coast Guard. Two were designed for use on sailboats with a clip for a line to tether the sailor to the boat and only counted as PDFs when worn by a sailor with a tethered line. Two of our PDFs were British. We ordered those lifejackets from England during the COVID-19 supply chain shortages, so they carried markings from the International Standards Organization and would not be counted as PDFs by the USCG.
When Captain Chris pulled up all three floor panels in the pilot house to access the engine compartment, I tried to step back. But he said, “Jenny, poke your head down here and take a look.” He used a laser pen to point out and discuss what I think of as the guts of the boat: the engine, oil filter, generator, air conditioner units, water tank, battery banks, electrical lines, etc. There was so much to look at, my eyes couldn’t find a familiar place to rest and give my brain a break. I’d been trying to stay out of the way as I thought the guts of the boat belonged to Joe. Captain Chris taught me that operating our vessel is a two-person job, and I needed to expand my comfort zone to include the boat systems.
On the second day of class, we stood next to Captain Chris’ van as he pulled out broken boat parts and showed us what can happen to operating systems if you skip routine maintenance. I furiously scribbled notes as Captain Chris discussed impellers, clogged plumbing lines, and how seawater cools the engine. Joe, who worked as an auto mechanic in high school, absorbed the information like a sponge. As for me, I’m still sorting through all the new concepts.
After two days of shore school, we went out on the water. Four feet of water is what we needed to keep our boat moving and not lodge the keel, or bottom of our vessel, in the mud. I was at the helm when we motored into the Jekyll Cut during a falling tide. When the low water alarm went off, Captain Chris asked me, “Would you like Joe to take over?” It was a relief to step away from the helm and the beep, beep, beep of the low water alert. Joe, directed by Captain Chris, found deeper water and reset the low water alarm to match our keel depth. So, when the alarm beeps now we are in four feet of water.
Captain Chris took us into Jekyll Cut to teach us the importance of paying attention to tides. A cut is an engineered ditch that lacks a natural water source and fills and empties with the tide. We learned it’s a channel that should only be navigated during a rising tide. Seeing the number zero pop-up on the screen for water depth under the keel is a lesson we won’t forget.
With Captain Chris on board, we practiced anchoring the boat, using hand signals to communicate while deploying and pulling in the anchor. He also helped us work on communicating with vessels when we were underway and utilizing the water rushing by channel markers to judge current strength. As the first mate, my favorite lesson was how to double back the lines so I could cast off the dock while standing on the boat instead of the dock. Whew! I no longer worry about being left behind. On a windy day, the boat can be pushed away from the dock faster than I can step back on.
At the end of our first day on the water, we stood at Blue Wander’s bow, discussing line management and keeping a tidy walkway. One of our dock neighbors was wheeling a cart of supplies to his boat. He heard us chatting, stopped in his tracks, looked at Captain Chris, and asked, “Is your name Chris?” When Chris nodded yes, our neighbor said, “I recognize your voice from your YouTube videos.” The two men chatted amiably about our neighbor’s boat, an all-metal sailing vessel aptly named Heavy Metal, and his Bahama-bound cruising plans before Captain Chris pointed to his cart overflowing with multi-roll packs of Charmin and asked, “Do you flush that in your marine toilet?”
“Nah, we bag it. It’s the only paper my wife will use.”
I understood the decision. Living onboard is a balancing act, requiring boaters to determine which luxury items they are willing to dedicate storage space for and what provisions they can live without. I’m not a Charmin girl, but an extravagance I always find space for is a bottle of French perfume.
Captain Chris’s actions onboard Blue Wander were gentle lessons on how to live comfortably aboard a vessel. His teaching style could be summarized as “Show, don’t tell.” After eating, he’d compact his trash by crushing his beverage bottle before placing the item in the waste bin. Leading by example, Captain Chris showed us the importance of conserving resources. Finite space for trash does limit our ability to anchor out for extended periods.
If we had a question about a component on our boat and Captain Chris lacked an answer, he’d call the manufacturer and find a solution – an invaluable move we copied two months later when electrical gremlins invaded our systems. He demonstrated how and where to seek help, and he gave us the confidence to set out on our first cruise. Without Captain Chris’ lessons, we’d likely be stuck in the mud or be a tow boat service’s frequent customer. We are grateful for his time and his talents. If this was still the era of speed-dial phones, he’d been in our number one slot. Throughout our first cruising season, we reached out to Captain Chris again and again for advice on trip planning and maintenance issues. We hope to take another series of classes offered by Captain Chris and his wife, Alyse, at a 2024 Trawlerfest. Until then, thank you, Captain Chris, for picking up the phone every time we call.
True North Attitude #4
Our Boating Adventures in 2021 - 2023
Helm Duty
I’m a slacker. I’ve reached a point in my life when I’ll happily do nothing for hours on end. My favorite type of nothing is to settle into a corner of the couch and read a book from cover to cover. An interest that allows me to travel through space and time without moving.
I was hoping boating would be a sideline activity for me. I could be present and supportive without participating. That dream did not come true. Much to my surprise, operating our 34-foot Nordic Tug, Blue Wander, is a two-person job.
Blue motors along at eight to ten miles per hour, it’s a slow but steady cruising rate. A 50-mile journey is an all-day activity for us. The distance a car can travel in about an hour takes us from sunrise to midafternoon. It’s too long for one person to monitor the helm station screens while scanning the waterway for obstructions, boat traffic, and crab pot buoys. Inputs that prompt the captain to make minor adjustments to the vessel’s course and speed.
This spring, I decided to accept the helm duty challenge and now volunteer to run the boat about half the time we’re underway. We operate Blue in one to two-hour shifts, giving us time to relax and rest our eyes.
We run the boat from the pilot house, located in the center of our vessel. It’s an elevated space with a panoramic view of the waterway. An aisleway separates two cushioned bench seats. I once envisioned placing a coordinating set of nautical-themed pillows on each bench to give the space a living room feel, but it’s a workplace, so my husband declared it a pillow-free zone. The benches are home to our self-inflating life jackets and binoculars. I use my life jacket to build a nest for my cruising day essentials, including my cell phone, earbuds, journal, pen case, bird book, and water tumbler. I’m not known for my ability to travel light.
The helm station is on the starboard side of the pilot house. At first glance, the helm’s instrument panel looks like a dizzying array of dials, digital readouts, and moving maps. There are so many colors and numbers that my brain screeches, “Noooo!” when I’m standing there. With my husband’s help, I’ve learned to quiet my internal chatterbox and scan the instruments. Allowing me to quickly take in and evaluate one piece of data at a time, then look up and out the windows.
The upper half of the helm instrument panel is dedicated to navigation and contains: two Garmin displays, the electric steering display, the autopilot, and the compass. It’s also home to our most valuable and dependable navigation aid, gifted to us by the harbor host in Southport, North Carolina. It’s a wooden popsicle stick colored green on one end and red on the other. The harbor host’s wife and grandchildren make them, and he hands them out to every cruiser that stops at the marina down the street from his house. The boat captain flips the stick when a vessel enters or leaves a port. It’s a low-tech aid designed to remind recreational captains to navigate with the red channel markers on the right when returning from sea and, conversely, to keep green buoys on the right when leaving port. Other rules apply, so please don’t flip the stick without consulting the captain.
The helm panel also houses the fuel gauge, engine instrumentation screen, throttle and thruster controls, and a panel with eleven toggle switches. Each toggle switch turns a different system on or off. The last three switches are variable speed controls the three front-facing window wipers. At first, I thought the wiper blades were an unnecessary device, as I wondered, Who wants to boat in rainy weather? However, clearing raindrops is not the primary function of the wipers. It’s a lesson that’s reiterated each time we cross a sound, aka a large body of water connected to the ocean. The wipers are needed in rough weather when waves crash over the front of the bow and obscure our view.
There is an upper helm station, also known as the canoe. But it’s not too crowded up there. The eight-foot-long panel houses two VHF radios, a satellite radio for our listening pleasure, solar panel controls, the bilge alarm, and the engine compartment’s fire suppression system. I stand on my tiptoes to operate the radios. At five feet four inches, I fall into the vertically challenged demographic. Luckily, the VHF radios are equipped with programmable presets. We keep the port side radio tuned to Channel 16 to listen to United States Coast Guard (USCG) broadcasts and initiate communication with other vessels. In busy port areas, the starboard side VHF radio is tuned to Channel 13 to monitor commercial vessel traffic or Channel 9 if we need to request an opening from a bridge tender. Switching either radio between channels 9, 13, and 16 can be done with the push of a button. If I’m at the helm, I need to take extra care when using the radios. More than once, I’ve reached up to change the channel and inadvertently bumped the throttle forward while balanced on my toes. It’s an accidental maneuver that can knock the first mate off balance.
With all these dials and instruments, it was surprising to learn that once the boat’s course was set with the autopilot, running the vessel down a waterway was hands-free for the most part. When we took up boating, I pictured myself standing at the helm station with hands locked at 10 and 2 on the ship’s wooden wheel steering wheel, (aka the helm). But that’s not necessary.
The helm controls the rudder. You can hand steer with the helm wheel, which controls Blue’s turn rate. For example, turning the wooden wheel one complete rotation to the right quickly spins Blue in a circle. I prefer to use the electronic steering control buttons. One push of a steering control button changes Blue’s course by one degree. I’m prone to using a series of single degree clicks, one degree at a time, if I want to change the course by a few degrees. If I pilot Blue around a bend in a river, I’ll hand steer or hold the appropriate port or starboard steering button down for a half-second to activate the 10-degree turn option.
If there’s traffic on the waterway, and I’m the designated boat pilot (aka acting captain), I prefer to stand barefoot in front of the helm station. With my shoes off, I can feel the water moving under the boat. If we’re fighting the current, my soles can detect the feel of the boat pushing against the water. If the wind shifts, my feet will react to maintain my balance. So, my toes are my early warning system.
As the acting captain, I spend most of my time at the helm seated, scanning the instrument panel, looking out the forward windows, and then grabbing the back of the bench seat to hold myself in place as I look out the rear window. My instrument scan starts with the Garmin displays. Half of the left Garmin’s screen is usually set to the radar function. Landforms show up as bright red while moving vessels are green. The top corner of the left Garmin is the waterway’s depth profile. At a glance, I can tell if the water is trending deeper or shallower. Below the depth profile is the waterway course. Blueappears as a boat icon following or deviating from the set course. The far right of the first Garmin is a series of data readouts, including the water depth below the keel in feet and boat speed in miles per hour. The right Garmin screen is dedicated to our course, although the far right of that screen also includes a series of data readouts leading with the water depth and the boat speed. I also take a quick peek at the engine control panel to confirm both the engine’s oil pressure and temperature are in the operating range.
Running the boat is hours filled with instrument scans, where I check and adjust Blue’s course and speed, monitor the water depth as if my life depended on it because it does, and scan the horizon in all directions for traffic and hazards. When it’s my turn to stand down, my eyes hurt, and my vision is a little blurry, but my working shift isn’t over. As first mate, I pick up my binoculars and start sweeping the horizon, looking for crab trap buoys. I call them out to my husband as if the bow was a clock pointed at noon. For example, “There’s a line of four white buoys starting at 2 o’clock. Four hundred yards and closing.”
I’m now comfortable running the Blue when the weather is calm. Joe is our designated captain. Next season, I hope to work on my docking, route planning, and marina selection skills. We’re cruising through retirement here along the Eastern seaboard and loving it, but I must admit, it’s a working type of fun.
What About Bob?
If you put two mariners traveling the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) together, one of them will bring up Bob. As in, “Do you know about Bob?” Or “Are you following the Bob track?” And “Have you joined the Bob423 Facebook Group?” Bob has made it his mission to find the deepest water the ICW has to offer along the Eastern Seaboard. The ICW is a series of interconnected rivers, cuts, sounds, and bays from Norfolk, Virginia, to Brownsville, Texas. Bob’s track starts at Mile Marker Zero in Norfolk at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and ends around Mile Marker 1243 in Key West, Florida. Every year, Bob motors up the ICW in his sailboat equipped with sonar that maps the waterway’s limited depth. Cruisers can upload his track to their onboard chart plotters, follow his ICW route, and attempt to miss the shoals — spots where the moving waters drop sand and silt on the bottom of the channel, creating potential obstructions for boaters. Experienced East Coast mariners tell us newbie cruisers, “It’s not if you run aground, but when you run aground. We all do.” Not a comforting thought.
Joe and I both have a deep fondness in our hearts for Bob423 or, dare I say, love? We haven’t met Bob, but I consider him a friend. He wrote the handbook for boaters on the ICW and updates the book annually: ICW Cruising Guide. His social media handle is well known. Recent additions of the guide list the author as Bob423. We’ve been followed his track through difficult spots since we started cruising the ICW. So, when Joe picked a marina stop off the Bob track, I said, “If Bob didn’t stop there, are you sure we should?” Joe’s response was nonverbal, but I’m pretty sure his shoulder shrug, followed by a deep exhalation, translated to: You’ve got to be kidding me!!
I wonder if I’ve become overly reliant on Bob’s track. There’s a connected network of waterways to explore if I can convince myself that we can leave the safety of Bob’s route. Joe’s ready. I need to learn to be more confident in my ability to read the instruments, the charts, and what I see on the water.
We spent the first night of our Fall 2023 cruising season in North Carolina at the Coinjock Marina and Restaurant. The marina is a long wooden dock, and the restaurant encourages boaters to call before arriving to reserve an order of their prime rib dinner. We opted to order off the menu while on site. On waterways, both of us love to order the “catch of the day.” Blue Wander, our small tugboat, was sandwiched between two large yachts on the dock. Both vessels departed before daylight. The predawn thrum of their diesel engines entered my dreams. Yachts with professional crews are not sight-seeing but hurrying to a destination.
That afternoon, we planned to leave the Bob track. Joe reminded me, “That’s how we boated in Lake Michigan. We picked a port and cruised toward our destination.” When we shoved off that morning, the dock was quiet. The air felt damp, but it was warm in the sunshine. For two hours, we motored south in the greenish-brown waters of the North River. Houses were few and far between on the grassy banks of this wide waterway. I watched an osprey swoop down to the river and spear a fish with its talons, then fly up to the bare branch of a tree. The brown and white raptor used its curved beak to tear bites off its catch. There was a ferocity to Osprey’s eating style that made me think he was trying to pick his talons clean.
We left the Bob track halfway across the Albemarle Sound. The water depth was 12-15 feet, which felt like an abundance of riches as our boat draws about four feet, and at low tide, some sections of the ICW are impassable. On this stretch of the greenish-brown waterway, it was just us and the crab trap buoys. The breeze picked up, and the buoys winked in and out of the wave froth, making them difficult to spot. It was like running an obstacle course. The placement of the buoys has always felt like a code I could not crack. Late in the afternoon, we saw a boat traveling toward us on a zigzag course. This was unusual, as vessels tend to motor along straight lines. Joe asked, “What’s that boat up to?” I peered at the craft through my binoculars and saw a fisherman in yellow coveralls pushing crab traps off the back of the boat. “It’s a fishing boat, dropping crab traps.” Working boats have the right of way, so Joe changed course to steer clear of the vessel.
Our destination that afternoon was the Albemarle Plantation Marina. Joe picked this out-of-the-way stop because the community has an outdoor Olympic-size pool, and he loves to swim. As we came into the dock, the wind sang through the sailboat masts. It’s a familiar moaning sound that I think of as the ghost chorus. The dock master welcomed us, helped us tie up our boat, and gave us passes for the pool and keys to a golf cart. Occasionally, a marina will have a loaner car, but unfettered access to a golf cart was a first.
Joe loved swimming laps in the outdoor pool, but I’ll remember this marina as a good sleeping spot. It was beyond quiet at night – silent, as not a sound emanated from the local community. Gentle waves moved the boat as if we were sleeping in a cradle, rocked by an unseen hand.
