January 13, 2025
0800 Popcorn and Swabs hoist Capt OhNo using ropes and wennches to the top of the mast of Pisces to measure her air draft. The air draft is the measurement between the water line and the top of the mast which is important for every boat owner to know to for passing under bridges or overhead lines. Most bridges on the ICW are at least 64’ and we were intially under the impression that our air draft was 63.5” which means that every bridge we got to, we were scared of hitting the bridge. When Capt OhNo took his measurement from the top of the mast with a few crucial pieces of equipment borrowed from S/V Angelfish, we are elated to discover our air draft is a very conservative 61.5”! To us and many others who travel the ICW, this is tons of overhead space between our boat and the underside of the bridges!
0900 Pisces crew departs on LBP for S/V Angelfish coffee date with a boat-made apple cake prepared by Popcorn. A very fun time was had by all.
1200 Popcorn and Capt OhNo run down (literally) John Rose Diving who they see driving a trailer through downtown Beaufort. They arrange to have the bottom of Pisces hulls scraped and the prop zincs replaced by John who is dressed in a heavy wetsuit with a very cool breathing rig. Scraping the bottom of the boat (the bottom = the parts of the hull that are under the water) is important because over a pretty short amount of time, barnacles and gunk will adhere to the hull and slow the boat down significantly. It is also important to make assess if there is any damage to the hull.
1230 Popcorn and Capt OhNo return by dinghy to mothership and prepare to bring Pisces from anchor back into the dock so John can do the hull cleaning. Swabs waits on shore with John and prepares to catch boat lines and secure them to the dock.
1300 - 1630 Crew busies themselves with various activities while John scrapes the bottom. Showers, working on running rigging for the boat, laying on the netting at the front of the boat. It was fun to hear John’s bubbles from his breathing apparatus and hear him scraping the barnacles and other detritus off the hulls.
1630 As nightfall approaches, the crew ask the dock master if they can “just stay tied up for the evening at no charge because John is still working and it is almost dark.”. The dockmaster replies, “If you stay, you pay.” The crew prepares the boat to leave as soon as John is finished.
1700 John finishes the bottom job and informs us that the zincs on the propeller are in such bad shape that the propellers also need to be replaced. The crew puts this on their list of “to-fix-in-the-future”, pay John and thank him for his great work, and shove off the dock to anchor in Taylor’s Creek.
We boarded Pisces The Catamaran on December 24, 2024 and pointed her south in a part shakedown, part healing and grieving trip. Notes are pulled from our handwritten, on board log book. Crew are:
Captain Clay (captain and owner of Sail & Surf Adventures, married to Ally); call sign Captain OhNo
First Mate Ally (head chef & lead investigator of all maritime mysteries, married to Clay); call sign Popcorn
Second Mate Carly (Ally’s mom, Clay’s mother-in-law, one-woman cleaning crew of Pisces); call sign Lieutenant Swabs
Dahlia (the cutest ship cat); call sign DD
*there is a very important and traumatic and magical process of getting Pisces that we are working on sharing here. We figured if we waited to start updating until we figured out those words though, we might never start updating at all. Know that there was a before and an after and this trip is part of our grieving process for our brother/son/friend Jacob.*