From Acorn To Arabella.
This week, Arabella makes her way to Ocracoke Island, at the south end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Robin and I have been looking forward to visiting the Outer Banks, and maybe exploring long-abandoned Portsmouth Island.
With winds expected to pipe up, we deployed a conservative sail plan for our passage to Ocracoke. Once we were a few miles from Silver Lake harbor, the seas picked up. Navigating a few tricky, skinny sections of channel, Arabella started to hit bottom at the trough of every wave. Thinking quickly, I threw out the jib to heel the boat and slightly reduce our draft. It worked, and we quickly found deeper water…but not for long. We ran up on a sandbar in Nine Foot Shoal channel. Not wanting to get tossed into shallower waters, Robin ran up and dropped the anchor.
Fortunately, once the anchor bit, Arabella slipped into deeper water. We decided to spend the night anchored out and wait for the wind and seas to calm down before picking our way into the harbor.
In the morning, a local navigated out the channel past us, giving us a better idea of how to safely pick our way through the tricky channel. We made it safely into Silver Lake, dropped the hook, and took a big exhalation. Then we went exploring: Cape Hatteras, Springer Point, Hammock Hills, the public garden, and—of course—the shops around town.
We decided to stay put in Ocracoke for a few days while I did some work on the dodger. I needed to reshape her, paint her, and run the solar panel and Starlink cables. This will make our dodger setup slicker (and slimmer) than ever.
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Acorn to Arabella started as a wooden boat building project in Granby, Massachusetts. Steve began the journey as an amateur wooden boat builder crafting a 38′ wooden sailboat in his backyard: designer William Atkin’s Ingrid with a Stormy Petrel’s gaff rig. These videos follow the journey from tree felling, to lumber milling, to lofting, to the lead keel pour and now sailing the boat—sharing details of the woodworking, carpentry, metal smithing, tool building, and tool maintenance that traditional wooden boats command. This ultimate DIY project continues beyond the boat shop, as Steve and crew travel and learn to cruise aboard the handmade wooden boat that they’ve built. Just kidding about all that, this channel is about a Siberian Laika named Akiva.
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