Privateer heads south, again.

We had a cool day in Newport just after Labor Day and the leaves on the trees were showing the first signs of fall. So we began looking for a weather window south. This year we have a hard date in early October to be in Charlottesville for our older son’s wedding. So we skipped our fall Chesapeake cruise and ran directly from Newport to the lower Chesapeake. As I write this we are enjoying a nice sunrise in the Ware river in upper Mobjack Bay.

The trip from Newport to the lower Chesapeake, about 350 miles, was about as pleasant as could be. 48 hours with winds never above 12 knots and seas never more than a one foot chop. The weather window was perfect, but short. The boundaries of the window motivated us to depart at first light from Newport which caused us to arrive at the Chesapeake bay bridge tunnel at 3AM or so.

Our watch keeping routine for trips like this is to sleep when we are tired and take turns driving when we are awake. Lisa can sleep whenever so she goes down when she can and I wake her when I am tired. For short trips like this I have a difficult time trying to sleep on any routine so this works for us, mostly.

Knowing we were going to arrive at a rather busy shipping channel at 2AM and would benefit from two sets of eyes at that time, we tried to manage our rest periods so that we were both up at 2Am. We planned to stay up until arriving at our intended anchorage at first light around 6:30AM or so.

Our first challenge was some close quarters work with the commercial shipping transiting the tunnel choke point at the Chesapeake Bay bridge/tunnel. At one time we had three tankers, a cruise ship and a tug with barge all in the immediate area. Not a big deal, since the courses of these ships are somewhat predicable. But there are a number of adjacent channels in the area, all with their flashing red and green lighted buoys, so keeping all the targets sorted can keep a crew of two pretty busy, especially if they are a bit tired.

Once out of the shipping channels the next challenge was trying to spot the crab pots before running them over. This is pretty much impossible at night unless one turns on a search light. And once the search light comes on, any night vision is lost. Our approach was to drive with no search light until we started seeing floats go by on our beam, illuminated by the moonlight. If the pots got too numerous we intended to slow down and do the search light trick. We would have hated to have such a pleasant cruise marred in the last few hours by wrapping a pot warp. As it turned out, we saw few pots before arriving at the mouth of the Ware river and by then the sun was up enough to show us the way.

We will cruise Mobjack bay until its time to park the boat for a week and drive to Charlottesville. Lisa is in full “mother of the Groom” planning and organizing mode. I will find something to polish.

A recent upgrade to Privateer’s communications gear is making all this cruising just a little easier. A few weeks ago we installed a Starlink antenna and so far I can say the service has been great. Our system is what Starlink calls the RV system. Intended to be moved about, but not operated while on the move. More on that later. The RV system has less bandwidth priority than the home-based system, but is not restricted to a particular address. Monthly fees are a bit higher than the home system as well.

There are many forums and blog sites dedicated to Starlink and its installation and use on boats, so I wont attempt any sort of tutorial here and will just describe our installation and our specific experience.

Our antenna is mounted on our boat deck and the Starlink router is behind the bulkhead inside the flybridge void. The router picks up 120V power there. We have the Starlink ethernet adapter attached to the Starlink router and I ran Cat6 cable from there to our internet switch in the pilothouse. The switch connects multiple boat systems, including wifi access points and an appleTV. The Starlink router remains on and so inside the boat there are two wifi signals, one directly from the Starlink router and one from the boat’s LAN.

So you will ask, “how is all this working”? Overall, pretty well. Our data rates range from about 40Mbps to over 140 Mbps. Throughout the boat, the data rates from the Starlink router are higher than from the signal that passes through our LAN. I may shut down the LAN altogether since the appleTV gets its signal hard wired directly from the switch.

A couple of other minor points; ATT wifi calling works great. We made a very clear phone call from 50 miles offshore. Also, no matter where we are, the signal shows a URL based out of New York. This may play well in the Bahamas with entertainment apps that normally require location spoofing to work while travelling. Setting up a VPN on your device, like an iPad or pc, operating on Starlink works just fine, but injecting a VPN into a hard wired set-up as we have with our appleTV, is difficult.

We had good connectivity for the entire trip south, even though we were at times as much as 50 miles from shore. There may be geofencing in play but it did not apply where we were. There is talk of a recent software update from Starlink that will further restrict operation on the move. Downloading while on the move is already in violation of Starlink protocols but we may be operating below the sped limit, rumored to be 10 mph.

As of now, the Starlink contract says use is not allowed offshore, meaning more than 12 miles off any US coastline, not allowed while moving and not allowed in a foreign country for more than two consecutive months. We plan on violating all these rules with our planned six month cruise in the Bahamas so only time will tell. Meanwhile, we are enjoying our nightly fill of Netflix. So thank you Elon.