October 26, 2007

Big disappointment today. We’re not with Bill and Bev R., friends who were to fly in yesterday from San Diego and join us yesterday for a week of sailing the end of the Chesapeake and into the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). Bill has a pinched nerve in his neck, coupled with the threat of California brush fires roaring in canyons nearby. They received a reverse 911 call “suggesting” they evacuate. When we spoke on Tuesday they were trying to decide what to take with them – albums, policies, wills, some thought of a few prized rugs. Bill said that being outside was like standing in front of a campfire and their patio was covered with ash, and he described the mandatory evacuation line as only a good golf shot away from there house.

Last night all was well. They had evacuated for only a day, their house was spared, and they were struck by the extraordinary acts of kindness and mobilization of resources in response to people’s needs. Their church, a mile down the hill towards the ocean, had packed up sacred things and other essential goods, but it too was spared. Bill’s likely even more motivated as head of this year’s stewardship drive.

With the exception of the company of Lynn and Ken, Deltaville wasn’t much. The marina had retro loaner bicycles with fat tires, coaster breaks, and big baskets. We tooled into town with the cycling postures of Miss Gulch (who morphed into the wicked witch in Wizard of Oz). Deltaville is a long strip of boat-related businesses, gas stations, and a restaurant or two, and then it started to rain, so back to the boat and the decision to head out the next day. The forecast predicted showers and winds 15 to 20, but out of the north to northeast, with some rain and visibility of one to three miles. We would be on a broad reach, wind behind us on our stern quarter instead of beating to windward and it would put us further south in Yorktown. Besides, these conditions on the Bay when air and water are both above 70 degrees do not bring on hyperthermia as they do in Maine.

Winds turned out to be consistently 22 to 27 with gusts up to 30 and sloppy seas up to five feet. We sailed with a reefed jib only, averaged well over six knots, and discovered Journey downwind in these conditions is no fuss, no hassle as much as she is a good boat for beating to windward in heavy weather. Journey’s is as intent about her work as her helmswoman, only occasionally do they allow waves to push her beam on the wind, and both suffer the slurp of seawater, dousing the cockpit and the mate from head to tow. Gee I wish I was better at the helm so that I could help.

Arrived in Yorktown only to be turned away by the marina where we had reserved a space because their basin on the south shore of the river was rolling with swell aggravated by tidal currents. They radioed that it would be worse at night and suggested a marina on Sarah Creek, across the river and in the lee of the storm. Next day the marina folks offered to drive us to the visitor’s center for Yorktown which is a hub of trolleys and shuttle busses that made it easy to tour Yorktown and Jamestown on Friday and Saturday.

October 29, 2007

Invasive species

Dave B. had told us of conservationists’ concern about phragmites australis, a perennial, coarse wetland reed that has grown in New England for millennia, but now is forcing out indigenous plants in the tidewaters of Virginia and Maryland. It’s uncertain why. Clearly it’s a tenacious plant, sending out both seeds and tendrils. Some scientists think that there may be a new genotype, others wonder about human development activities. State conservationists plan to wipe it out by using herbicides that would allow native plants to return.

Turns out that the stories of both Jamestown and Yorktown are fundamentally about the most invasive life form on the planet. Extensive and impressive displays, recent archeology, and actors in living history museums tell in remarkable candor of the stealth settlement of Englishmen in Jamestown in 1607, where settlers were instructed to look as if they were not staying, but to stay and claim, how they manipulated and overwhelmed native Americans, how Africans were rapidly reclassified and legislated from being indentured servants to slaves as the essential machines that drove the cash crop of tobacco. The initial invaders had a high mortality rate, but the tendrils of ships kept supplying new ones until the indigenous people were overwhelmed.

One hundred and seventy four years later, only about 20 miles away, the offspring of these settlers and many others like them, now American colonists, defeated Cornwallis, ending the revolutionary war. It too is a story of invasion, this time by organized armies. The British army invading to maintain its hold, the continental army and its French allies invading the peninsula between the York and James rivers to expel them.

The acreage along the Chesapeake Bay consumed by the formalized manpower and machines of invasion dwarfs the wetlands occupied by phragmites. Journey has passed by Aberdeen Proving Ground, the Naval Academy, Patuxent River naval air station, Langley Air Force Base, and now Norfolk – Portsmouth, VA, where the whopper invasion machines of them all dwarfed her on her passage last evening as we ran up Norfolk reach to our berth at Waterside Marina at downtown Norfolk.

We seem to understand as little about why phragmites has become an invasive species as why we are. We just keep doing it, applying vast resources and technology to be the best at it in the world with so little understanding of the ecosystems – social, cultural, religious – that we invade.

We rest on this beautiful crisp cool morning at mile “0” of the Intracoastal Waterway in Norfolk, having made another “near gale” passage yesterday from York River to Norfolk, and now welcome the adventure of the twisty rivers, canals, inland seas, live oaks and sphagnum moss that lies before Journey carrying her southern invaders.