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ortola. That’s where the crew of the sailboat “Sunrise” had planned to be by now. That was the idea when the 38-foot Halbert-Rassy left Norfolk on November 8 as part of the recent Caribbean 1500 rally.

Instead, Bill Calfee, his wife Lara and their 22-month-old daughter Isobel are in Oriental and the boat is undergoing some repairs to the hull and rudder.

The keel of “Sunrise”, which bounced again and again in the Oregon Inlet.

They came to Oriental by way of — and because of — the Oregon Inlet. This is the point in story at which more than a few people have said, “The Oregon Inlet? Why would someone come in thru…” That passage, at the top end of the Pamlico Sound has a well-earned reputation for being treacherous.

At the time, for the crew of Sunrise, it seemed to be a better alternative than what the Atlantic was offering.

Bill, Lara and Isobel Calfee in September, two months before their detour to Oriental.

On the Sunrise’s first day out in the Caribbean 1500, the boat and crew were getting knocked around by 30 knot winds right on the stern. That made for a lot of swells and, in general, uncomfortable sailing.

The family had done a few overnights in the previous year of living on the boat, but this was to be Lara’s first long offshore passage. Ditto for Isobel, not quite 2. There were also two crew members. After 24 hours of running downwind, and wind chop, Bill says that most of the adults were exhausted. On top of that, “the baby was sick.”

“Sunrise“in the yard at SailCraft.

So, to the Oregon Inlet it was. “Normally, when we do something like that,” Bill says “we try to get some local knowledge.” He says he knew the inlet was notorious and before heading in, he wanted to get more info than what the chart showed. He got on the radio “over and over,” but he says no one responded.

Sunrise and crew entered the channel of Oregon Inlet and learned quickly that it had shoaled. The keel hit. And then hit again. And again. “We bounced repeatedly off the bottom.”

Bill Calfee on the deck of “Sunrise” in the more stable surroundings of the SailCraft boat yard.

Bill says he thinks it may have been 3 or 5 minutes of the boat hitting the channel floor. “It felt endless.” A huge concern was that at some point the boat might not bounce back up but rather go hard aground, and then would break up in the waves.

The Sunrise called the Coast Guard to report their trouble. They were ultimately able to get underway and limped in to Wanchese. There, they had the boat pulled out of the water to have a look. Sure enough, the rudder and rudder post had been damaged. The bottom of the keel also was damaged and inside the boat, in several places, Bill says, the tabbing where the bulkheads meet the hull showed signs of the stress from the boat pounding.

The rudder needed work.

Instead of staying in Wanchese for the boat repairs, Bill says he called around and learned that Oriental had good boatyards where sail boat repairs could be made. They arrived at the SailCraft yard in mid-November.

At SailCraft boat yard, Turtle Midyette has been working on the rudder and making other repairs.

Looking back on what got him and his family to this point, Bill says that had he been simply cruising and not part of the Caribbean 1500, he wouldn’t have left the Chesapeake with the weather that was forecast.

“I would have never gone out in that situation.” He says he second-guessed himself when he learned that other boats — 65 in all — would indeed be going despite the weather. At the time, he says that he thought, “‘Maybe I missed something.’”

Part of the nav station and the binder from the Caribbean 1500.

He says he and Lara and Isobel don’t usually travel with other boats and may have gotten, for a moment, into a “pack mentality.” Bill explains he joined the Caribbean 1500 because while he’s sailed a lot, his wife and daughter had not done much offshore. This would be their first. He said it had been a “weight on my shoulders” to “have a good passage for them.” With sailboats with more experience taking part, he says, he thought it “would make the experience even better.”

Instead, he says, “I got myself in to trouble.”

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He and others who took part in the rally say that weather had already delayed the Caribbean 1500 start for a week. Bill says he relied on the organizers who he says, choosing his words carefully, “gave a sense of offering good weather data and good routing data.” He suggests some of the info was dated or illegible.

Bill Calfee on board “Sunrise”

Ultimately, though, he says “I’m the captain of my vessel. On the list of what I learned was to not turn over that responsibility to someone else.”

Bill wrote about it in his blog.

Of the 65 boats that were signed up to sail, 8 never made it to Tortola. One boat was lost, one crew was lost and multiple boats had damage. The larger, faster boats “had a good experience”. We did not have a good experience…

So, in the future, the weight of “go/no-go” decision is squarely on my shoulders. Only I can make sure we leave in weather that is appropriate for our boat and crew. Clearly a bunch of guys in big fast boat will tolerate more abuse than our family show. Our boat is designed to take Ocean storm conditions, and yet we are not seeking that kind of experience.

In a way the Caribbean 1500 was a great learning experience for us as we learned to trust our own intuition regardless of what the pack is doing. We allowed peer pressure and “experienced sailors” override our own judgment. Never again!

To read more of Bill’s blog on the adventures of “Sunrise,” click here.

So, instead of Tortola, Bill has been in Oriental for much of the past month (Lara and Isobel were visiting family for part of that time. ) Rather than warm Caribbean breezes, the Vermont family is in Oriental in the throes of a hard-freeze almost like they’d find at home.

“My wife is better at this and reels me in.” says Bill. He says that Lara, who spent a few years in Nepal with the Peace Corps and is now a massage therapist, takes a philosophical approach, “‘There was a reason we were supposed to be here. Something for us to learn, something for us to do, somebody to meet.” He says he tries to adopt that thinking.

Prayer flags under the hatch of “Sunrise”.

The crew of Sunrise had lived in Dorset, Vermont where Bill worked analyzing and designing insulation systems for homes. They left Vermont in the fall of 2009 with plans to be gone five years. They sailed to the Bahamas and spent this past summer off the coast of Maine before aiming for Tortola this fall.

A Vermont native, Bill says he grew up sailing on Lake Champlain. Before buying Sunrise, he and Lara sailed on the lake on a 23-foot Kestrel called “BeHereNow.”

That’s the name they wanted to give to the Halberg-Rassy they would go cruising on. When they got the cruising sailboat two years ago, its aft end read, “Sunrise” and “Newport, RI”. They got the port of call changed to “Dorset, Vermont”. But taking off the S and the U and the N, R, I, S, and E was easier said than done.

The name on the aft of “Sunrise”.

“I tried everything to get the … name off,” Bill says, “Heaters. Solvents. It wouldn’t come off. Razor blade. Nothing. It wouldn’t come off.” Bill could remove only the top of the E …

One Saturday, as he was struggling with that, his mother came to visit. She was 95 and suffering from Alzheimers, and took comfort in having Bill read aloud to her.

That day, he grabbed a book off his shelf. It was “Cruising At Last,” a book he loved, and the one that he says got him and Lara “dreaming of going off cruising.” He read the first chapter to his mother. The pages concentrated on “this guy building his boat.”

Then, Bill says, “I get to the end of the chapter and it says, ‘and we named her Sunrise.’” Bill says he just stopped reading at that word, despite his mother asking him to continue. Here, in one of his favorite books, was a forgotten detail about the boat’s name. It was the same name, that despite his best efforts, stuck like a barnacle on the boat he had just bought.

Perhaps in the spirit of the name they wanted to put on the boat — BeHereNow — Bill and Lara decided to keep Sunrise as the name. It remains, on the transom, with the top of the “E” partially torn off.

Snowflakes as anti-fouling. Some friends of the Calfees added them after applying the red bottom-paint before the boat took off from Vermont. Even in warm waters, the crew always had a bit of that state’s winter with them.

At SailCraft, Bill has been doing some of the work along with Turtle Midyette. Taking advantage of the boat being out of the water, he’s going to raise the waterline a few inches. That will mean painting over the snowflakes that friends had painted on the hull two years ago to remind the Calfees of where they came from.

Bill points out that while he will be covering the hull below the waterline with a new coat of paint, it is an ablative, which means the snowflakes will reveal themselves again over time.

When Bill and Lara set out a year ago September, they planned to be gone five years. “We used to say Thailand” was where they were headed, Bill Calfee says. “But it’s really not about the destination. Right now the destination is Oriental.”

Isobel Calfee finds a place to play hide and seek on Oriental’s waterfront.

The repairs to Sunrise are expected to be complete around the new year. Meanwhile, Oriental has been a good stop for Sunrise and crew to be. Here and now.

Posted Friday December 10, 2010 by Melinda Penkava

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