Sail Andante

Boat Food: Cast Iron Skillet Pizza

Its Friday. We’re on the mooring in Buzzards Bay and its cold and windy. So why not bake a pizza?

Andante’s original-equipment propane-fired oven is low-tech (no thermostat) and poorly insulated. But it gets the job done under some crazy conditions and still cooks better than our fancy oven in the dirt house. Go figure.

Step 1: Make the dough. I did this earlier this afternoon using a recipe that has worked for me for many years. It is arguably better if you swap half the regular flour for 00 pizza flour. But I don’t have that. And it will still be great.

I do have: 3 cups flour, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon sugar. 1 packet (2.25 teaspoons) yeast. 1 cup water. 1 bottle red wine. Mix it all together (except the wine) as best you can in a large bowl. When dough-like, knead until smooth, keeping it in the bowl if possible to avoid a mess. Form into a happy ball, coat in olive oil, and place back in the bowl under a towel to rise for an hour or two (or three, if its cold like it is here today.) Then divide into two balls and (if you are me) freeze one for later.

Step 2: Make some sauce. I made a simple marinara with garlic sauteed in olive oil, basil, oregano, red pepper, and a small can of diced tomatoes and cooked it down for about 30 minutes.

Simple marinara sauce. Could also use basil pesto. Or garlic, oil and anchovy paste.

Step 3: Preheat the oven. It should be as hot as you can get it. On Andante that is just over 400 deg F and it takes a solid 30 minutes to reach that temperature. In a dirt house you could easily reach 500 F. Whatever. You’ll be watching closely to see when your pizza is done and a hotter oven will just get you there faster.

Step 4: When the oven is almost hot, preheat your cast iron skillet on medium-high heat on the stovetop. For 5-6 minutes. Until really hot. Turn off the stove. Swizzle a generous amount of olive oil in the pan and maybe use a bit of paper towel to wipe the oil around and be sure it coats the whole thing.

HOT!! Note: This is before I added a couple of tablespoons of oil to the pan. There was an actual puddle of oil in the pan when I added the dough in the next step.

Step 5: Quickly, form your happy dough ball into an approximate pizza shape by pulling and stretching as needed and then plop it in the hot pan. Carefully, without searing your fingertips, press around the edges so the dough mostly fills the pan. It will probably be making attractive sizzling sounds at this point.

Don’t overthink this. A somewhat uneven disc of dough will taste exactly as good as a perfect circle. Just be careful not to burn your fingers on the pan.

Step 6: Toppings. With no delay, spread your sauce and whatever pizza toppings you prefer on the dough. I used mozzarella, feta, romano and parmesan cheeses. No animals died for my pizza. But several were thoroughly squeezed.

Step 7: Bake that thing. Carefully put the freaky hot pan in the oven and let it cook until the top is brown and bubbly. That should take between 10-15 minutes.

I keep a pizza stone in Andante’s oven. I’m not sure it helps but it looks cool.

It may not be Food & Wine attractive but the end result is perfectly acceptable after that bottle of wine. And the crust is nicely browned and crispy. Who needs anything else on a Friday night?

Except maybe another bottle of wine.

Enjoy your weekend.

Winter 2023/2024 Recap

It’s not you. Its us.

Six months have passed and, at least according to this blog, nothing has happened. This is not the first time we’ve dropped the ball and left our loyal readers hanging. And it will not be the last. But hopefully, with this post, we will bring you up-to-date with our activities of the past half-year.

Per Paula’s excellent travelogue last November, we arrived at Bock Marine in Beaufort, NC and settled in for a quiet winter on the hard. The plan was for me (Dave) to train/fly/drive from Cape Cod to NC to live and work on Andante for about a week each month. That actually happened.

The train approach was novel and fun and had potential. But it was hopelessly long with the one-way trip exceeding 28 hours including a 4-hour drive from Norfolk where the train actually terminated. At 2 AM.

Flying was relatively quick but placed limitations on what could be carried back and forth (ever try flying with solar panels, an outboard motor and your shop vac?). Flying would have been prohibitively expensive if we didn’t have lots of airline miles to burn. But we did, so I used that method of transport twice.

In the end, driving (18 hours +/-) just wasn’t that bad and provided the lowest total cost (no rental car) and maximum flexibility in both schedule and payload.

On the first first few trips I enjoyed the hospitality and central heating of my wonderful in-laws. Later in the spring I made use of ample shore-power to stay aboard Andante in relative comfort.

So why did we move Andante all the way to North Carolina rather than spend the cold, dark, miserable winter near home on Cape Cod? Because the difference between 25 degrees F and 45 degrees F is everything when it comes to boat maintenance tasks. Those extra few degrees make possible epoxy, varnish, paint, and general comfort when doing fine work with your hands. It was not balmy and warm in Beaufort all winter. But it was above freezing for at least a few hours every day — and much warmer than freezing most days.

The list of jobs started out long and kept growing all winter. But progress was made. A new bimini was designed and sewn. A new set of solar panels was installed above the dinghy davits. Several new seacocks and associated plumbing were installed to service two new bilge pumps. And of course lots of routine maintenance: Hull scraped and painted; anchor chain end-for-ended and marks repainted; new anodes on the hull and prop; upgrades to various bits of running rigging. And as much varnishing of exterior woodwork as time and weather would allow.

It took nearly 3 years to get all the old varnish removed. Applying the first new coat to the eyebrow was surprisingly satisfying. We’ll see how long that feeling lasts.

There was only one real surprise that required some extra effort. At some point during the trip south one of the four heavy steel engine mounts — the one that also supports our refrigeration compressor — cracked and broke. Once I was able to jack up the engine and remove the mount it was a simple matter for the skilled folks at Bock Marine to repair it for us, welding on additional stiffeners so this will never happen again.

Shiny and extra-strong engine mount after repair

It took a couple of months to design fabricate the aluminum framework for our new solar panels. The array consists of three 115W bifacial panels. As solar arrays on sailboard go this is pretty small .

This year we tried a new and relatively inexpensive clear coat on the prop. It is supposed to be extremely hard and slippery so that barnacles can’t get a grip and should just slide right off. We’ll see about that.

Andante was back in the water in mid-April with fresh bottom paint.

And by the third week of April we were underway towards home. This photo was taken by Kenny Bock from his house on Core Creek.

The trip home was short and all business. Persistent north winds precluded a direct shot from Beaufort to Cape Cod around Cape Hatteras. So we retraced our steps north along the ICW to Norfolk before jumping out into the Atlantic. With favorable winds we completed the remainder of the trip in three days with quick nap stops in Cape May and Sandy Hook.

Andante back home on her mooring in Red Brook Harbor. The water is extremely green but clear in early May.

The final leg

It took four more days to transit the ICW to Andante’s winter home in North Carolina. The remaining 170 miles were both long and short. We put in one more very long day running from the Pungo Ferry Bridge to the head of the Alligator River, arriving at our anchorage after dark. The day included a treat in our transit through Albemarle Sound, where we could unfurl the sails again and give Andante a bit more room to roam. While we weren’t keen on running the ICW at night, it was less daunting here since Dave had visited the same anchorage several years prior and was confident in the available space, depth and holding. Nonetheless, we were very thankful for our radar, which guided us safely past several unlighted marks after dark, and for our charting program, which led us directly to Dave’s previous anchorage. In fact, we dropped the anchor almost exactly where Andante had been two years prior!

The long days allowed us to plan for a few shorter hops in the final days of our trip. The first would take us through one of the longest straight land cuts in the Pungo River – Alligator River Canal. Along this very narrow straight section of ICW, we enjoyed ever-warming temperatures, watched a bald eagle flying overhead and spotted great herons keeping watch along the shoreline. The shorter days underway were made even more enjoyable as we unfurled our sails one last time while transiting the Pamlico and Neuse Rivers.

With extra daylight hours on anchor we started working through a long list of jobs to get the boat ready for our arrival and final haul-out. Before we knew it, we were tying off lines at the dock on Core Creek, looking forward to standing on land again and greeting my parents. But we were also sad. Sad to have this great adventure behind us and sad to watch the cohort of boats we had traveled with continue south to their own destinations.

Sailing in the Neuse River. The mainsail is stowed because we had hauled the dinghy onto deck for the final haul-out.

Last few miles with canvas stowed and dock lines ready

Bridges and locks and shorter days

The next phase of our trip would be very different than the first, where we transitioned from sailing in wide open waters to “driving” along miles and miles of dredged channel through some of the most remote marshland I have experienced on Andante. We entered the intracoastal waterway (ICW) at mile zero and would spend the next 200-ish miles carefully following a very narrow “ditch” through some extremely remote areas to our destination just north of Beaufort, NC. At times, it felt a bit like driving 95 south to North Carolina, requiring attentiveness in navigating other traffic in the confines of the channel, biding time waiting on bridge openings, looking out for hazards (like tugs pulling barges, free-floating logs, tree stumps and uncharted shoals) and generally staying “in our lane”. We were thankful for our autopilot, which allowed us to make small continuous corrections to our course without having a hand on the wheel, and for the bathymetric survey data provided by the Army Corps of Engineers, which warned us of areas that needed extra attention. And in case we got too comfortable at any given time, the ICW would throw us a reminder in the form of a half-sunk motorboat or an entire felled tree extending partway into the channel.

On a trip like this, you focus a lot on the weather and the state of the boat and her crew. Outside concerns, beyond getting safely from point A to point B, fall away rather quickly. In fact, time becomes somewhat irrelevant, beyond knowing how many hours until sunrise and sunset or high/low tide. Not so on the ICW. In our transit south to North Carolina, we would navigate under 14 bridges and through 1 lock. Several of these bridges and the Great Bridge Lock opened on a schedule and we encountered the majority of these in our first day in the channel, making for a very busy day. We arrived at the first low bridge at mile 5.8 around 10:50 Sunday morning, noting immediately that a small handful of sailboats were anchored just north of the bridge. Usually this bridge opens on demand, but on hailing the tender we were informed that the bridge was operating under a restricted schedule (beginning that day) and would only be opening at 8 am, noon and 6 pm. We were not the only ones caught unaware!

It’s not unusual to have to wait an hour for a bridge to open so we were prepared to motor in circles until its opening. But then I looked at my Apple watch, which was clearly paying closer attention to the outside world than we and our onboard instruments were! It told us that we had an extra hour to wait and we quickly realized we had completely forgotten to “fall back” for the end of daylight savings. There’s a lot you can’t control while cruising, so you quickly learn to make the most of ‘found time’. We joined our anchored friends and made the best of a few hours sitting still with the engine off. I took advantage of the first warm temperatures of the trip and enjoyed a shower before getting underway again!

Delayed bridge openings create bottlenecks and act to group boats together for subsequent legs of their journey. We would spend the next few days on the ICW leapfrogging the same group of boats, which was oddly comforting. The options for anchoring enroute were limited and we found ourselves relying on Dave’s track from his journey south a few years prior. The first night we anchored just outside the very narrow channel north of the Pungo Ferry Bridge and enjoyed a spectacular sunset. We left all our lights on to provide visibility for anyone brave enough to travel after dark (mostly tugs with barges). The quiet was deafening and like none I have ever experienced.

Keeping track of the bridges and navigation landmarks to come in cruising guides and logs from prior trips, while keeping a close eye on our position in the “ditch”

Waiting for the water to drop in Great Bridge Lock

Four days. Four states.

If there were a title for Leg 2 of our migration, it might be “Weather’s good. Let’s just keep going.”

We must have paid sufficient dues to the weather gods because in the days to follow we were blessed with clear skies, sunshine, calm seas and temperatures trending in the right direction. Having made the decision to head inshore to New Jersey, leg 2 of our journey would bring us south along the Jersey Shore to Cape May. With light winds on our nose, we spent the day motor sailing about 2-3 miles from shore, close enough for a nice tour of the various beach communities along our route. The cockpit on Andante can be fully-enclosed in canvas to protect us from the wind and weather which means that under bright sunshine we also stay toasty warm in our own mobile greenhouse.

Having had a good night’s sleep and with continued good weather in the forecast, we pushed south through the night guided by a near-full moon off our stern and by the very bright lights of Atlantic City off our bow. I passed the time on my night watch more comfortably this time, listening to a podcast while keeping an eye on the radar and AIS for traffic and other hazards. Sometime in the middle of my watch, I was surprised to discover a large bird peering at me over the gunwales of our dinghy hoisted in its davits on Andante’s stern. I’m not sure how long he had been resting there before I noticed him, but we would later discover that it was long enough to make a rather large mess!

We reached the southern-most tip of the Jersey Shore at Cape May just before dawn and, with light southeast winds forecast for the next few days, we pointed our bow north up the Delaware Bay. We were headed for the canal that provides passage to the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay. This route is extremely busy with very large commercial traffic delivering vehicles, goods and fuel to inland ports like Philadelphia and Baltimore. It took us all day to transit Delaware Bay and the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal. At twilight we entered the Chesapeake Bay and, without finding an anchorage to our liking and with the wind and weather holding, we made the decision to continue pushing south.

I started my night watch appreciating the navigational advantage gained through modern radar, charts, AIS and radio. I can’t imagine what it would be like to navigate these waters by paper chart, sight and stars alone. It is extremely difficult to determine distances over water at night and it is almost impossible to “see” your way through a meandering channel marked by lighted red and green blinking channel markers. I thanked all the technology at my disposal as a car carrier passed safely to port, only visible as a massive sky-scraper-sized absence of light and deep steady rumbling of engines. This included the AIS transponders that allow us to “see” each other in the dark, the radio that allowed us to communicate our intentions, the charts and radar that assured me that Andante was safely outside the channel and the radar that confirmed my larger friend was safely past.

The wind and currents gave us a bit of a rolling ride as we passed under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge north of Annapolis, MD around midnight, but things calmed down nicely again as the bay widened to the south and the winds dropped. We made steady progress down the length of the bay, stopping near dawn for fuel in the Patuxent River before continuing south. At this point, our goal was to reach Norfolk, VA where we would transition to daytime travel only as we entered the Intracoastal Waterway. Since Norfolk would mark the end of night watches it was perhaps fitting that we arrived around 1 am. Dave spent the night with Andante hove-to in a quiet corner of Hampton Roads while we waited for the sun to rise. Andante enjoyed the peaceful respite from transiting and was joined by a pod of playful dolphins who visited her repeatedly throughout the night.