Yorktown, VA

Originally posted at www.svsweetescape.com

Late Friday afternoon we pulled into the York River Yacht Haven Marina.  We had ordered a life raft which was supposed to have been shipped to the marina there but had yet to arrive.

Judy spent Saturday morning on the phone trying to track down the missing life raft between doing loads of wash.  

In the meantime, Brian rode his bike to the local West Marine store where he was able to locate the needed sight bowl for the Racor fuel filter for our generator.  It is something of a miracle that this West Marine, a West Marine Express in fact, happened to have this obscure part in stock.  According to the clerk there, someone had ordered the bowl a while back and never picked it up.  In the absence of that we would have almost certainly had to order the thing and then wait for it to arrive.  Once acquired, the sight bowl was installed and the problem solved.

The verdict on the life raft was not as satisfying.  The raft is a Viking brand life raft which was supposed to ship from Viking’s warehouse in Norfolk - only 30 miles to the south.  The delivery time was supposed to be four or five days.  Apparently the two boat shows in Annapolis, first the sailboat show and then this past week the powerboat show has thrown a wrench in the works as apparently much of Viking’s staff has been in attendance and unable to ship anything.  We are not going to hang around here waiting.  The raft will have to catch up with us further south.

We want to give some love here to the York River Yacht Haven Marina.  This is a beautiful marina just off the York River.  The staff is awesome and they can’t do enough for you.  The marina features a very good restaurant and excellent facilities including a large ship’s store and a swimming pool.  We spent three nights at the marina as they offer the third night free if you stay for two nights.

On Saturday the marina loaned us their courtesy car to go to the Food Lion to do some shopping.  Then on Sunday, Dan - the owner of the marina offered to let us borrow his BMW for a side trip to Historic Williamsburg.  We accepted his offer with enthusiasm and drove to Williamsburg where we had lunch and spent several hours touring the historic town and environs.  We enjoyed Williamsburg and plan to return next summer.

After Williamsburg we drove over to Jamestown, the first colony in Virginia, just to see what was there.  We stopped at the visitor’s center but did not pay the entrance fee because it was getting late in the day.  We would like to return here also.  This part of Virginia has so much history that one could spend weeks visiting museums and colonial villages and encampments.  It really is fascinating.

While the York River Yacht Haven Marina was a great place there was one shortcoming that caused a problem for us and that was their pump out facilities.  We were in need of a pump out and the marina’s pump out station was on a short dock at the end of a very tight fairway.  Brian was concerned about being able to maneuver in this tight space and the fact that Sweet Escape would overhang this dock by about half.  For that reason we decided to look elsewhere for a pump out.  

Elsewhere turned out to be the Yorktown River Walk on the other side of the York River.  But this presented a problem as well since they didn’t open until 10 AM.  Our original desire was to leave the marina on Monday and go to Norfolk where we would anchor overnight before starting our run south down the ICW.  But storms were predicted for Monday afternoon and if we left at 10:30 AM (best case) from Yorktown we would be out on the Bay when the storms began.  So, we decided to go get pumped out and then anchor back near the marina in Sarah Creek and get an early start for Norfolk on Tuesday.  

We went across the river and found two Coast Guard boats hanging out in the middle.  For a moment we thought we were going to get boarded again but then realized that they were enforcing a security zone for a Navy destroyer that was going down the river.  We continued on our way, pumped out and then returned to the creek, anchoring among a bunch of crab pots and spent a stormy night anchored on Sarah Creek.

We’ll post some photos from our visit to Yorktown on our albums page.