1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Transiting to Our Home Port!

We made passage from Deale, MD, to Port Tobacco, MD, on Libertarian, our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46, on July 1, 2023, after 4,994 days with the boat in a giant shrink wrap plastic-skinned tent getting refitted.

The 420hp Cummins 6CTAs performed extremely well. The 108 mile trip took 7 hours and 45 minutes, from cast off to first tie-off at our new home port. The gorgeous OEM tachometers are wildly inaccurate, so I can’t say for sure what RPM they were turning. The gorgeous OEM temp and oil pressure gauges, likewise, are obviously not reading accurately, but they were stable for the entire trip. There were no mechanical breakdowns or major issues.

Oil pressure and temp probably weren’t 120psi and 110°, respectively

But they were consistent side-to-side and stable for the whole trip

The Chesapeake Bay was snotty as it can be; we were running south on a rising tide with a southerly breeze, so we saw 1-2’ swells, then white caps, then 2-3” cresting waves, then it got particularly nasty while transiting the confluence of the Patuxent River, forcing us to drop to idle at 6kts. After two hours bobbing through the snot, we were back to 2’ chop with white caps, so I put the sticks forward, got that Roamer hull up on plane and smoothed out the ride by getting on top of the snot.

Lotsa spray when we approached the Patuxent River confluence

The turn onto the Potomac River was fun. Suddenly, the swells we’d been pushing through while heading south turned to beam and then following seas. We’d surf down a swell and stuff the nose gently into the next one, then plow through it and repeat for an hour. The entire boat was very thoroughly leak tested with saltwater coming over the bow…and passed the test. The V-berth portholes saw lots of action, but kept it all on the outside.

By the time we passed Colton’s Point, where we found the Roamer on Purgatory Row of Colton’s Point Marina in December 2007, the Chesapeake’s influence had waned to the point we were just cruising along on the calm Potomac. It’s hard to tell for sure with the inaccurate tachometers, but I believe our comfortable cruising speed was ~1850rpm at 15.5kts for the majority of the trip.

Nice wake at 15.5kts and ~1,850rpm

Now let’s see if I can make a video link work right.

Next up in our 1969 Chris Craft Roamer 46 Refit: Home Port Trip Follow-up