Monday, November 1st - Day 4 (cont...) -
Happy Birthday to me!
We had the anchor up and left the nice anchorage at 11am. I slowly motored around behind the breakwater while Laura finished cleaning the anchor with our washdown hose up on the bow. I could see the whitecaps in the lower harbor over the breakwater so didn't want to motor our there while Laura was working. She would not have been happy with the bouncing and flying water.
A short time later she had everything put away and the anchor secured in it's mount. I increased RPM to 2,100 (our cruising RPM) and turned the boat north for the 3.5 mile run up and around Sandy Hook. The wind was as predicted - 20 to 25 knots from the NW which made for a bumpy upwind ride. The wind angle was too close to the bow for using sails to help us so we just slogged along with the motor. By time we turned east around Sandy Hook, the boat was soaked with saltwater from the spray of the waves hitting the bow. A few minutes later we turned south down the coast and everything calmed down as we pulled out 3/4 mainsail and 3/4 jib. Second Wind surged to mid-7s with the nice broad-reach sailing and we were finally able to shut down the engine.
The seas were light with just a small swell from the north. Since the winds were off the land, if we stayed close to shore it should be a calm ride. I kept the boat 1 to 1 1/2 miles from the shore all day using the radar. Here we are on our first sail of the trip.
We had nice sailing for over 6 hours. As the winds dropped to low teens then single digits later in the afternoon, our apparent wind moved forward and made sailing difficult. With the wind speed changing from 9-22 and angle moving around 20-30 degrees, the boat made much better time setting the autopilot on wind-angle then trying to keep the sails trimmed for best speed. This means the autopilot monitors our wind instruments and turns the boat to keep the wind angle (close to) constant. The boat stays powered up and our speed stayed near 7 knots the whole time. The boat ends up making a slight zig-zag track down the coast but we never slow down. It's much faster overall.
By 5pm the wind had died enough that we were below 6 knots so I started the engine for assistance. I usually time our leaving Atlantic Highlands for about 24 hours before low tide at Cape May which is 110 miles away. Figuring we would be averaging 5 to 5 1/2 knots, that would get us to Cape May in time for the flood tide to push us up Delaware Bay.
But, this trip was a little different. The weather forecast had changed and the NW winds would be right on our nose if we turned up Delaware Bay around noon-time tomorrow. Instead, I was trying to catch the end of the previous flood tide which would end around 7am. Because the high winds had kept our boatspeed in the 7's for the first 6 hours, we had a good chance of making it.
Just before sunset I took this picture of our new instruments to show what they look like when sailing down the coast.
I had the display set on "Charts" - not radar which worked great the whole trip. If you blow up the picture, I'll talk about a few items....
First, the instrument in the lower left is our autopilot control. Notice that it says "Wind Vane mode. Wind:80 S" The autopilot was changing the heading of the boat based on what the wind was doing. If the wind moved a little forward, it turned the boat to port. If the wind moved to more behind us, it turned the boat to starboard. These changes were gradual as it averaged the wind direction over time. It didn't jerk the boat back and forth.
There is a lot of information on the chartplotter but I'll let you scope it out.
Skies had cleared during the day and our first ocean sunset of the trip was a little subdued.
We changed our normal overnight watch schedule because I needed to be at the helm for navigating around Cape May through the Prissywick Channel. I took the 8-12 first watch while Laura tried to sleep for a bit. Most of the time we don't sleep well on the first night of an off-shore passage but the boat was not moving around very much with the calmer winds and low seas. She was able to get a couple hours of sleep.
Tuesday, November 2nd - Day 5
Just after midnight, Laura relieved me and I slept fairly well until my shift at 4am. We had just passed the Cape May inlet and were only about 1 hour from rounding the Cape. Excellent!
I navigated us around Cape May at 5am and it was very nice to have the tidal current pushing us at 7 to 8 knots. I was hoping our speed would keep up with the current so we would cover most of the bay before the NW winds built in sometime after noon. If we were caught in the middle of Delaware Bay with 15 knot NW winds, it would be a very trying day pushing against the wind and currents.
It was a beautiful sunrise on Delaware Bay. Here is a panorama video I took just after sunrise.
Our trip up the bay worked out much better than I had hoped. Don't you just love it when that happens! The currents helped us for the first 30 miles and we never saw more than about 12 knot winds on the nose until we turned toward the Chesapeake - Delaware Canal around the nuclear power plant. We entered the canal a couple hours later and had a nice 12 mile trip to Chesapeake Bay. We never saw one other boat through the entire canal. Was everybody else south already?
I wrote in the last blog that we had the option of running down the coast all the way to Norfolk if the winds were good. The forecasts from Windfinder.com and PredictWind.com both showed higher winds on Tuesday night into Wednesday moving to the north and northeast. This would cause bigger seas off-shore Maryland and maybe a wild ride with the winds and seas behind us. Plus, we didn't have a marina reservation in Norfolk and we heard they were very busy right now. This, coupled with getting to Cape May a few hours early, made the decision easy. Onward to Georgetown, MD via Delaware Bay!
The Sun was setting behind us as we turned east into the Sassafras River around 5:30pm. All the wind forecasts were wrong as the afternoon and evening N to NW wind increase never happened. I expected to have some help from the sails for the 15 mile trip down northern Chesapeake Bay but the winds stayed calm all afternoon. We ended up anchoring in the dark around the "S" turn at 6:30pm. I gladly turned the engine off after 26 straight hours.
Laura and I relaxed and watched some TV but we were both falling asleep on the sofa. We hit the sack around 9:30pm and I fell right to sleep.
Wednesday, Nov 3rd - Day 6
It was a cold night with the temps dropping into the 30s outside. Since we were going to a marina today, I had kept the inverter on all night to run our new electric blanket which drained the batteries a bit.
Temp was 59 inside our cabin when we got up. Laura was up earlier and I slept in a bit. I had about 10 hours of great sleep in the calm anchorage and felt much better.
We relaxed a bit in the morning and got the boat ready to head into the marina. Tomorrow we will leave the boat for a bit (a few days?) for some personal travel. Hopefully, we will be back in a week or so to continue our trip south.
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