Tuesday, October 10th (continued)
I did end up doing a few small boat jobs and we were forced to move the boat again just before sunset. In the late afternoon, a large powerboat (60' Nordhavn?) came into the anchorage and dropped their anchor right next to us between Second Wind and another large powerboat. I was down below and didn't see him anchor there or I would have complained right away and asked him to move.
Powerboats and sailboats behave differently at anchor - especially when the winds go light and the boats start drifting around instead of riding on their anchor. It was hard for me to understand why he had to anchor between us and the other powerboat when there was lots of room on our starboard side and behind us where he wouldn't have been close to anyone.
I was up in the cockpit around 5pm - playing a few songs on my flute - watching the Nordhavn drift closer and closer to us. At one point, the boats were only 20 feet apart. This was nuts. I never saw anyone on the boat as I guess they just all went inside and stayed there. I wasn't going to be able to sleep thinking about us bumping into each other. I'd rather move now than at 3am.
Laura wasn't too surprised when I went below and said, "We're moving....". I turned on the electronics then started the engine. We pulled our anchor, moved back about 200 feet and re-anchored. Now the A-hole Nordhavn could drift wherever he wanted and couldn't get near us.
The rest of the night was quiet. We set our alarm for 4:30am and hit the sack early knowing tomorrow would be a long day.
Down the coast of NJ -
We normally take this trip down the coast of NJ in one big day-night-day run from Sandy Hook to the upper Chesapeake Bay because the calmer weather doesn't usually last long enough for us to stop anywhere then keep going the next day. We really don't want to spend a week in Atlantic City or Cape May waiting for weather up Delaware Bay. But, this time we had 2-3 days of nice weather forecasts where the winds and seas were light. Probably not much sailing (boo hoo...) but no bashing us around in a big ocean swell either.
It was about 80 nautical miles from our anchorage to Atlantic City. At our normal 6 knots, this was 13 hours. If we wanted to get to the Atlantic City anchorage before dark (6:30pm), we needed to leave by 5am. This is why we set our alarm for 4:30am.
Wednesday, October 11th (Day 4) - Atlantic Highlands to Atlantic City
Temp 51. Water temp 63. Light west winds
80 nautical miles today (197 total trip miles)
Laura and I woke up quickly to the 4:30am alarm. I did my normal 10 minutes of stretching and exercise in bed while she got the coffee going. After engine checks (oil, water, belts, etc.) I turned on our instruments and started the engine. It took me a little longer then usual because I had to set our instruments for night mode (red) so they wouldn't blind me. There was some light from the nearby city so it wasn't totally dark - dark when I went out on the bow with a headlight and flashlight to pull the anchor. Oh... I should mention that in my very tired state, I did everything but turn on the RADAR that I would need to see the boats around us and navigate out of the anchorage. Oops!
The anchor came up quickly and mostly clean which meant I didn't have to stop and wash it off every 10 seconds. I love it when that happens! After getting the anchor to the surface, I left it in the water to wash off then called Laura up from below (where she had helped flake the anchor chain coming in). She would finish putting the anchor away while I went quickly to the helm as we were drifting close to another powerboat I could see in front of us.
As I backed away from the powerboat, I realized I couldn't see anything. This wasn't good. It only took me about 10 second to switch our chartplotter to RADAR and turn it on. No warm-up necessary as the screen came on right away. Yea!
I slowly motored out of the anchorage to the lower New York Bay while Laura finished pulling the anchor out of the water and getting it nicely sitting in its holder. Note that we have an electric windlass so she's not doing this by hand - just stepping on a switch and watching closely for problems.
She came back into the cockpit as I throttled up to our normal cruising 2,100 RPM. We motored north up the bay to get around Sandy Hook. The lower bay was just about as calm as we've ever seen it. Laura mentioned how unusual this is because we normally plan this trip for north or west winds (for sailing south) which make this 4 mile run north pretty bumpy. Today the winds were light so we just motored on calm waters.
I took this picture of the NYC skyline just before we turned around Sandy Hook. The iPhone automatically brightened up the picture. It wasn't this light out.
It was a pleasant day on the ocean and we even had a little help from a west wind in the morning when we had both the jib and mainsail working. Unfortunately, that only lasted a couple hours then the wind died and we pulled in the jib. Keeping the mainsail up and sheeted in tight help calm the roll down from the small SE swell.
I was hopeful that because of the light winds, we would get some sea-breezes later in the day. This happens when the Sun heats up the land and the air rises. Cooler ocean air comes in to replace the warmed air and creates a breeze off the ocean toward the land. We did see a little of this in the afternoon but it wasn't strong enough to energize our sails.
Just after 1pm, we passed Barnegat Bay and Laura took this nice picture of the lighthouse.
There were lots of pleasure boats heading south with us because of the nice seas and weather. I was a little worried about the anchorage being full in Atlantic City so I researched staying at the Farley State Marina (and Golden Nugget casino).
Our ETA to Atlantic City was about 6pm so I knew we would be there before dark. Around 4pm, I fired up my DockWa app and saw that they had the marina listed. After filling out a quick reservation request in the app, I saw the fee was only about $120. After a short discussion with Laura, I requested a slip in the marina for tonight.
Only a few minutes later, I received a DockWa message from the marina. They said the marina office closed at 5pm and asked our estimated arrival time. I replied with the 6 - 6:15 timeline and they said we could have a "T" head dock (very easy in and out) but there would be no dockhands to assist. I agreed and they confirmed the reservation. They also gave us the gate codes to get back into the marina if went to the casino or into town. Nice!
This was only our 4th day away from the dock in Catskill but both Laura and I felt like we needed a quiet night in the marina (and no other boats anchoring 20 feet away from us). We were both looking forward to an evening ashore.
Right at 6pm we motored into the marina basin and quickly tied up to our assigned dock. Wow! We had a 90 foot "T" dock all to ourselves.
After cleaning ourselves up a bit, we decided to check out dinner in the casino (and maybe some craps?). We decided to treat ourselves to a belated anniversary dinner and walked down the long dock then across the street to the casino entrance.
The place wasn't too busy and, after looking around a bit, we decided on the Chart House Restaurant. The matradee told us it was about a 1/2 hour wait. Oh well. We had about 6 other on-site restaurants to choose from.
We walked past a nice looking steakhouse and decided to check them out. They gave us a table so dark we had to use our phones to read the menus. That was probably what they wanted so we couldn't see the prices - $110 for a strip-steak and all the fixin's were extra. When the waitress came for our drink order we declined and left to find a "better for us" dinner.
We settled on a more open air restaurant. Laura still had the steak - filet mignon - and I ordered chicken parm. They were both excellent and our total bill was just over what one steak would have cost in the last place.
After walking around the casino a bit we stopped by the only open crap table to watch the action. I was an avid casino crap player many years ago but now didn't even remember all the point odds and associated bets I use to make. After watching for only a few minutes, I decided to save my money and we continued our walk around the casino a little while before heading back to the boat and not placing even one bet. Hey. I was a winner because I still had the $500 in my pocket I would have used to play craps.
We were both pretty beat after our long day and early start so only watched a little TV before hitting the sack around 9pm. I didn't even fill up our water tank which I always do when we stay in marinas. But, we still had 3/4 water tank after being out 4 days. No worries.
Thursday, October 12th (Day 5) - Atlantic City to Upper Delaware Bay
Temp 50, Water temp 62 (it's not getting warmer..). Winds light and variable
82 nautical miles today (279 total trip miles)
One of the challenges with this section of our trip is timing the tides up Delaware Bay. There can be 3-4 knots of tidal current so, if it's against us, we won't go very far. From experience, I know that if we round Cape May around low tide, we will only be against the current for an hour or so then we will have helping current up the 40 mile Delaware Bay, through the C&D Canal and down the upper Chesapeake Bay (if we went that far).
Today the low tide at Cape May was around 1pm. Cape May is about 35 miles from Atlantic City so would take us about 6 hours. We should leave around 7am.
We had the alarm set for 6:30am and were off the dock at 7:10am. I love it when there is a light wind blowing the boat off the dock. This happened when we fueled up in Atlantic Highlands and again this morning. After pulling in our power cord and step ladder, I only had to release all the docklines, jump on the boat and wait a couple minutes. The boat just drifted sideways away from the dock toward the basin. Easy-piesey...
Yesterday wasn't bad but today was even calmer. Yesterday's 1-2 foot swell had gone down even more and the water was glassy.
Around 10am a little bird startled us by flying right into the cockpit then quickly back out to eventually settle on our dinghy. We had a hitchhiker!
We enjoyed our quiet ride down the coast toward Cape May. Otto (otto-pilot) ran the boat nicely and I settled into my 2nd book of the trip - "The Door to December" by Dean Koontz. A good scary book to prepare for Halloween.
Around noon we motored past Wildwood, NJ. It looks pretty cool from the water.
An hour or so later we rounded Cape May through the Prissywick Channel and I got this picture of the Cape May lighthouse. I can't blame the rough water for getting my finger in the way this time. Sorry...
The ride was so calm today, Laura decided to break out the plastic polish and clean up our clear (Issinglass) canvas. We have used Novus plastic polish for many years and it works great. It comes in 3 flavors. The #1 is for daily cleaning. #2 is for removal of light scratches and stains while #3 is the heavy scratch remover. She used the #2 today and it was amazing how quickly it removed all the black streaks from the summer rains. I used the #1 on all the inside faces. I took this picture of our 3 year-old windows a short while later. Are there windows there?
As we motored up Delaware Bay, our speed picked up with the rising tide. Laura took this pretty picture of the Sun on the calm waters.
Later in the afternoon I tried playing flute in the cockpit but the biting flies were bad enough that I gave it up after a couple songs. How do you play an instrument when a fly is biting your leg?
By mid afternoon we knew we would not be able to make the Reedy Island anchorage before dark. The entrance to this anchorage is through a tiny channel in the breakwater. The channel is marked by red and green channel markers but only one of them is lit. Plus, the tidal current is pushing the boat sideways as you try to motor through the cut. It's not a fun thing at night.
Another option was to keep going all the way to our Sassafras anchorage. Even though we would have helping tides, it would be about 2am when we anchored. Neither of us voted for that.
After checking the weather forecasts, I saw the winds were light this evening then gradually going from the north in the early morning. By something like 8am, the prediction was 10-15 knots from the north. That might be a little rough going by the power plant where the river runs north / south. I decided to anchor in a spot we had been to before just below the power plant along the northern shore. It was partially protected by a breakwater and about 1 1/2 miles from the ship channel to give their wakes a chance to dissipate.
At 8pm, in the dark, we slowly motored toward shore below the Hope Creek Jetty. Laura went up on the bow to run the anchor and, when she shined the spotlight around the boat, found we were in the middle of crab trap city. I slowly motored back toward the ship channel and after only a few 100 feet we were clear of the crab markers. We anchored at 8:10pm after another long 13 hour day.
We watched a little TV then hit the sack early.
Friday, October 13th (Day 6) - Upper Delaware Bay to Sassafras River.
Temp 48, Water temp 61. Winds from the north at 10-15 decreasing during the day
42 nautical miles today (321 total trip miles)
It was a quiet night at this anchorage until around 6am when a whole bunch of freighters must have gone by and sent us their wakes. The boat bounced around for about 10 minutes then again calmed.
Once again our schedule was set by the tides. The currents at this end of the C&D Canal will start helping at 9:30am. We anchored only about 7 miles from there so decided to leave around 8am. After sleeping in a little, we pulled up the anchor at 8:15 and motored north around the Hope Creek Nuclear Power Plant. This was our view from the anchorage on a pretty morning.
I was a little worried about the winds and currents causing big waves after we turned north and it was a little bumpy but not bad. It was southbound wind against northbound current which caused 2-3 foot steep waves. This wasn't a big problem for us because they were right on the bow and we had the current pushing us north to keep our speed up.
After entering the C&D Canal, everything calmed down. The currents switched in our favor and it took us less than 2 hours to cover the 14 miles to Chesapeake Bay.
Our nice day continued as we motored south down the northern Chesapeake. Now another choice.... We could be at our Sassafras anchorage by 3pm or keep going to make miles in the remaining daylight. Also, tomorrow (Saturday) and tomorrow night were forecast rain and storms. Sunday was 15-20 knot north winds so we'd probably want to stay put for that too.
I didn't see another anchorage south of the Sassafras that would be good for the weekend winds so we decided to make it an early day. We turned up the Sassafras River and motored around the first "S" turn to anchor SW of Knight Island. We've anchored here many times before. The holding and protection is excellent from everything but SW winds which are not in the forecast. Anchor down at 2:45pm.
We love this anchorage and the only problem has been the limited cell phone coverage - usually 1 bar or less. In the past, I've had to stand up on the aft boxes to get enough signal for an updated weather forecast. Now that we have Starlink, that wasn't a problem. We could easily stream TV and had full internet access on the boat.
I should also mention that we had full Starlink Internet all the way down the NJ coast and up Delaware Bay. Pretty nice!
After anchoring, I played flute for quite a while and we had our first cocktail hour in many days. We grilled burgers for dinner and relaxed on a quiet boat. We're probably not moving for a couple days so we have some extra sleep and downtime coming our way.
This was the subdued sunset from our quiet anchorage.
Saturday, October 14th (Day 7) - Sassafras River
Temp 50. Water temp 65. Light north winds
When I checked the weather forecast for today, it showed light rain (correct) and winds out of the south. It's now after noon while I writing the blog and the winds are still light out of the north. Hmmm... I just checked the forecast again and it changed to light east winds. If it had said that this morning, we might have moved south to maybe the Annapolis Area. Oh well. Not a problem to take the day off.
I slept 10 hours last night and woke up very refreshed. It always seem like to need "make up" sleep if I get short nights or early mornings. I needed that 10 hours of calm boat.
The boat was only 63 degrees this morning so I got up, turned on our heat to run off the inverter and batteries then went back to a warm bed. This takes a lot out of our batteries but we usually put it back in quickly running the engine. Crap. I just remembered we weren't going anywhere today and might be here 3 days. Plus, no Sun for our solar panels and no wind until tomorrow for our wind generator. We'll need those batteries.
I got up, threw on some sweats and went out to start the Honda generator. 5 minutes later it was running the heat plus charging the batteries when the heater thermostat turned off. Yea. Back to bed....
The boat warmed up nicely and I can't help but think how comfortable we've made our life over the past few years. After installing the "Easy Start", the generator can now run our heat just like a house furnace. All I need to do is add a couple quarts of gasoline every few hours and we have about 18 gallons on-board.
I decided to work on the blog (as you can see). Hope I was not too long-winded.
Laura read an article on-line this morning about "Procrast-a-baking" This is defined as "having a million things to do but deciding to bake something instead". She immediately started to bake and this was the result a few hours later. Maple Cinnamon rolls (no icing yet). Yikes! We don't have anyone around to share them with. We'll have to eat them all... (only kidding. We have freezer room after 5 days cruising).
Our plans are to head south down the bay on Monday, Tuesday and maybe Wednesday. We need to be in Reedville at our friends Walter and Mary's for personal business on Thursday and Friday. Then......
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