Sailing Baby Blue

It's Thursday and we are sitting outside Sandy Hook in New Jersey, bored out of our minds. We arrived here early Tuesday afternoon. Jon slept for the rest of the day (the night before was too rough to sleep well) and I read Mockingjay . That was it for Day 1. On Day 2, I finished a painting, read The House on Mango Street , did some sewing, and played the guitar for an hour while Jon cooked for us, planned our route, and finished Before the Wind . Now it's Day 3. We moved to a better spot to anchor out of the swell, but the wind continues to howl even though the rain has died down and we can't get to shore. We played cards, we played chess, we played bananagrams. We listened to Fresh Air. We tried AcroYoga on the boat. (No surprise, it didn't work.) We wished our inverter wasn't broken so we could charge the laptop and watch a DVD or charge the phone and listen to the new Margaret Atwood book, Stone Mattress . All of that to give you an idea of ou...

We left our last unremarkable Connecticut anchorage on the Long Island Sound and headed to New York City on Friday morning. The wind was coming straight out of the Southwest where we needed to go, so we motored the whole way there. We could see the smog and the skyline of the city from hours away.   Some Connecticut swans swimming near a parking lot. City/Smog We passed City Island, where we had originally planned to anchor, early in the day and saw just how far it was from Manhattan. When we started out that morning we thought we would find a place to anchor for the night to await the right time to pass through Hell Gate without any problems. Ideally we would need to go at high slack tide, either around 7:30pm (in the dark) or the next morning at 7:30am, so that the current would help push us the rest of the way down the East River. But since we were only about an hour and a half away from Hell Gate and low slack tide, we thought we would just go for it and could alwa...

From Cape Cod to the Long Island Sound, the wind has cooperated in getting us quickly to each destination. We have been doing our part, not pressing our luck by sitting out the rainy and windy days. We spent two such days in Onset, MA where we took only two photos:   Some hydrangeas on someone's front lawn.   Guess which one of us saw this and said, "Spooky Halloween House," and which said, "Look, a meth lab." There was not a lot going on. We saw a lot of seasonal closure signs so it was probably just our timing because the beaches looked lovely, but with the wind and rain we decided to stay confined inside the boat. When the weather cleared we crossed Buzzard's Bay to Hadley Harbor where we spent a calm night before a quick 7 mile trip to Martha's Vineyard. Though we hadn't thought we would go out of our way to see Martha's Vineyard, when I saw one of the little gingerbread houses in our guidebook, I pretty much insisted. We ...

The morning after we arrived in Provincetown we spent a couple hours putting the boat back together, then went to go find out what the damage was for spending the night on the rental mooring. We found out while asking around about moorings that most of the boating crowd clears out after Labor Day, hence the mostly empty harbor that surprised us when we pulled in. Because the harbor was shutting down for the season, when we found the guy in charge of our mooring he told us not to worry about paying the nightly fee. We were very grateful to save the $45 and went off to anchor for the remainder of our stay. Depending on the time of the day the streets were still full of life despite the cooling fall weather. Many shops and restaurants had already closed down for the season, and we were disappointed not to be able to get a burger from Burger Queen. Despite the blur you can see the state of disarray in our cabin and our damp gear that took a couple days to fully dry out. ...

So this is a little out of order but I wanted to write about some of our projects and changes we made to the boat to get ready to leave Maine. At first we thought we would wait on self-steering gear until we were further along on our trip as there shouldn't be much need for it on the ICW. But when we found a used Monitor for about $2000 less than a new one we couldn't resist. It just needed some minor adjustments to fit it to our boat. Check out this windy video to see it at work:  Unfortunately we were not able to get much assistance from the Monitor for our long sleepless trip across the Gulf of Maine, as we had large following seas the entire time which are difficult conditions for a self-steering vane to cope with.  Our boat came with two anchors: a Bruce and a light weight anchor. You can never have too many anchors and while we have had no issues with the Bruce holding we decided to add a larger Rocna as our primary anchor. The Rocna looked good from revi...

By the sheer will of my superhuman husband we made it to Cape Cod, but it was far from the ideal first overnighter we were hoping for. We left Rockport around 6:30am on Tuesday while the wind was blowing hard and the waves rocked us around. Since the weather was supposed to improve, the plan was to travel into better conditions. I hadn't been expecting quite such jarring conditions, and the anxiety I had been suppressing about making the trip reared its head and told me that I, in fact, was not at all ready. But not wanting to spend a year in Rockport, we at least needed to get moving South and would decide whether we could make it to our destination after we got to Monhegan Island. By 9:00am things were looking up and as I steered us downwind at speeds I was formerly uncomfortable with, my outlook also improved. To aid our decision about how to proceed, we obsessively listened to the radio weather forecast which had morphed into a small craft advisory for everywhere along th...