The Adventure Begins

The Adventure begins … or maybe it just continues.
It seems as if we have been on an adventure ever since we decided to make the trip. Just getting the house in shape to sell and then (when it did not sell) renting it was its' own adventure. We listed the rental in Craig's list and had a number of people looking. Within two weeks we had it rented and had exactly one month to move out. By the end of the month we had moved out of the house proper and were living in the Apartment. It took another month to get stuff moved out of the Garage.
Monday, May 31 – Memorial Day
Closed up the house and left with the pickup truck bed filled to the top with boxes of stuff for the boat.
That is after we already loaded everything we thought we needed on board the day before. Last year when we left it looked like an explosion in a Walmart inside. Last week it looked like an explosion in a Home Depot. This time when we left it looked as if the moving van was emptied in to the main cabin. There were boxes and bags everywhere. I would have taken a picture, but we could not find the camera. We knew where it was, it was buried under the boxes and we could not get there.
We did get under way about one o'clock and had an uneventful trip to Cape May.
Having to establish a Buffalo Wing Baseline for this trip, it was necessary to have dinner at C-View. Also got to watch the Flyers Stanley Cup game after Carole beat on the bartender to change the channel. He kept pleading that he needed to take care of customers. Like we were just bystanders.

Tuesday, June 1 – Skinny Water - Cape May to Atlantic City
Hot and humid. We wound our way through the shallows and marshes of the New Jersey ICW (inland waterway). Kicked up mud several times, but nothing serious. Stayed at Gardner's Basin. $1.50/ft. This year sure beats the $4.00/ft. We paid last year at Trump Castle Marina. Of course there are no showers at Gardner's, but $90.00 for a shower is a little steep.




Wednesday, June 2, - Muddy Water - Atlantic City to Brielle, NJ (Manesquan Inlet)
Hot and Hazy, no wind. Visibility about a mile – that lasted for about 1 hr. and then the fog dropped in. Visibility went to about 200 ft. We could not see from one channel marker to the next. If the channel in the marsh was narrow enough we could see the banks, but sometimes there were no banks to see and the deep area was only 50 ft. wide. The GPS on the chart plotter was fortunately very accurate – mostly. We were traveling in water only about 1ft. Deeper than our boat needs to float, and inevitably we did get stuck in the mud. It took about ten minutes to find deeper water and get moving again. The fog finally lifted and we made decent progress. The gremlins were not done with us yet! Just past the Beach Haven inlet we were running outside the channel in what the charts (three of them) showed as 12' of water when we ran aground. This time pretty hard on a sand bar. “Serendipity” came to our rescue again. Just as I realized that we were really stuck Tow Boat US came by. In five minutes were off and on our way again. I expect that he patrolled that area since after he freed us he just hung around that spot. I will say that when other boats called him to ask about that area (the markers are confusing – as well as the mismarked shoal) he told them where the deeper water was.
The rest of the day was uneventful and when we pulled in to Brielle Yacht Club we met another Looper Boat that had just made the same trip from Atlantic City. They took 3 days to do it and only traveled on high tide so never touched bottom. I later learned that they followed a boat that had 1 ft. less draft that constantly radioed them where the deeper water was.

Thursday, June 3 – Ocean Voyage - Manesquan to Atlantic Highlands.
So far we have not taken much time put stuff away. On the ICW it took both of us to navigate much of the time. When we left Manesquan we thought being out on the Ocean (it was fairly calm and there is not much to see) that we might get some stuff done. Once again we departed with 1 mile visibility and when we got to the Ocean the fog was so thick we were lucky to see the front of the boat. With radar and no worry about shallow water we were able to keep going. We did however keep both of us on watch.
The sun came out as we approached Sandy Hook and we got to Atlantic Highlands easily.
The docks at Atlantic Highlands SUCK. They are fixed docks and with a six foot tide we had to climb a ladder to get to the dock at low tide. Annie needed to use her ramp from the deck box on the back of the boat to the dock.

Friday, June 4 – Clean up the mess day.
Eileen and Sal (sister and Brother-in -law) were coming up that night and we were going out to dinner at a bar/restaurant that a friend just opened. We took the opportunity to sort out much of what we had on the boat and sent back four boxes of stuff that we either did not need or were duplicates of things we already had on board but did not remember. They say that the first thing to go is your knees - boy are "they" wrong.
We had a great dinner at Twin Light Bar in Highlands with Eileen and Sal. Our friend Mark also gave us a beer sampling. They have about 15 beers on tap.
When they left that night we only had one layer of boxes, bags and crates to put away!

Saturday, 5 June – The Back Side of Manhattan - Atlantic Highlands to Nyack, NY
I was surprised that NY Harbor and the Lower Bay were empty of boats. On a beautiful Saturday morning there should have been a thousand arrogant NY Boaters out there trying run us down (Sorry New Yorker's, but that has been my experience every other time I was there). We decided to take the long way past Manhattan and went up the East River to the Harlem River and on to the Hudson below Yonkers. A different trip. The Harlem river not very spectacular, but it was certainly interesting. The trip goes by Yankee Stadium, Columbia and several other interesting buildings. One big surprise we got was that the tidal current in the Harlem River runs opposite both the Hudson and the East Rivers. We were doing 9 kts in the East River and 4.5 kts. in the Harlem and then 8 in the Hudson.

We finished the day on a mooring at the Nyack Boat Club. They have a launch service that took us (and Annie) to shore. Wind picked up a bit that night and we did drag their mooring about twenty feet.

Sunday, 6 June – Stormy Weather -Nyack to Peekskill
Bad weather forecast so we hightailed it to Peekskill. With several phone calls we were able to secure a dock. Peekskill Yacht Club is run by the members. They have no paid staff, so it can be difficult to find someone to get a dock for the night. Lat year we made some friends there and I had phone numbers. We got there early and with difficulty tied up securely. It was a floating dock and we had to back in to it. I could not back all of the way in as our keel was catching on the bubbler pipe. We got in far enough so that we could get off the side of the swim platform. Annie was another story. The Annie ramp training took about 15 minutes, with me holding the ramp with my arm while Annie would start on it and then back off. With a lot of coaxing she finally went down the ramp. I then had to reposition it so that she could get off the side of the swim platform on to the dock. At some point I will get pictures of this. The next time she did not hesitate and in fact she did not wait for me to even get a good grip on the ramp. I almost dropped her. Now when I go down the stern ladder to the swim platform she is right there waiting for me to set it up!
We went for a walk. I wanted to find a bar that would have the Stanley Cup Game that night. On the way back we got to the yacht club parking lot when the front came through. We stood in a shed and watched the rain fly by horizontally. Wind was blowing about 40 kts. With gusts as high as 55. All boats were secure and after the rain stopped we went back to the boat. Wind did not let up until about 11 that night.
Our plan was to stay there and rent a car to visit the Storm King Art Center. It turns out they are closed on Monday and Tuesday. So on to plan B!
End of week one!