Day 78: A long but much better day!

5/29/18:  This was our earliest hop out yet!  Alarm was set for 4:30, with a departure from the dock scheduled for 5:00am.  Sheesh!  The sun doesn’t even wake up all the way until 5:34 today here in Atlantic City NJ.

There were 4 other boats leaving here at 5:00, which seemed like a good idea.  We have over 90 miles to go today, and we’re hoping to save fuel and go slow (8-9mph) the whole day.  Fuel prices get higher the farther north we go, so if we can go slow and burn half the fuel of going fast, that seems like a good idea. So yes, we decided that we would join the 5:00 parade.  We were the last ones out of the marina, following Phanthom, Exhale, Vagabond, and Meander.  

The water was as calm as could be here in the marina.  It seems such a shame to pay a high marina price and not even use the bathroom here!  Here was our departing shot.  Good Morning and Adios Golden Nugget.

The tide was coming in, so that gave us a little bit of current to fight going out the channel.  But once we got out onto the ocean, it was surprisingly calm!  YAHOOOOO!   There were some gentle swells, but no wind and no waves or seas on top of them.  There was a bit of fog.  There is a little dolphin tail in the center of this picture.  We travelled with this view for a few hours.

I use an app on the iPad called ‘nebo’.  It is a boat tracking app.  It provides an actual track of our path for the day, total miles and time travelled, and some other info.  It also provides an internet link that shows our location at any time, which has been nice for us to share with our kids.  Another benefit is that when other users make their profile visible, other nebo users can see them.  So this was fun to see who was moving and where they were going today.  Three of the five boats we were with were using it today.  Here we were, before Phanthom left us in the dust.  He travels at 10 mph.

Our view changed to this for several more hours.  There are three boats in front of us, spread across the screen (hard to see, I know).  It was a much better day on the ocean today.  Gentle swells for about half the day that smoothed out to just a basic day on any large body of water.  Some waves, some small swells, and it was easy to go up and down the ladder!  So everybody got coffee refills, potty breaks, lunch, snacks – because the flight attendant could move about the cabin without injury.  YAY!

We saw lots of resorty areas along the Jersey shore.  This was near the northern end, and this is the first hill, or land elevation above sea level that we have seen from the water since the banks along the Potomac River.

Right after I took this picture, we heard on the radio ‘Island Girl, Island Girl, Kara Mia’.  Captain replied – ‘This is Island Girl, go ahead Kara Mia.’  We hear Ron come back – ‘Hey, I’m coming up on your stern, looking to slow pass on your port’.  SERIOUSLY?!  Woohoo!  Long story short is that they got their props put on and were back in the water this morning.  And it was now just about 3:00, and they had travelled all the way from Cape May (~135 miles?) at 30mph on this nice calm ocean, and caught up with us!  We are so happy for them, because after today, there won’t be another good ocean travel day for awhile.  Great to see them!  And they took a nice picture of us!  Here is Island Girl cruising on the Atlantic Ocean!

Soon we turned west around the north end of the Jersey shore at Sandy Hook, and then we were in the lower New York Harbor.  We expected it to be really busy with boats and ferries, but we’ve seen way worse in Tacoma Washington.  Maybe the inner harbor will be crazy nuts, but this was really quiet.

As we headed west across the harbor, we could see lots of buildings to the north.  This isn’t Manhattan, but it is the Brooklyn area of New York City.  It was still pretty foggy hazy!

We are getting daily geography lessons on this trip!  The red arrow is where and the direction that I took the picture.  And the blue line shows how New York gets ownership of Staten Island and separates it from New Jersey.   There’s a little blue dot in the middle bottom of Staten Island – that’s us.  So we won’t see Manhattan from the water until we go up the Hudson River a ways.

We found our way in to Great Kills Yacht Club.  It is a private club over 100 years old, but one of the members helps Loopers get overnight slips here.  We had made a reservation with John, the harbor host last week.  As we were headed north today, I called him to let him know we were on our way.  UH OH!  They actually only have two transient slips.  The rest of the slips are leased to yacht club members.  When those are empty, they put transients like us in them.  The ‘owner’ of the slip that he was going to put us in decided to put his own boat in the water, so now what?  He could put us in another one that only had one power plug-in, but we need two.  Or we could go to the marina next door.  Captain said we could make things work sufficiently with only one plug-in.

Island Girl is 14’ wide.  I think the slip he put us in is 14’6” wide.  It was a tight fit, but Captain did a great job just being patient while the breeze floated us along to get lined up, and then inching her in.  And then, John said he thought he had a pig-tail power cord that would take our two plug-ins down to one.   Sweet!  We just can’t run too much stuff all at once.  No problem!  A couple more boats came into the marina after us;  some we’ve met before, some new.  After dinner, we all got together on the dock for some docktails, sharing stories and getting to know each other.  Our Aussie friends Clive & Ann on Someday were here, and we met Gold Loopers Bru & Sandy on Coconuts.  Always a great bunch of people, these loopers!

I’m glad our big ocean travel is done.  Today was a perfect day out there.  Thank you to the One who blessed us with it.  Tomorrow we’ll do a little touristy stuff… we’ll see how that goes with my city-adverse Captain.  😉