Manhattan to (almost) the Chesapeake Bay

The next day (Friday) turned out to be sunny with gentle winds so off we go to the East River that takes us right next to Manhattan and out to the ocean.  It's always interesting to go this route as you pass Rikers Island prison and for overflow they have the biggest prison ship in the world.  The best part is going past all the high rise apartments and office towers.  After going past Manhattan with ferries going every which way and low flying helicopters going from Manhattan to the airport we headed out to the ocean.

We got out on the ocean about 4:00 PM and headed down the New Jersey coast.  My watch was from 10-2 AM so I had a wee nap beforehand.  By my 10 PM watch I could see the bright lights of Atlantic City way off in the distance.   Our night went smoothly and as dawn approached we were starting to cross Delaware Bay.  The weather reports said we would have favoring winds that would be no more than 20 knots.  We had a nice day sailing but about 4:00 PM Dixie informed us that the weather was changing for the worse and that we should duck into Ocean City and ride out the storm for the next day.  I looked at the weather reports I had and they said we should be ok since the bad weather would be south of us.  So wanting to get to Norfolk and thinking we were ok we continued on...i.e. we didn't take Dixie's wise advice.

As darkness came the winds changed direction from what the weather reports said and also increased in velocity.  Well to say the least we had a wild night...huge waves and winds up to 30 knots.  We had a real problem making headway so progress was very slow.  We had both our sails up since we thought the winds were going to be reasonable.  The main sail was just flapping in the wind and causing real problems so we eventually decided it had to come down.  So poor John had to go out in this bouncing fury and pull it down and tie it up. The other problem was that on the Delaware coast there is no where to duck in and hide so we had to just keep going with waves breaking over the bow and coming right up over our dodger and then over the back of the boat.  Not much sleep this night.  We pounded on and by daybreak we were near the Chesapeake Bay.  Only problem was now we turned and were heading straight into the huge waves and the wind was still above 20 knots.

Slowly we made our way up the Chesapeake and decided to stop short of Norfolk at the first marina.  Were we glad to get into a nice quiet slip.  Captain John did an incredible job!