JUNE 7 - 19 THE FINAL 500

One of the Victorians in Cape May, NJ, now an inn



Dock at Fishers Island, NY



Dacey onboard and posing in front of the Statue of Liberty



Atlantic City Life Guards at the beach (note the fog rolling in on the right)

Jun 7 Leaving Annapolis with our friend Ann Dacey (from West Virginia) we found good weather for the first few days. We also reconnected with ANDROS, a boat from upstate New York that we first met in these waters back in October. There is a new boat, PAVITI TERN, that was in Annapolis and is going the same way we are, destination Westport, MA. Mike, the skipper, is single-handing, and his boat is a 1930s classic sailboat.

June 11 We have arrived in Atlantic City, the best stop before we sail overnight for Block Island. From here we plan to clear two of the shipping lanes outside of New York City before dark and then will just have to pass through one more in the night.

But first, we need to get good weather to leave for a 160 mile trip to the northeast, and even though it is sunny and warm, the wind is coming from the north and then from the east, and that is not good. We ended up in Atlantic City for four days.

Dacey and I are making the best of our visit to the Jersey shore. We took a self-guided tour of the Victorian houses in Cape May the day before we got to Atlantic City, and have been to the casinos, the boardwalk, and the beach in AC. With Ken and Mike (PAVITI TERN) we’ve found some good seafood and beer near the Aquarium docks and there are groceries across the river near the St.George Thoroughfare. There is also a good anchorage there (St. George Thor.), within sight of the casinos but out of most of the traffic.

June 15 We finally left Atlantic City with a east-south-east wind and sailed overnight under a pink half-moon (it came up at 12:45 am and then got covered by clouds at 2 am). We avoided the traffic in the shipping lanes, but we couldn’t get to Block Island due to the wind changing to be more north east as the wee hours passed. At 8 am Ken decided to re-direct to New York City. It might have been dark on the second day before we reached land if we had continued the way we were going. But even going to NYC it took us until 6:30 pm to get just outside the harbor and anchor off of Sandy Hook, in northern New Jersey.

June 17 To get some rest and to catch the best current we slept in and started through the passage to get through New York Harbor in mid-day. It was mostly cloudy but there was almost no traffic (except the Staten Island Ferries which seem to go every 15 minutes!) and we were fascinated by the sights, passing the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the whole east side of Manhattan, La Guardia Airport, etc. This was definitely an interesting day, even though this part of the trip was unplanned. We ended up anchoring for the night off of Long Island, in a shallow cove all by ourselves. Dacey has found her niche as a wonderful ship’s cook and she prepared another delicious dinner for us.

June 18 This was our best day for sailing of all the days Dacey has been on board. We had a good wind, Long Island Sound was flat, and even though it rained most of the day, we made good progress and sailed between the Connecticut shore and the Long Island shore until we got to Fishers Island. We really like Fishers Island! It looks like a small Cape or Maine town, just a couple dozen boats in West Harbor, and friendly people on shore. We got to stay for the night at the fuel dock as they had just closed, and a passerby offered a ride to wherever we needed to go. Dacey can connect up with a sister who is driving through Connecticut this evening if she takes the ferry to New London. We’ll miss her, but she has been onboard for 12 days and she has a family party to get to in Massachusetts.

Fishers Island has 200 year-round inhabitants and 4000 summer residents, we were told by another friendly islander that gave us a ride to the Pequot Inn after Dacey left. Some of the summer people have filtered in at this point, enough to make the Inn a “happening” place on a Thursday night. The bar/restaurant reminded me of a ski lodge and yacht club dining room combined.

June 20 We motored into Duxbury Harbor at 8:15 pm today, completing our 8 month trip in drizzle but good visibility. We plan to get RISING TIDE hauled out and
paint the bottom in the coming week. The weather is threatening to be a full-blown nor’easter for a few days so we are happy to be in a snug harbor. The past two days took us through Newport where we stopped for one night but didn’t go ashore. The weather in this period was very foggy and we had to cross ferry lanes to Block Island but by mid-day today it had cleared. We couldn’t stop in Mattapoisett as we had planned (Onset as a second choice also was scrapped because of the impending storm). The current in the Cape Cod Canal was favorable and we made good time from Newport to Duxbury.

We’ll be reassessing our future trips as we adjust to mostly shore life for the next few months. We had a good boat to take this voyage in and we (the crew) held up, for the most part, through good and bad weather. The last three weeks were the most challenging mentally as we approached the end of the journey and had difficult weather conditions to cope with. Gone are the days of consistent warmth and no rain, returning us to New England’s ever-changing weather. As we put our socks and shoes back on and pull out the slickers from the hanging locker, we end our trip and wonder what the future will bring.

MAY 28 - JUNE 6 The “Rising Tide Awards”

Crab buyer on the docks, Oxford, MD, with blue crabs



Crab lunch in Oxford, MD with all the fixins'



Kids getting briefed before their trip on a "pirate boat" in Annapolis


AWARDS

Most Memorable: sailing in light air across the clearest water ever, the Bahama Bank east of Bimini, for a day and a half in crystal clear water, seeing only a few boats in the distance and sand, starfish, and small silver fish below us

Best Harbor or Anchorage: Faber Cove near Ft. Pierce Inlet, FL

Best Food: tie for conch salad in George Town, Exumas (all freshly made while you watch) and fish fry in Green Turtle Cay, Abacos, put on by the church youth group

Best Marina: Bohicket Creek Marina, South Carolina

Best Laundromat: free one, for boaters, at Charleston Maritime Center, SC, where we watched preparations for an outdoor wedding while we did the wash

Best Live Music: Bahamian Junkanoo bands, they perform at Christmas and New Years in Nassau, as a parade, and various other times of the year as individual bands (we watched one in George Town, Exumas)

Most Feared Waters: Alligator River entrance at south end of Albermarle Sound, NC

Worst Guidebook: Pavlidis’ “The Exuma Guide”, 2007 edition with numerous references to “this may change after 1999.…”

Best Guide: Explorer Charts (with annotations for groceries, laudromats, fuel, etc.) for the three different areas of the Bahamas

Most Likely to Go Back To: Eastern Shore Maryland to explore some more; but if we “win the lottery” we’d fly to the Exumas to see the annual April “Family Regatta“, the locals’ sailing festival and races that we missed this year

Good Samaritan Award: Brian on GOTTA LIFE who saw us aground, anchored his sailboat and came over with his daughter sounding the surrounding water, in his dinghy, to pull us off in the Matanzas River, near St. Augustine

All-Star Support Team: Mike Powers for keeping Belva and Ken Sr. up to date with our blog, Captain John Campbell for sending engine parts, etc., Steve Ward for phone advice and providing parts, our son Pete for forwarding mail and taking care of our house

On-The-Spot-Help When You Need It Award: Barry and Susan Perkins on SWAN who returned again (and again) to Key Biscayne while our engine was disabled and helped us to move RISING TIDE between anchorage and sea wall as needed

Best Local Business: Sun Electronics (solar panels and related products), Miami

Worst Local Business: West Marine, various locations

Encouragement Award: Frank and Linda Cassidy, veterans of this route (and much further travels) who got us interested in the Bahamas in the first place



May 28 We have just a few places left to visit that are new to us before we retrace our steps through Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. We crossed the Chesapeake to Oxford, Maryland on the Eastern Shore, in the Choptank River. We also visited St. Michaels, Maryland, which was not far if we stayed in the Choptank, slipped into Broad Creek and then anchored in San Domingo Creek. Both towns are full of older 1700s and 1800s buildings, restaurants, boat yards, and crab fishermen. Oxford is a little smaller, and St. Michaels has a museum on the waterfront with several buildings and quite a few boats in the water and on land that they are exhibiting.

One of the boat yards, in Oxford, has an interesting method of building and repairing wooden boats. They use Kevlar rope instead of frames and it is set in a perpendicular routed groove in the wood planking and fiberglassed over. This yard, Cutts and Case, also has a lot of wooden boats in their yard, and they even have the power boat FOTO on display. It’s the boat the famous photographer Morris Rosenfield used (around the mid 1900s?).

We thoroughly enjoyed the area, and were treated to a lot of bird activity (one swan flew by at the same time each morning just before sunrise -- they make an unusual sound as they fly) and we learned a lot about the oystering and crabbing in the area.

June 2 (Tuesday) Our friend Ann Dacey is coming from West Virginia to join us for our last week of sailing. We positioned ourselves in Annapolis today and plan on completing a few projects while we are here, before she arrives on Saturday. The weather is very warm today, and the wind is light. The forecast is for thunderstorms each afternoon this week and by Thursday it should get cooler.

We are anchored in Back Creek which runs alongside Eastport, which is to Annapolis as Cambridge is to Boston. We can walk across Eastport in about 15 minutes and cross a bridge into Annapolis. Both places are interesting, and Eastport has a good share of funky houses and local restaurants/bars. When we bought RISING TIDE in 2003 it was at a marina in Back Creek.

June 5 Lots of rain today. Nonetheless it is laundry day and we loaded up our dinghy with laundry bags and headed to the main harbor in Annapolis. We’ll bring the clean, dry clothes back in plastic trash bags to keep it dry. The nice thing about doing laundry while cruising is you often get in a good place where you can go have a drink at a pub while the laundry washes, check out some of the shops while it dries, and then since you’re already “in town” you can stay and have dinner out. If there are at least 2 washers and 2 dryers this can be done with a minimum of time actually spent in the laundromat. Since we have still been wearing mostly shorts, tank tops and no shoes, two loads every two weeks just about does it!

We walked quite a bit today, probably 3-4 miles. We used the bus system in Annapolis for part of our traveling, but the traffic was backed up so we found walking was actually faster as the Friday afternoon influx was jamming the roads. A single-hander on a wooden sailboat (PAVITI TERN) from Westport, Mass. joined us in our travels today after we met him in the laundromat.

June 6 We’re getting ready to leave tomorrow for Chesapeake City near the Delaware/Maryland border.