Back to Normal?

 

Pictures: 

You can see this carousel from the water when you go down the East River, New York City; another NYC surprise is a tram that you can see if you look carefully at bridge in this picture, about half-way along, the Roosevelt Island Tram; Bonnie and a friend at the Milford Yacht Club; a schooner charter out for a sunset sail in Newport (when they tacked they passed us within 15 ft. of our cockpit!); the beautiful deep waters off of Castle Inn, leaving Newport; Heidi and Ken safely home and having Mother's Day lunch at Pete's house in Braintree.

Normal for us on our cruise was conserving water, cooking fuel, and electricity. We have a 43 gallon water tank and three spare containers of water, about 16 gallons more. Our cooking fuel is alcohol and has to be hauled aboard along with everything else, so we are careful with not choosing food that has to be cooked too long. We use quite a few battery-operated lights and a radio that cranks, in addition to our boat’s wired-in lighting and radio/CD player.  Our solar panels work extremely well to charge our boat battery, but of course not when it’s raining so we have to have back-ups. The boat battery and hot water heater both get charged when we are running our engine but then when we don’t go anywhere we can run both down.

Getting home we are adjusting to the land-based normal. No more hauling the anchor each morning before getting under way. No more closely checking the weather for three days out and planning our itinerary accordingly. Our Skipper Bob guide to anchoring sites can go away for a while, after helping us find some great places to spend the night and sending us in the right direction ashore to find groceries and hardware stores. We are back to the big-screen TV, the thermostat to control our house heat, mail getting delivered to our door, cars to take us to run errands. It all seems very weird!

RISING TIDE brought us safely back to Duxbury last Monday, May 7, though the Cape Cod Canal against the current, but we found it pretty easy going by staying near to the edge where the current was less. We had four days of traveling after leaving northern New Jersey. We pushed it the last day because rain was predicted to come in for several days, and it did! Those last four days were perfectly beautiful, and the wind was not a factor, so we had “smooth sailing”. We went from NJ through New York City, a wonderful route on the East River, with hardly any other boat traffic, to City Island, NY. The next day we stopped in Milford, CT. After that we had a long day to Newport, RI, but were glad to get there as it’s a protected harbor with more going on than most at this time of year. And from there to Duxbury.

At the City Island anchorage we were reunited with friends Kitty and Scot on TAMURE. We hadn’t seen them since last fall when we left Atlantic Highlands, NJ to go south slowly on the ICW and they left to sail outside in long hops to Charleston, SC. They eventually continued on to the Bahamas and returned to Atlantic Highlands on May 4 on the morning after we got to Atlantic Highlands. They had the same plan for that day as us, to transit the East River in mid-afternoon to catch the favorable current in the dangerous part, Hell Gate. We enjoyed getting together with them that night for several hours, comparing notes about the winter travels and about plans for the future. Their next stop, the next day, was home in Rowayton, CT.

Our stop in Milford, CT was scheduled as a chance to show the former owner, Bonnie, what improvements we have made to RISING TIDE. We got guest dockage at Bonnie’s yacht club, and also got to attend a Cinco de Mayo party there with her and her friends. Since we have stayed in touch and tried to connect with Bonnie in Florida (our schedules conflicted) it was great to make it work this time.

Our very last day of our cruise was last Friday, May 11 when we moved RISING TIDE to Cohasset, which is a 12 mile car ride but a 25 mile boat trip due to the long trip out of Duxbury and Plymouth Harbors. It’s difficult to sum up the seven months we spent cruising and exploring the East Coast, Florida Keys, and part of the Florida Gulf Coast; but we are definitely glad for the opportunity and we now have memories of innumerable towns and cities in this area along with lots of wildlife and many great people that we met.

PS Check out the website, below, for a young British man who is rowing from Miami to New York right now! It is a fund-raiser for Alzheimer's Disease. We didn't meet him as he was a few weeks behind us, but he has been making great progress on his trip.
http://www.iamfinechallenge.org/wp/

Chesapeake Bay and New Jersey Shore

Pictures: Kids at an "old-fashioned"authentic soda fountain in Rock Hall, MD; a mallard pair in Annapolis; we were headed to the red-roofed building, part of a maritime museum, in Solomon's Island, MD (we had to go around!); returning to our dinghy after a grocery-shopping walk in Manansquan, NJ; sunset view from our anchorage near Atlantic City (the boat on the right is a cruiser from Maine)

Usually having to see a dentist is not the highlight of your day. But in Deltaville, VA, just before we were to head north, Heidi had an issue with a orthodontic retainer and needed it re-cemented.  Very luckily a dentist was located nearby who could do this, even though it was his day off. He and his wife live on a plantation looking out over the Rappahanock River and he only works in Deltaville for one day normally, with 3 other days in Richmond. Dr. Suyes cheerfully completed the repair in a “cottage” office on his property and then he and his wife sat and talked with me for another half hour. This in a town that probably doesn’t have more than a thousand residents, on a Friday afternoon, and with transportation based on bicycles. We all found we had a lot in common and enjoyed hearing about each other’s travels.  

Since leaving Deltaville we have been putting some miles in. The weather has been mostly chilly and grey, and we’ve had our share of rain, although it has come mostly at night. We know we are a little too early in the season to fully enjoy the Chesapeake and NJ shore, but we are hoping to get home by mid May.

The route we have taken, staying inside of the bays, following canals, and behind the Jersey beach towns has put us in touch with many of the birds that are mating and nesting at this time of year. It has been interesting to watch nests being built by osprey, an excess of male mallards being shunned by female mallards that have already paired, and egrets showing off their beautiful mating feathers. We also have seen an abundance of butterflies, most likely red admirals.

There are few other cruisers. Some of the other boaters we stay in touch with are still in Florida or the Bahamas. We did get in the middle of crew practice for a high school near Atlantic City. There were about a dozen rowing shells with about 8 coaches in their own boats buzzing around one 5 mile stretch. The rowers had to stop to avoid us and we had to zig zag to avoid them. Also in this stretch were 4 bridges that we had to get opened as they were too low for us to go under.

We spent an extra day in Solomon’s Island, Maryland and two extra days in Annapolis. Both places have museums, good restaurants, and good resources for boaters. We met another cruising sailboat in Annapolis, from Texas, that is completing the Great Loop, heading next up the Hudson and to the Great Lakes.  The other towns we visited for a short time were Rock Hall, MD,  Delaware City, DE, and Manasquan NJ (a lot like Scituate, MA).

We expect to transit through New York City’s East River later today, after we fuel up in Atlantic Highlands N,J and wait to catch the favorable current through the tricky area called Hell’s Gate just after Manhattan. If all goes well the next blog post will be from Duxbury or Cohasset, MA!