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/