We are underway northbound in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of New Jersey and bound for Manasquan Inlet and our next scheduled stop. We have basically been going non-stop since leaving Norfolk, making lots of miles each day and just stopping for the night. Skippers call this process of just getting the boat from point A to point B without taking in any of the intermediate stops a "delivery trip" (and there are professionals who do this sort of delivery for a living).
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| Barnegat Lighthouse, aka Old Barney. |
When last I posted here a week ago, I was still getting over the flu, and I am happy to report that is behind me, with the exception perhaps of some lingering fatigue. The trip has not been without incident, however, to wit, the starboard stabilizer fin has been malfunctioning, and evidently we picked up a lot of growth in the very warm water in Norfolk that is costing us over a half knot. In hindsight I am sorry I did not call I diver in my final week there, but I was so flat on my back with the flu that I just did not deal with it.
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| I sorted and stowed the "take-out" supplies from the life raft service. This is an even older water ration, from the last time I did this, which I replaced with the "new" take-outs. These go in our ditch bag. |
Thus last Tuesday turned out to be a much longer day than expected, taking us over ten hours to make Solomons. Arriving after 6, the best anchorage was full and we ended up going up the creek to our backup (map). We tendered to the Island Hideaway for dinner, where we asked for seats on the deck but were very shortly scrambling for cover due to a rain shower. We had a short walk after dinner.
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| Each half-liter pouch (one per person of liferaft capacity) contains ten individual 50ml servings. I tasted these, from 2007, before cutting them all open and dumping them. They were fine. |
Wednesday we got an early start for a fair tide, which let us go all the way past Annapolis to the Magothy River, a first for us. We dropped the hook just outside of Deep Creek (map). We tendered up the creek to Donelly's Dockside for dinner. They have a nice courtesy dock and the food was decent.
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| We passed this interesting mailbox, made from an old scuba cylinder, on our walk around Arnold from Donelly's Dockside. |
Thursday we left with the tide. The bay was quite choppy for most of the day, thankfully mostly behind us. We pressed on to the canal and whizzed to Chesapeake City with over a knot behind us. The entrance to the basin has again shoaled in, and we had just 8.3' on a tide of 1.8' as we made our way in. For the very first time ever in our history here, we found the basin completely devoid of anchored boats, and we had our pick of the best spot in the anchorage (map).
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| Vector all alone in the anchorage basin at Chesapeake City. A first for us. |
We splashed the tender right away and headed ashore for dinner at just 4:30 to beat a forecast rain storm. With temperatures pleasant we opted to eat at The Deck at the Chesapeake Inn, at a table well under cover. It did rain while we ate, but it was done by the time we headed home, and we managed to stay dry the whole evening.
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| Approaching Hope Creek generating station. The steam and the overcast might persuade you this was a cool, crisp day, but it was 94° with 74% relative humidity. |
Even on a delivery trip, pushing against the tide in the canal is not something we want to do, and so we had a free morning Friday while we waited on the current to reverse. I took the tender across the canal to Schaeffer's for gas, then landed back in town for a walk. The mercury was already headed into the 90s when I picked up a couple of breakfast sandwiches at Cafe on the Bay to bring home for brunch. I also took the time to finally clear the condensate drain for the pilothouse air conditioners; a quick shot of compressed air did the trick.
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| I kept getting CPA alarms for this tugboat, so I had to call him. He was driving in circles spreading shells on the bottom. You can see pumps blowing the shells off the barge with water jets. |
We weighed anchor at the turn of the tide, which corresponds to near dead low tide. I had sounded the entire entrance in the dinghy when I went for gas, so I knew we could just squeak out along the east bulkhead. As it happens, just as we were weighing anchor a passel of speedboats were making their way into the basin on a poker run. They swung past the docks at the Inn to grab a card and then headed right back out; I could see no end in sight so I made my Sécurité announcement and we used the Law of Gross Tonnage to make our way out. A down-east headed eastbound on the canal did not get the memo and nearly T-boned us before realizing he needed to change course; such an expensive boat not to have a radio.
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| Not what you ever want to see underway: both fins on the same side of center. Here the port fin is trying to lean us to port while the starboard fin is trying to lean us to starboard. |
We had a nice push out of the canal and part of the way down the bay. Normally we would just stop wherever we ran out of tide, but today we had to push on to the Cohansey River, because forecast westerlies overnight would have made the east side of the bay miserable, and we were still trying to put miles under the keel. Somehow in over a dozen years running the bay we have never had to go up this river, but today was the day.
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| Centering the fins reveals the port returns to center but the starboard is "stuck" in position, trying to lean us to starboard.. |
When we ran out of tidal push our speed dropped considerably. I attributed some of that to the dirty hull, and some to adverse tide, but there seemed to be more. When I looked at the stabilizers I could see the finicky starboard fin was actually "stuck" in the wrong position, with the computer using the port fin to compensate. The fins fighting each other like this likely cost another half knot or so, but there was little I could do about it out in the bay. We continued to the Cohansey, hoping for a quiet anchorage and maybe dinner ashore at the Bait Box restaurant at a marina a couple of miles upriver of our planned stop.
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| The difficult to access and even harder to manipulate terminal strip where the potentiometer and valve connect to the cable at the actuator. |
The adverse tide in the bay became a fair tide in the river, and we had the hook down at a comfortable spot in a bend (map) by 5:15. Our hopes of dinner ashore were dashed the minute we passed the mouth of the river, when a cloud of biting flies descended on the boat, covering every outdoor surface. It was all Louise could do to be out on deck, covered head to toe in the heat, long enough to set the hook. We had leftovers on board. After dinner I tore into the stabilizer, replacing the positioning potentiometer, a likely culprit, on the starboard fin.
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| Walking to the grocery store in Atlantic City is a stroll along the Monopoly board. Here I am at Baltic and Pennsylvania, but I also passed Vermont, Connecticut, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and New York. |
Saturday morning we had to push back out of the river but then had a fair tide most of the way down the bay, only having to push at the very end and through the Cape May Canal. The starboard fin behaved itself all day, leading me to believe the pot was the entire problem. We got a good spot in the anchorage (map) across from the Coast Guard station. The forecast said rain at 6, and so we headed ashore well ahead of that for our favorite joint, next to the boat ramp. Alas, it was not to be; the heavens opened just as we approached the dock, and we turned around like wet rats and went home to dry off and cobble something together from the pantry.
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| We also landed on Luxury Tax, another space on the board. There it is, just above the total. I think this is 3% on the beer. |
Our reservation in Brielle was set for Monday, but we need at least two days of good ocean weather to make it there from Cape May, and by Saturday night it was looking like we would have to hunker down for two full days, possibly right there in Cape May. But Sunday morning things looked barely acceptable to make a run for Atlantic City, and at the turn of the tide we poked our nose out the inlet. It was, indeed, just barely acceptable, and I had to curve around to follow the shoreline rather than the straight-line route that would take us out past the 3nm line.
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| The Borgate had a very yummy looking bake shop in its food court. |
We were both well past done with the sea state by the time we made Absecon Inlet. With a fair tide at both ends and a 7:20 start, we had the hook down early at 2:30 in our usual spot (map) and we each had a well-earned nap. At dinner time, Google told us our preferred eatery, the Back Bay Ale House, was "as busy as it gets," unsurprising on a pleasant weekend. The harbor itself had also been "as busy as it gets" all afternoon. Instead we tendered over to the casino, hoping to eat at The Deck, their waterfront venue. The live music, while good, was way too loud and we ended up inside at Dos Caminos, where the service was glacially slow. Also, the cigarette smoke from the casino does not respect the restaurant boundary.
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| Mostly alone again, in the Absecon anchorage. |
I much prefer to hunker down in Atlantic City than Cape May, but hunker down we did, with one more day to wait to continue our progress north. So Monday was something of a free day. We were out of lunch food, so I started my day with a walk across the Monopoly board to the Save-a-lot grocery store about a mile and a half from the Gardner Basin day dock. This is a terrible store, but the nicer Acme in Brigantine requires a bus ride in both directions. I filled my backpack and then caught a bus back to Gardner's, cutting the time in half since I had a half gallon of milk in my bag.
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| Still leaves open a lot of sporting possibilities. |
After lunch I tendered ashore and walked to the Borgata, something I have meant to do on every visit but somehow never managed. There are zero sidewalks between the two casinos, making for an, uhh, interesting walk. While it is tacky in the way that all casinos are tacky, it is much more upscale than the closer Golden Nugget or even Harrah's, between the two, with much nicer dining options. On some future visit it might be worth taking the Jitney over for dinner. Things were much quieter on a Monday evening and we had no trouble getting in to Back Bay Ale House.
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| Sign over the bar at Back Bay Ale House. This cracked us up, because seven digits after the decimal point is precision down to less than a hundredth of an inch. And I am pretty sure these coordinates are actually inside the aquarium. |
It is nominally a one-day run from Atlantic City to Manasquan Inlet, but in order to be able to dock we need to arrive at slack tide. That timing is much easier when broken into two legs, and so yesterday we set our sights on Barnegat Light. A fair tide at both ends would have had us leave Absecon Inlet at 10, but the forecast said the seas would be building all day and become untenable in the early afternoon, so we instead started to weigh anchor at 7:30. As soon as I turned on the stabilizers, however, the starboard fin was again back to its old tricks, after working OK for two days.
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| Barnegat Inlet from the top of Old Barney. It's calm; nothing like when we came in. |
I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to get the fin to center so I could pin it, feeling our weather window slipping away the whole time. Eventually I had to give up, cutting power to the solenoid and just letting the fin "freewheel" for the day. The port fin worked extra hard all day, but we managed well, right up until we were making our way into Barnegat Inlet. We had nearly three knots against us in the channel, which caused our speed to drop to the point where the fin centered. The boat took some serious rolls in the turbulent inlet before either of us noticed the fins were not working, likely because we expected the lone fin to be less effective to begin with. Things got much better when I over-rode the speed sensor.
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| Looking back to the anchorage. Vector is just above center frame. |
We dropped the hook in a wide spot off channel, just outside a handful of moorings (map). On our last visit I wrote there were so many moorings here that it was nearly impossible to anchor, but this time it was fine. We tendered over to the town boat ramp and walked to Kubel's for dinner, which was quite good. Afterward we took a short stroll. The starboard fin ended its day in a position where I was able to center it manually with my spud wrench and get the pin in for the next leg, and Craig from Stabilized Marine gave me some pointers for further troubleshooting.
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| The old mechanism, now fixed in place, from the original Fresnel lens. The light still operates, now with a modern rotating beacon. |
Today's slack arrival to Manasquan meant leaving Barnegat Light at 11:30, and so I took the morning to take a longer walk and climb to the top of the eponymous lighthouse, affectionately known as "Old Barney." The boat ramp had an attendant during the day, who collects the ramp fee, and he had no issue with me leaving the dinghy there. On my way back to the boat I stopped at the Inlet Deli, clearly the town meeting spot, and picked up a couple of breakfast sandwiches for brunch. We are finally back in the land of decent bagels.
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| Lightkeeper sculpture, installed in 2019 when the lighthouse turned 160. |
Today's conditions have been very benign, which is good considering we are still running on one fin, like Nemo. In a short while we will make the inlet, when I will have to set this aside for photo placement. We expect to be here at least a week and maybe closer to two before we continue north to New York. My next post will be underway on that leg, whenever it is.
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| Some sort of rescue squad training exercise was going on in the anchorage. I think this is an aircraft life raft and not a maritime one; the put about a dozen rescue workers in yellow helmets in it. |
Update: We are docked at Hoffman's Marina in Brielle (map). I was unable to get the photos done before we arrived, and I've been going great guns since the minute we tied up, so I am just now getting back to it on a rainy afternoon. I'm going to just go ahead and post this, and I will pick up from our arrival here in the next post.
