Premature evacuation

We are underway southbound in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of NJ. And by just off, I mean we are hugging the shoreline at about a half mile to shelter from mostly westerly wind. On a chilly October day, the beaches are deserted. Conditions are less than perfect, but we're in a hurry, and the forecast is for steadily decreasing winds and seas. We had a bit of a bumpy ride first thing in the morning.

One of my favorite views, lady Liberty seen under the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.

Yesterday we made a very rushed exit from the Derecktor shipyard so that we can get the boat to NJ as quickly as possible. Friday I got a call at 7am from the memory care facility telling me they sent my dad to the hospital due to blood in the urine. By 8am I was at Enterprise just as they opened to pick up a car, and we raced out of the yard headed for the hospital. Before I left to get the car I met briefly with the yard manager about re-doing some of the work in the bilge, where a greenhorn worker had painted over a bunch of corrosion instead of remediating it first.

The week up to that point had been uneventful. The topsides painter wrapped up all the myriad touch-up spots we had marked out, the upholstery shop finished up the cushions with much more appropriate foam, and I wrapped up various projects around the boat. Louise got a new phone, I sold the old one, and I tore into the old sat compass to see if it could be repaired before listing on eBay for parts. We were generally moving toward closure, with the bilge repair being the last outstanding item, and when I learned our friends Tim and Crisalida were in NYC for a couple of weeks I was concocting plans to get down to the city to meet up before we left the dock.

The most I could coax out of Louise's old phone.

The Friday morning phone call changed everything in an instant, and the ensuing week has been a whirlwind of nonstop phone calls and medical research interspersed with trips to the hospital. We spent Friday night in a hotel in Brick just ten minutes from the hospital, and we spent several hours on Saturday, after they moved him to a room from the ER. With the bleeding not stopping by Saturday, and no physicians planning to stop by over the weekend, we made our way home Saturday evening to start wrapping up our stay at the yard.

I was hoping we might be able to leave Monday, but when I descended into the tiller flat Sunday morning to check on the repair, I was very disappointed to find they had fixed the gaffe on the port side but not the starboard side. "Greenhorn" might have been too kind a word to describe this worker. That meant we'd be in the yard until at least Tuesday morning, and I extended the rental car, due Monday morning, by a day so we could drive back down for the day.

I thought I bought a seat pedestal, but it seems I bought a depestal instead. This same misspelling repeated throughout the manual.

That timing turned out for the best, because we arrived at the hospital just as the urologist and the cardiologist were there to discuss the case. We ultimately agreed to a cystoscopic procedure to try to stop the bleeding, and we remained at the hospital the rest of the day until they wheeled him into the OR, then headed to dinner nearby. The urologist called while we were out to say the procedure was a success and that he would be in recovery for a couple of hours. Knowing he would be out of it for the rest of the night we headed home.

No work was done on the boat Monday, with the repair instead scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. I dropped the car back at Enterprise when they opened Tuesday morning and we spent the rest of the day alternating between medical research, phone calls, passage planning, and scrambling to get the boat ready for sea. Our final dinner Tuesday night was at the Village Station where we said our good-byes to Sindy and Hannah, and we popped in to F&F on the way home to say goodbye to Dave.

The sum total of the innards of a satellite compass. Two GPS antennas and a circuit board. 

I spent a good deal of time on Sunday looking at marinas in NJ where we could spend maybe a week within an hour's drive of the hospital. With a good window to get down the coast, I ended up reserving at the Farley State Marina in Atlantic City. It's a lot less convenient than where we stayed in Brielle, but it does not require planning a dead-slack arrival and it's less than half the price. It also shortens the window we need to get to Delaware Bay when it comes time to move south. It's normally a three-day trip for us from Long Island Sound to Atlantic City, and I booked an arrival Saturday for a full week.

Business side of the circuit board. The power LED comes on but all the ports, including the diagnostic USB, are dead.

Yesterday morning I had to get the yard to fix one last gaffe; they spilled something down the side of the boat while they were fixing the paint work in the tiller flat. Fortunately that all came off with lacquer thinner and I was able to finish up in the tiller flat and have everything else ready to go by departure time. We dropped lines at 9:30 for a fair tide the whole way to Great Kills Harbor on Staten Island, where we dropped the hook in our usual spot (map).

With a 3pm arrival I had hoped to make it to Net Cost Market for some more of my favored Polish porter, but I ended up spending an hour on the phone with various care providers and I had to wave off. We tendered to the Richmond County Yacht Club and walked to Goodfellas for dinner. This morning we weighed anchor at 7:20 for a fair-tide departure, skirting around the dredging operation at the Sandy Hook Channel on our way out to sea.

A pile of rust sandwiched between old white paint on the bottom and fresh gray paint on the top. Who does this?

Seas have flattened out a bit even since I began typing, and as I wrap up we are just an hour from our planned exit at Barnegat Light. But as I made yet more phone calls regarding care plans and discharge dates, it became clear we will be better served to arrive to Atlantic City tonight, pick up the car in the morning instead of our planned end-of-day pickup, and get up to the hospital before the holiday weekend starts. We have a much better chance of seeing the right people tomorrow.

And so it is that we will pass right by Barnegat Inlet, with the plotter now projecting an arrival to Atlantic City around 8:30pm. We should just catch the very tail end of the flood at Absecon Inlet, and we will spend two nights at anchor instead of our originally planned one (a one-week car rental is seven full 24-hour days, but a one-week marina stay is six hours shorter than that). We'll move to the marina mid-day Saturday.

I think this was paint residue in brush thinner that spilled down the side.

I appreciate all the well-wishes we have received concerning my aging parents. We always knew this time would come, and we are thankful to have been in the NJ/NY area for this particular phase. We will linger here for this next week, but then we will resume moving south to more temperate climes. We hope to be in Myrtle Beach by Thanksgiving, where we will fly to California for the holiday. We have a buffer of about two weeks that I will use to periodically drive, fly, or take the train back here to take care of whatever might arise.

We're sorry to once again miss our friends Tim and Crisalida. We had hoped to get up to Maine this season and see them on Monhegan Island, then they had to shoot past us in Mamaroneck to make their offshore window, and, of course, we missed their wedding when Uber stood us up in Titusville. We will hope to catch them in Deltaville as we pass by on our way south.

Approaching New York City from Long Island Sound.

My next post here will most likely be on our passage from Atlantic City to Cape May. We are booked at the marina until next Saturday, but our actual day of departure maybe be earlier or later than that depending on the offshore weather. At this time of year the windows get fewer, shorter, and further between.