Window of opportunity.

We are underway southbound in a choppy North Atlantic Ocean. Seas are not yet angry, but they are at least mildly annoyed. By tomorrow they will be untenable, and likely for at least a week, and therein lies a tale: Despite having a marina slip through tomorrow and even having extended our rental car to tomorrow morning, with expectation of a Sunday or Monday departure, at 6:30 this morning we decided instead to make a run for it.

My giant pretzel at Landing Point Tavern seemed very happy to see me.

When last I posted here, we were also shifting gears, trying to move our rental car reservation up to Friday morning from our scheduled Friday evening booking. The local office was hemming and hawing and saying they could not commit to having cars then, yada, yada, and so I just changed the booking online, which is what I should have done in the first place. We had a nice dinner underway, the leftovers from the previous evening at Goodfellas, and we ran the last hour and a half after dark. The city lights in the distance made the going a bit easier. We just caught the tail end of the flood into our usual anchorage (map), where we found just one other boat.

Friday morning we double-checked our anchor circle and that we were well set through two changes of the tide, checked on the battery charge, then dropped the tender and headed ashore. Lyft picked us up at the casino, since Enterprise had no pickup drivers available, and we were in our car and on the way to the hospital just a few minutes after 10. This would be the first of four trips north to Brick over the course of the week, but the only one with the boat left at anchor. I checked in on our cameras, battery monitor, and position report throughout the day; Vector did just fine on her own. We got back in the dark after dinner.

Sunset over the Jersey shore en route to Atlantic City.

Saturday we decked the tender and moved over to the Farley State Marina, operated by the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino. In over a dozen years stopping in Atlantic City, this is only our third time at these docks. Once was a free dock-and-dine stop to kill a couple of hours on an overnight run to NYC, and the other time, also free, we needed a dock for a diver to replace our line cutters. We pulled into the slip (map) bow-first so I could effect repairs on the bow roller at some point.

We were happy to be well-secured to the dock when a nor'easter came through, confining us to the boat all day Sunday. I used the downtime to make adjustments to the new satellite compass and to work on the last bits of trim for the settee reconstruction. We never set foot off the boat, eating aboard rather than braving the driving rain. Online acquaintance Lou aboard Sister Kate had pulled in to the marina Saturday evening, and it was too messy to even walk down the dock to say hello. We missed each other Monday as well and by Tuesday morning they had already moved on.

Fixing the sat compass settings. This may seem like gibberish, but I need to know the meaning of all 22 of these three-letter "sentences" to get this right.

My father's situation, meanwhile, has been a moving target. We were hoping to move him to hospice care, in accordance with his wishes in his health care directive. But an indwelling catheter for the next two weeks and an MRSA infection that required isolation and IV antibiotics for three more weeks mean he can not yet return to his memory care facility, nor can he remain in the hospital. We got the word on this late in the day on Monday, while we were in a nearby Walgreens getting our flu and COVID shots.

I ended up spending all Monday evening researching skilled nursing facilities where he can finish his isolation and antibiotics before he goes back to his own bed, and then we spent most of the day Tuesday driving around to the three facilities that came out of that research, while the hospital made referrals. He was accepted by all three, and we sent our choice to the hospital first thing Wednesday.

The other end of the equation: the autopilot settings. More gibberish and even harder to get right.

Tuesday on our way home we stopped off at the house to brief my mother on the situation, and we left with four bankers' boxes filled with every file folder we could find in the entire house. My dad was the person who had done all the organization and filing, and we needed to help mom get on top of it all and whittle it down.

Wednesday was Louise's birthday, and the way she chose to spend it was going through all four of those boxes and purging seven decades of accumulation. She handed me maybe five percent of it to either go through for disposition, or just for my own edification or amusement before discarding things. I did find a handful of photos and documents of sentimental value which I have either kept or photographed; I will spare you the dorky photos of my childhood. For dinner, she wanted me to take her to a dive bar a half hour out in the boonies at May's Landing because they had highly-rated pot pie.

Louise's birthday dance. Mid-sort.

As long as Louise was in her happy place (she finds purging things very cathartic), I spent much of Wednesday working on the boat. Tuesday we had found the condensate tray from the pilothouse air conditioners overflowing onto the floor, and I spent a couple of hours working on the hard-to-reach drain plumbing to get it unclogged. And I took the anchor roller carriage off and managed to get it halfway bent back into shape so that the forward roller will start turning again.

Yesterday ended up being given over mostly to errands, including taking 25 pounds of papers to the UPS store for shredding, two full bankers' boxes of papers and folders to recycling (along with all the accumulated recycling from the boat), dropping off two Amazon returns at Staples (where we could just as easily have also taken the shredding, it turns out), and picking up five Amazon deliveries from a locker that just happens to be at a marina. I also indulged myself by driving up to the Net Cost Market in Manalapan to see if they had my Żywiec porter, but they carry no beer there. The Vingo bottle shop a few doors down had it, though, and I bought a case of 20 (in hindsight I should've taken two cases).

One of the many interesting finds in the files. My dad served his tour in the Army as part of Occupation Forces Japan, and went to NYU on the GI Bill. Many returning vets were housed on North Brother Island while they attended NY colleges, and most likely someone he knew was housed there.

We swung by the memory care facility to pick up five changes of my dad's clothing, which he will need at the skilled nursing facility, and I dropped Louise at the hospital to check on things while I drove my mother to the bank. We heard in the morning that our choice for skilled nursing could not provide the required IV antibiotic, and by the end of the day the hospital had arranged instead for our second choice. With that being a moving target, we opted to just keep his clothes in the car until he was actually discharged. After dinner we swung by the CVS and picked up our accumulated mail that we had forwarded from Florida, since we needed to get our ballots. It was a long day.

Anticipating that he would be discharged today and that we would want to drive back up, I had extended the rental car to tomorrow, and we figured to leave the marina after I turned it back in and then spend one or two more nights in the anchorage. But after we got back home last night, Louise-the-weather-router gave me the bad news: the storm that was going to just miss us looked like it might instead make an ocean passage untenable. At 6:00 this morning she checked again, confirming those fears.

The end result of the files clean-up. Two neat portable file boxes that just fit in these two shelves.

The bright spot, if you can call it that, is that today's weather had actually improved slightly, and we determined we could have a tolerable passage if we left first thing. Louise ran out to the car with the wagon to offload my case of Żywiec, a gallon of hydraulic fluid, and my dad's clothes, all of which we had left in the trunk, while I got the boat ready for sea. Then I ran the car back to Enterprise in Absecon while she singled up lines and took on fresh water. The Lyft dropped me back at the marina just after 8 and we were underway by 8:30.

We still have to get back up to Brick to check in on him once he moves, and we still have three Amazon deliveries to pick up. So I have another car booked for this afternoon in Rio Grande, one town up from Cape May, and a marina reservation in Cape May. Three nights in Cape May is more than we paid for a week at the state marina. The plotter says we will be docked by 2:15, and I might not even have this post uploaded by then.

I went through a few more things at the house, too. This one is a blast from the past, and provides some insight into where I get my parts-hoarding behavior. Saving an obsolete electrical item for who-knows-what.

Over the course of a full week docked there, we did not eat at a restaurant in Atlantic City even once. We typically wrapped up at or around the hospital between 4:15 and 5:30, and we'd stop somewhere on the way home for dinner. Those places were the Black Cat Bar & Grill, Villa Rifici, Calabria Pizza (BYOB), and the Hangtime Bar & Grill  in Absecon, Fred & Ethel's Tavern (really) in very touristy Smithfield, and the Landing Point Tavern in Mays Landing. All were decent and worth a return. We also stopped more than once at JT's Bagel Hut in Forked River, and I now have more than a passing familiarity with the Frank Sinatra and Celia Cruz rest areas on the Parkway.

Update: As predicted, I did not get finished before I had to drive through the inlet. We are now docked at the South Jersey Marina (map) in Cape May, a familiar stop even though we normally just anchor in Cape May. I had arranged for a rental car this afternoon, but when the transfer from the hospital still had not happened by 3pm we postponed it until tomorrow morning. We walked across the street to dinner at long-time favorite Smokey Bones.

We both filled out our mail-in ballots underway today and they will go to the post office tomorrow.

We are very glad to be here, and that we made the mad scramble this morning, because we will now be able to continue our journey via Delaware Bay on Monday or Tuesday morning. The decision to press to Atlantic City a week ago and do all our visiting from there now seems prescient; had we stopped in Brielle we would be pinned down another week at least, and at a lofty rate to boot.

In the morning we will make our way to Rio Grande, the next town north, to pick up our rental car and then proceed directly to Toms River. We have the car till Monday morning, and it remains to be seen whether we can leave Cape May after we turn it in. If not, we will move out to the anchorage for another night. My next update here will be underway in the Delaware Bay.