Sandy Hook to level with Atlantic City

Friday 28 September: Leaving Sandy Hook, for Cape May, and by midnight we are level with Atlantic City.
A restless night, with wind howling in the rigging and anchor alarm going off. Glen wakes up at 4am to also check the updates on weather forecast. The wind will only change direction later in the morning, so we postpone the waking up alarm from 6am to 8am. Interestingly, we also get an alarm from the Coast Guard training station which we are anchored next to – in the form of a bugle call! Only in America.
We poke our head out to a dull day, still windy and light rain. But at least the wind has turned NE as the weather front has passed. It will be a good downwind sail. After breakfast, we dig out all our thermal gear and the rubber boots, as it looks we are going to need it all for this leg to Cape May!
Cockpit tent goes up, and it instantly gives us relief from the chilly wind, even without the sides zipped on. We up-anchor, and ready to go. Well, as ready as we can be under the conditions. Frankly the snug warm berths below are calling to each of us!
Sails out and we brace ourselves for a North Sea experience. As we round Sandy Hook, the wind and sea are wild. The choppy waves are throwing us around, and the wind blows our cockpit tent making us feel like we have our own weather front right here around the boat.
The wind is 15-20kts which gives us 6kts speed on this broad reach. The genoa backs quite badly as we are rolled about and we are looking forward to the deeper Atlantic, where hopefully it will be less choppy.
Little did we know. Soon, the sea gets even rougher, and despite taking the usual anti sea-sickness pill Oana gets sick. Second time she gets this bad after we left Gibraltar. As the wind turns, so is our point of sail, and we go dead downwind and rolling accordingly.
Around midday we get a surprise call from the Coast Guard. We think they must be wanting all our data again. But no, an even bigger surprise. They tell us that our EPIRB is activated and they need to know if we are OK. Glen dives into the saloon and finds the EPIRB’s strobe flashing from where we store it in the bookshelves. But oddly, the security mechanism that prevents accidental activation is all intact! Glen touches the switch and it turns off. But of course it doesn’t stop there with the Coast Guard. They want to know the 16 digit Hex code for the EPIRB, and giving them this over a weak VHF signal was not easy. Well, very bad that it went off, but good to know it works. We will have to contact McMurdo, the manufacturer, to ask them how this can happen.
By now, because of all this EPIRB chit-chat, we have sailed into the middle of a shipping lane, not an ideal place to be. So we gybe and head back dead downwind on a southerly course. Glen and Alex pole-out the genoa, which is tricky on the rolling foredeck. But once out, it stabilizes the rolling a bit. Meanwhile, Oana is shivering in the aft berth and occasionally back in the toilet feeding the fish! Poor her.
As if the EPIRB event was not enough to excite our day, yet another strange thing happened mid afternoon. A ship appears over the horizon with an unusual shape. We declare that this ship has the shape of a commercial aircraft. All we can see on the AIS is a tug boat. As it gets closer we can now clearly see it is a Boeing 747 floating across the ocean! And what is more, it’s painted like Airforce One! What a sight. We all have to pinch ourselves, are we dreaming? Soon it’s clear that Air Force … or it’s lookalike, is on a huge barge being towed.
Next event, the tug calls us to ensure we have seen him and what he has in tow (ha!, as if we couldn’t notice!) and requests us to give him clearance. Give Air Force One clearance? Do we want the entire US military targeting us? Of course we’re going to give you clearance!… but only once we are close enough to capture some photos. This one could go viral, we may even earn $10 from You Tube with this one 🙂
Very slowly the charade crosses our bow and passes ahead of us as we still watch in awe as we think of punch lines like: “Trump’s administration all awash at sea” or “Mr. Trump, did we run out of Gaz, Sir?” or “That was a pretty neat carrier landing Mr.T”
All day we have rolled along under grey skies and a grey sea. But half an hour before sunset a thin gap of clear sky lines the horizon. And we hold our breath waiting and hoping for the sun to pop down under the clouds. Which soon it does, and rewards us with a brief warm light and a very nice sunset.
As sun sets, the wind drops a bit, and although our speed drops to only 5 kts, we carry on sailing, changing the auto helm to sail by the wind instead of steer to course, as we watch a beautiful red sky develop and the sparkling glitzy lights of Atlantic City appear on the horizon.
By 9pm the wind has fully died, 45 mile from Cape May. So on goes the engine and watermaker. Nice to get the water tanks full from clean Atlantic water. We just hope that Mr.T was not dumping his holding tanks from up there in front of us on Air Force One!
So ends an interesting day off the New Jersey Coast.