It’s Sunday morning and we are about 50 miles from the entrance to the Chesapeake where we will join the rest of the fleet in Hampton before heading to Antigua. As I write this we are sailing at about 7kts on a close reach with a 10kts balmy breeze. It’s a beautiful morning and a wonderful time to be on the water.
As luck would have it, we passed Saybrook Light, at the mouth of the CT River, just as the sun was setting behind the breakwater. It was a good omen for our voyage. 
While we were able to sail for about the first 12 hours, we have been motoring for the last day as we passed through a slow moving high that was working its way off the coast and killed the wind.
As the high hovered over us, the wind died almost completely and the seas were as calm as a lake. I don’t enjoy motoring hour after hour but I’ll take that any time over pounding into wind and waves. Motoring along was quite peaceful, in a “droning diesel” sort of way. At least, all that “white” noise, perhaps better described as “grey noise” as in sooty diesel noise, made for good sleeping.
Fortunately, after motoring for hours and hours overnight, the wind picked up at daybreak today, just enough to sail along with the big “Code 0” head sail. It’s been nice to enjoy the sound of water rushing along the hull after all that motoring. Oh yeah, and it’s sunny to boot. Also, the last two nights were spectacularly clear with stars in all directions made even brighter by a new moon. We were also treated to a few shooting stars. Beautiful.
Along the way, as is so often the case when we are on passage, we were joined by a very tired little bird when we were perhaps 40 miles off of NY. I often wonder how many little birds end up at sea with no place to land and just fall into the water when they get to tired to carry on. We are generally joined by one or more small birds when we are on passage and yesterday was no exception. Oddly, these birds are always quite docile, perhaps because they are just to exhausted to run away when they arrive. This little guy hopped all around the boat and even landed on each of us. He even “snuggled?” up to James.
How about some light reading?
I guess that he realized that he was in rough shape when he perched on the EPIRB. “Mayday, mayday. I’m a really little bird and in distress.”
Unfortunately, as is so often the case with these little visitors, he died overnight. I did give him a “sort of” proper sea burial. Adios amigos. Overboard you go. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…. Fish food.
There is A LOT of boat traffic between NY and the Delaware River and this trip was no different. In particular, there are always many boats anchored off of the mouth of the river. As we approached the “fleet” of a dozen 800’ tankers anchored, I wondered if perhaps I’d need to divert to go around them. While this shot of the plotter makes it look like we’d have trouble threading our way between them, we ended up continuing on our course without diverting even a single degree from our course and never came closer than ½ mile of anyone. I did check, more than once, to be sure that none of them decided to pull anchor and get underway while we were close. I was happy when we were past them and again in the clear.
As luck would have it, we will likely arrive at the mouth of the Chesapeake at slack tide before the flood so the flooding current will give us a lift of a few knots as we make our way the final 30 miles into Hampton. Last May, when I entered Hampton, I wasn’t so lucky, arriving with the tide in full ebb so it took me nearly 10 hours to make that same run, bucking a 2-3kt current the entire way. It was tedious and annoying and we didn’t get to the marina until about 05:00. It was a very long day at the end of a 10 day run from Tortola. “Are we there yet?”
With a flooding tide this go around, it will be a lot more pleasant and take less than half the time. Amazing how much difference a few knots of positive, or negative, current can have on a trip.
Nice view forward on a beautiful sailing day.
Not to Jinx it as we aren’t there quite yet, but it’s been an uneventful trip on my first leg of the run to Antigua and a winter afloat. Let’s hope that leg two, all 1,500 miles of it, turns out to be this easy.
As Brenda once quipped, “Bob and the dog, ever hopeful”. Yes, that’s me. Can I have a cookie?
Editor: Oh yeah, if you are wondering about photos on the post and yet at sea, we are close to the Delmarva Peninsula so there is cell coverage.
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