I don’t know why but we got out of Nyack like we hadn’t paid the hotel bill. The Hudson River pulled out all the stops and it was a beautiful fall morning.
Come to think of it, anchorages are a bit like family reunions where the distant cousins are thrown together and seem to get along for a day or two but disappear from each others lives with hardly a wave goodbye. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stepped out into the cockpit only to realize that so-and-so left at the crack of dawn, leaving a hole in the social fabric of the ad hoc community. There’s a lot of saying good bye in this lifestyle.
In the meantime our friends, also in a Manta, emailed us that they were in New York in a small yacht basin and just wanted to catch up so we could sail in company. It worked out beautifully. They were raising their sails as we sailed past.
There’s a hole when you leave, that’s the hole we left.
Marce watches the Palisades slip by.
Manhattan from Escape Velocity.
EV temporally besting Anything Goes.
The day started so well that both Skippers were persuaded to press on past Sandy Hook to the mouth of the Delaware Bay. We decided to try to find better wind offshore. We found too much and it was right on the nose. To tack would have meant losing hard won southing against a stiff southern breeze. We rolled the dice on the wind direction change NOAA predicted. Snake eyes. This hardly conveys the suffering we endured but when we finally had enough we powered into Atlantic City Inlet, which took six hours of outrageous pounding, dropped the hook in SAND, and listened to 25-30kts of south wind roar through the rigging.