Day 1, Year 8: Passage to Cape May, New Jersey, Day 1
Date: Sunday, November 4, 2012
Weather: Beautiful Day, Temp in the mid-50’s, Winds W 5-15
Latitude: 41 57.063 N
Longitude: 071 27.903 W
Location: South of Block Island
Slishy, sloshy, wishy, washy . . . that’s how I would describe our current forward motion. Unexpectedly the wind has been on the nose all day, coming from just South of West. We thought it was going to be WNW, moving to NW and then N, but not so. The swell is coming from the SW and it is not exactly regular. We get a couple of greater than one meter waves, a bunch of smaller ones, and then the larger ones again. And the seas are increasing as I write this log. It is a lumpy, bumpy ride as we head southward. We left Woods Hole at 7:15 am and hobby-horsed our way down the Vineyard Sound for the next three hours. Once out to sea, the ride eased a bit. For the most part the day has been uneventful, but not entirely. Right off the bat we discovered that the button you push on the cockpit display to engage the auto pilot was not working. Thankfully we have the remote control for the auto pilot and we are using that. Then when we tried to unfurl the headsail we discovered that we had left too much of the furling line wrapped around the furler after securing the lines for Hurricane Sandy, so we are motor sailing with a full main and a deeply reefed head sail. Since the winds are directly on the nose, we have been motoring all day to keep up the speed. We do need to reach Cape May by Tuesday morning and try to get through the Delaware Bay to Chesapeake City on Tuesday night before the heavy winds begin on Wednesday morning. Windbird is in what I call tanker-mode as she plows into these increasing seas and head winds. It is not the most comfortable ride, but we are making decent progress and feel secure. The west winds are pushing us too far to the east, but Herb on South Bound II told us this afternoon that a front is passing and in about four hours from now we should start getting winds from the NW gradually working around to the NE sometime tomorrow. As that happens we will be able to turn more to the west. One thing we must note–We are truly appreciating the cockpit enclosure. Without it, it would be a cold, wet ride.
