A Tale of Two Chemists: Transiting the East River, New York City

Transiting the East River, New York City … Sunday 30th June 2013

We thought long and hard about whether to make the passage through to Long Island Sound today or wait for tomorrow. The weather forecast was reasonable except for the prospect of thunder storms, and in the end we couldn't convince ourselves that Monday would be a lot better. Timing the transit through the East River is critical. If you arrive at the Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan two hours after low tide you can catch favorable currents all the way through. If you ignore the tides you can end up fighting up to 5 knots of current as you try to make your way through "Hells Gate". Today the timing worked out well with low tide at the Battery at 9am, so we felt that if we reached there by 10.30 or 11 am we should be through to Long Island Sound and safely anchored before the afternoon thunderstorms set in. We hauled up our anchor at Atlantic Highlands at 7am and headed north for New York. Of course what the "perfect plan" for transiting the East River fails to mention is that to get to the Battery at the required time you will have to fight formidable currents through the Narrows and into the Upper Bay just to get there. Our highly sophisticated chart plotter suggested we should be bucking 1.5 knot currents. However, our speed through the water was 7 knots and our speed over the ground dropped as low as 3.5 knots … you do the math! We had planned in some time for adverse current and did make it to the southern tip of Manhattan in good time. I was so excited about the prospect of taking photos but the visibility couldn't have been worse. Actually, as Gloria pointed out it could have been worse - total fog. As it was, the conditions were hot, airless and smoggy. Once in the East River we made excellent progress and it took us less than 2 hours to reach Throgs Neck Bridge at the eastern end of the river. At this point the channels opened up and the wind was blowing steadily from the south so we decided to extend our plans and sail onwards to Oyster Bay, about 12 miles to the east. However, after about 15 minutes we took another look at the sky and the storm clouds gathering, changed our minds again and headed south into Manhasset Bay. It was just as well we did because a short while later we realized that we had torn the trailing edge of our genoa. We furled the sail and continued under main alone and then engine to anchor off Port Washington. After a cup of tea and some lunch we unfurled and dropped the genoa to inspect the damage. Mostly it appears that the stitching has pulled out from a strip down the trailing edge. We contemplated re-stitching this by hand but figured that we might be able to do a couple of feet per hour and the tear is maybe 40 ft long! So we "folded" the sail and man-handled it down the companionway and into the aft cabin. The genoa must weigh about 100lb and doesn't exactly pack up neatly. Lets just say that we won't be putting anything else in the aft cabin for now. For the rest of the trip we are going to have to use our small stay-sail hanked on to the inner forestay. It's a real pain that this has happened, but it would have been much worse if it happened earlier in our trip.

Mike

40 49.079 N, 73 42.666 W