A Tale of Two Chemists: Visiting Cape May

Visiting Cape May .... Saturday 6^th October 2012

We awoke early to a windy blue-sky day. After breakfast I did some cleaning of the cabin spaces while Mike tackled the bow light (red on port/green on starboard). We had noticed on the overnight sail that this light needed some ‘encouragement’ to come on initially. Later on we realized that it was no longer lit. At this point, in the real dead of night with significant wind and some seas, I thought we should just leave it. But Mike bravely went forward (using the harness and the jack lines) to give it a little more ‘encouragement’-- without success. So we knew something was amiss with it. Today, we found the connections looked pretty corroded so Mike worked to clean these, and then re-connected the wires to the light-- no light. Our current theory is that the wire itself is corroded or broken or both. So we added wire to our shopping list and set off to town in the dinghy.

We were looking for a place to tie up the dinghy but also for a location where we could meet our old friend John Higgins and his two children later. The staff at Unsch’s marina was kind enough to let us tie up. We acquired for 14-gauge wire at their marine shop (which seemed to have a lot of interesting stuff—like an old fashioned hardware store). We also had a good look at the fuel dock. This, unlike the fuel dock at EGYC, is more like a slip. To get in to it, you would need to come along the main ‘thoroughfare’ of the marina and then turn left to put the boat between pilings and stop before the bow hit the seawall. Perhaps even more interesting to contemplate is trying to back out of this slip and make a 90-right to starboard. The captain thought it was do-able, the first mate was thinking, “Yes, but maybe not by us.”

After the marina it was a brisk walk to town for groceries (for our guests) and lunch, of course. By 11:00 am Mike was already talking about lunch so this had to take priority over the provisioning. We did find a very nice spot on the pedestrian mall that served Northern Italian food…. A walk on the beach preceded the food shopping. It seemed a long way back to the marina with Mike carrying a ridiculous weight of food and drink.

Back on the boat we are experiencing some very windy conditions as some squalls come through. This didn’t really seem to make it any easier to bake an apple pie. Now we are watching darkness fall and awaiting the call from our guests.