Preparing for an offshore passage

Preparing for an offshore passage

Tuesday 13th October 2020

I didn’t have the greatest start to the day. Before dawn, I got up to try and address a clanging halyard that was interrupting my sleep. I happened to look over the side of the boat and couldn’t see the dinghy where it had been lying, tied up to the side of Cotinga. I looked harder and still couldn’t see it and was instantly convinced that the “Dumb Dog”, along with the outboard, had been stolen. I was very distressed, kicking myself for not locking it up, as the impact of this catastrophe started to dawn on me. After a few painful moments I looked further forward and realized that the dinghy was actually lying close to the bow because the wind had switched direction.  The outboard motor was still mounted on the rail of Cotinga where it has been for the past several days. This is not the first time I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night and panicked that the dinghy had been stolen. I guess I’m not very mentally sharp at that time of day!

Tomorrow morning we hope to head out of New York Bay and make our way south to Delaware Bay. If all goes to plan we are going to skip going into Cape May and continue directly up Delaware Bay about fifty miles to an anchorage just before the canal that cuts across to Chesapeake Bay. It’s about 125 nautical miles from here (or to be precise Sandy Hook) to the entrance of Delaware Bay and whilst we’ll stay fairly close to shore, Atlantic City (80 miles south) is the only harbor that we could safely enter before Cape May (120 miles south). So we are preparing as if this were a significant offshore passage. 

We filled up our water tanks and our three reserve diesel jerry cans. We pulled the dinghy up on dock to clean the bottom and then hoisted it up onto the foredeck, deflated it, rolled it up and tied it down. We set up our removable inner forestay and fitted the “stay-sail” ready for use. This evening, after an excellent dinner of chicken fajitas, we are making sandwiches for lunch and a flask of coffee for an early start. We have some left over lentil soup and sausage that will make a fine dinner tomorrow evening. The forecast looks reasonable and we are hoping that the winds will stay out of the west rather than south-west so that we aren’t beating our brains out all the way down.

This afternoon the rain finally stopped (we must have tipped 20 gallons of water out of the dinghy this morning) and we found time to take a walk around the inlet that is Great Kill harbor. It's actually a nature reserve, very pleasant to walk around and we saw lots of birds presumably on migration. Within the harbor we also saw six or seven wrecked boats that were either completely sunk, except for their masts sticking above water, or washed up on shore. In some cases it was obvious that they had been dragged with their moorings onto the rocks. This could have been during hurricane Sandy, but that seems like a long time ago (2012), or maybe some more recent storm. It’s quite distressing to see this.

We won’t be posting tomorrow.

Mike

Cleaning the bottom of the dinghy. We were pleasantly surprised that after ten weeks in the water there was only a little slime that was easy to brush off and no barnacles. This particular anti-fouling paint actually seems to work!

Another view of the dinghy cleaning operation at the dock in Great Kills. Note the fender hanging in the water - that was to stop teh dinghy scraping teh side of Cotinga where she was lying during teh storm. This morning the dinghy was "hidden" (in plane sight) up under the bow.