08/31/2008 Staten Island to Cape May

08/31/2008 I left this morning with the tide at 9:00am. I am on my first real journey alone. I plan on heading down the coast. I am not sure where I will end up stopping, but I have decided to sail through the night. I am currently about 6 miles off-shore and the weather has been calm and beautiful. I have been on sail since Sandy Hook at the entrance of the harbor and have tried different sail configurations including wing-on-wing with the jib and main, wing-on-wing with the main and spinnaker, reaching with the spinnaker, the main only and now I have a good west wind that I am on main and jib close-hauled.

Today I have had many visitors. The first that wore out their welcome real fast was a large batch of black house flies. I would think there were between 100 to 200 of them on the boat. I don’t know where they came from but it was nerve racking. I finally remembered I have a can of bug spray on the boat. That eliminated most of that problem, except for the clean up I did later in the evening. The second is a beautiful bird that has adopted me. It is a yellow and orange bird that would hop around the boat to stay away from me. He did help in eating some of the flies. It seems he liked the flies alive. It also appears though that he is hunkering down for night as he has taken the inside corner of the salon to sleep. I assume, and hope, he will fly away when I get closer to land.

I had a good dinner tonight and a wonderful sunset. After the sunset, there was a brilliant orange sky. I feel good at this time about trying the night sail down the coast. The weather is suppose to stay calm and I would not have been able to get into any reasonable inlets during the day, unless I ran the motor.

It does appear though that I will need to run the generator tonight. With the instruments running all day, the voltage is a little low and the charge won’t hurt. For all of my friends at CSYC, tonight was sort of like a Fagewi race with a few major differences. 1) There was no moon vs. a full moon, 2) I was sailing alone and 3) I was able to sail in one direction for the whole sail. As the sun set, the winds picked up. I was reaching along at 8-9 knots for a period of time. When it was consistently hitting above 8.5 knots, I reefed in the jib. It made for a more comfortable ride, but the speeds did not diminish much.

For you others reading that are not familiar with the Fagewi race, it is a race that our local club in Colorado holds once a summer. It is scheduled a weekend that is will be closest to a full moon. The race is run between sunset Saturday evening until sunrise Sunday morning. We usually do laps around three race marks and with the help of a handicapping system come up with a winner. It is a fun race and I usually do my best not to have anything scheduled for Sunday after racing all night.

I cat napped all night. I set a timer to go off every 20 minutes and I would check the radar and do a 360 degree visual check for any possible obstacles. I did get hailed by a research vessel to stand-off a little more than my current path was set for. The stars were beautiful and the bird did stay until later this morning. He did laps around the boat looking for more food. It was interesting watching him as his only concerned appeared to be was finding food. It brought me back to a thought I have had of how grateful I am able to do something like this. There are many people today that their primary concern is finding food and shelter for themselves and their families.