Category: Passage

Go time.

Ok, well we have been watching the weather all day and we are feeling good about the forecast. Our plan is to leave at 3:30am and make the trip down to Atlantic city! It is a long trek (almost 90 nautical miles) but we are feeling confident. Here is what NOAA is saying:

TONIGHT
NW WINDS 20 TO 25 KT…DIMINISHING TO 15 TO 20 KT
AFTER MIDNIGHT. SEAS 2 TO 4 FT. MAINLY IN NW SWELL WITH A
DOMINANT PERIOD OF 4 SECONDS.

MON
W WINDS 10 TO 15 KT WITH GUSTS UP TO 25 KT. SEAS 2 TO
3 FT. MAINLY IN E SWELL WITH A DOMINANT PERIOD OF 8 SECONDS.

Wish us luck! :)

To New York, and Beyond!

We’re bouncing back, baby!!!!

So we were stuck in Haverstraw Marina (aka purgatory) for a couple weeks, but we’re outta there!

So our roller furling repair was quoted at $3200, but we managed to get out of there for under $1600 (thanks to some sweat equity courtesy of Caitie and yours truly)  We’re outta there!

So we had one nasty experience at anchor where it was blowing 20+ knots the night we left the marina, resulting in shifts sleeping/watching for anchor slippage, but at least WE’RE OUTTA THERE!

Frankly everything is looking up – We’re making progress again.  Who knew how good it felt to be on the move (and, more importantly), have decent weather!

Trying out the new headstay w/New York City in the distance

Trying out the new headstay w/New York City in the distance

 

Today we did the rip down the Hudson River to Sandy Hook, New Jersey.  At first, we weren’t sure how far we were going to get (because I, Mark, slept in this morning after a long and tiring night on anchor watch Wednesday).  We were targeting an anchorage behind the Statue of Liberty for an afternoon anchor…but as soon as we hit New York Harbour, we had the current in our favour and were going 10-11 knots!!  It was the fastest we’d been in the boat, and was extra crazy due to the hundreds of other boats/ferries flying around in all directions.

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Needless to say…we were happy to get through that chaos and decided to stretch it the extra 15 miles to Sandy Hook.

The anchoring process here wasn’t fun (first solid argument b/w Caitie and I so far), but we got it on the 4th try.

Even after that stress, though, we had a magic moment where a gorgeous white dove landed on the boat out of nowhere.  We were both a little awestruck…we continued our anchoring and he hopped onto my shoulder!!  It was so surreal!  Then he flew over to Caitie’s shoulder!!  We took the mandatory pics and feel it must have been a good omen.  Right?!

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Tomorrow just may be the day we start our trek down the Atlantic coast.  Wish us luck!

 

LOCKTOBERfest / OPTROP’s Guide on how to transit an Erie Canal lock

We’ve now transitted 35 locks of the New York State Canal System, through the Erie Canal from Buffalo to Albany, NY, and frankly we are quite happy to be done with elevation change for a while.Why are we so relieved to be out?  Because going through locks is tiring, tedious and dangerous (more so than we originally thought).  Effectively, your boat (along with a few others) will enter a cement chamber ~300 feet long x ~45 feet wide, with gates at either end that close you in, like a caged wild animal.  And like a caged animal, your sailboat will not happily sit still in the cage, but rather squirm around as the Lockmaster lets the water in or out, and you will try to hold it in place with boat hooks and the slimy, wet ropes that are attached to the cement walls (you’re going to want to watch out for the aqua spiders that hide on them too, too).  During this process, you try not to scrape or slime your boat and also avoid hitting the multi-million dollar power yachts beside you as the water swirls around.  It’s stressful, don’t let my smile fool you.We are happy to say we avoided any collisions or scrapes, but for anyone else planning a similar voyage, here are our 5 top tips for lock success:

5) Have a plan for how your boat can pull up nicely parallel to a very tall (or very short, depending on which way the water is going) cement wall.  Some power boats have bow-thrusters that do this for them very nicely, but we just used our one propellor (and its prop walk) and a very carefully timed slow down, docking technique with boat hooks, fenders and lines. We watched some entertaining docking events go down in locks among crews who had not planned how they were going to get alongside the wall (short story – lots of swearing, some mild boat/wall smashing, maybe some tears).

4) Have the right equipment for protecting your boat.  We used lots of fenders, and a DIY fender board for this.  Having some old lines that you don’t mind getting slimed from the walls are great too, as sometimes there are fixed lines or cables (versus attached at the top but free swinging below) and you can loop a line around these to hold yourself in place.  Just be careful not to get them caught as your boat is going up or down (same for your fenderboard!) or you’ll have a bad time.

3) Have the right equipment for your crew, which for us meant work gloves and boat hooks (or any sturdy long stick used to push off the wall).  The ropes that you grab onto spend most of their lives sitting in swamp water, growing all sorts of new slime forms and just waiting to slip out of your hands.  They’re disgusting, and you definitely don’t want to bite your nails after handling them.

2) Slow down when entering the lock.  There is a finite “runway” to these “landing strips” of cement, and you do not want to slam into the boat in front of you, or the metal gates at the other end.  Also, we’re learning very quickly that a 40 foot boat keeps a lot more momentum than the 27 footer we’re used to, and it’s not easy or safe to try and manually slow these boats down without a cleat (there are lots of rings, but these take an additional couple of seconds to thread a line through).  Although Mark has now nearly mastered our clockwise prop walk, it can be a bit unnerving to see your stern moving towards the boat tied beside you as you back up.

1) Pay careful attention while descending or ascending.  CONSTANT VIGILANCE.  Or you’ll hit your boat against the wall / your boat against someone else’s boat.  Since our boat is shaped like an almond and not like a rectangle (looking at you, house boats of the Erie Canal), we don’t have one nice long flat surface to line up against a wall, but instead will swing as the water swirls around us, unless we are in a constant state of push and pull to keep ourselves straight.

We loved the scenery, people and free docks we’ve encountered along the Erie Canal…but we are very happy to be heading out of our landlocked waterway and onto the Hudson River.

Day two: All the way to Buffalo, NY

We knew we had a long day ahead of us, so we were up early to make the ~75 nautical mile trek up to Buffalo from Erie.  Damn that was a good cup of coffee.

Surprisingly we made it!  We were working the engine pretty hard (and felt pretty guilty burning so much fuel), but we kept telling ourselves that it would be worth it to get there…

We made such good time we even decided to make our way up to Rich Marine where we were going to de-step the next day.  This involved transiting a lift bridge, swing bridge, and a lock – NONE of which we’d ever done before (frankly).  Thank god for the handheld VHF :)

Alles friedlich

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Departure Day!

The forecast was looking good, we’d had any number of “going away” parties, we’d made our upgrades and built a smashing mast cradle…it was finally time to go.  September 23rd, 2014.

We had a long downwind motorsail (interrupted by a nice broad reach once we’d banked some time), and arrived at Presque Isle, Erie, PA for a nice sundowner around 6pm.  The voyage up Lake Erie was a quiet one, and the anchorage was empty when we arrived.  Perfect for our first ever anchoring experience on Tara.  It went very well by all accounts, largely due to the fact that we’re packing a 45lb Mantus.  Uh huh.

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Erieau, Ontario

SHAKEDOWN CRUISE! After landing in Cleveland and spending a few days recuperating from the craziness of packing/leaving Vancouver, it was time to take our first cruise on TARA.  Our goals were pretty simple: Get a feel for the boat and understand where we needed to focus our $$ and time over the next few weeks. So why not sail across the… Read more →