Current Events

Originally posted www.svsweetescape.com

We are learning a lot about currents and tides, something that we never had to be concerned about on Lake Michigan.  More on this later.

We weighed anchor and said farewell to Lady Liberty on Thursday morning.  We had spent the night in a very tight anchorage located west of Liberty Island behind the statue and were happy to get out of there.  We pointed the boat southeast and motored under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, through Sandy Hook Bay and out into the North Atlantic Ocean headed for Manasquan Inlet about 40 miles to the south.

The weather wasn’t bad at first - just cloudy and cool.  We had three to four foot waves with 10 to 15 knot winds out of the east.  

We deployed the jib and after about an hour we raised the main but had a problem getting the outhaul extended all the way to the end of the boom.  The main had come out but the outhaul had bound up about a foot short.  Sailing is all about sail shape.  Having the mainsail all the way out but not hauled to the end of the boom just wasn’t working as we were spilling too much wind out of the belly of our loose footed mailsail.

About this time we noticed storms building along the New Jersey coast.  We decided to reef in the mainsail in anticipation of the approaching weather and to improve the trim of the main.  Brian wrapped the furling line around one of our cabin top winches while Judy held the boat into the wind.  The furler wouldn’t budge.  It was like it was jammed.  Another wrap around the winch drum and “bang” the furling line comes out of the furler altogether.  

One of our greatest fears with the in mast furling system is the possibility of it becoming jammed making it impossible to lower the mainsail.  Aside from the obvious inconvenience this can also be dangerous especially in situations like storms.

Brian grabbed a winch handle and made his way to the mast to attempt to crank in the main from there while Judy continued to hold the boat into the wind.  Thankfully the sail furled with no trouble although this a tedious and time consuming process where because of obstructions you can only get half a turn on the furler before having to remove the handle and reinsert it again for another half turn.

This problem was created by us when we re-rigged the boat back in Catskill, we apparently didn’t rig the furling line properly.  As for the problem with the outhaul, it’s possible that this was related because everything worked okay later at the dock after the furling line was properly installed.  We’ll see how it goes.

As we continued south the winds picked up and we were rained on just a bit but nothing major.

We had been reading about some of the inlets along the Jersey coast and about how tricky they can be to enter especially on an outgoing tide.  As we approached the Manasquan Inlet we had an outgoing tide and there wasn’t much we could do about it so in we went.

Wow.  On approach it appeared that waves were breaking from north to south across the inlet and onto the rocks on the south side so we’ll just cheat to starboard and there will be no problem right?  Wrong.  Once inside the inlet we got hit by a wave that rolled the boat to the extent that stuff went flying below.  In fact we found our laptop computer on the floor.  When this happened Brian was wrestling with the helm, trying to keep the boat off the rocks on the south side of the inlet despite the ocean’s best efforts to put us there.  Note to self, try to avoid going into inlets on a strong outgoing current.

Once inside the inlet we were stopped by the Coast Guard who wanted to do a safety inspection of the boat.  A great way to cap off an already wonderful day.  We told them that we were heading to a marina up the channel and they instructed us to proceed there and that they would follow us and then perform the inspection after we were docked.

Back to the title of this post - Current Events.  The river there has a very strong current and this along with the winds and the fact that the CG vessel was right on our stern made an adventure out of what should have been a routine docking scenario at the end of a T dock.  Eventually, we were able to get the boat restrained with no damage and only slight damage to ego.  We had no problem passing the safety inspection by the way.

Needless to say we were happy to say good night to this day.  Next up:  Atlantic City.