What a wild ride! We took off from Cocoa Village on Sunday morning (thanks to Betty Flowe our personal astrologer for helping us with our timing) and made it through the locks and through the last bridge at Port Canaveral with 5 minutes to spare before they shut down for their curfew to allow for the really big boats to load up their cruisers! We headed straight out the port and by 11:15 am, we were in the Atlantic Ocean northbound with all 3 sails full. Our boat is cutter rigged so we have a jib, a staysail (much smaller jib sail) and of course, our main sail. Engine turned off, we were in heaven.
With a northerly wind, we decided to sail east to pick up the gulf stream. Worked perfectly. We reached it about the time the winds shifted to the east so we could sail north (the direction we wanted to go). With the gulf stream pushing along with an extra 3-4 knots of speed, we were flying along showing speeds of up to 12 knots (averaged about 8-9 knots). We'd planned to sail for a couple of days and then pull into Beaufort, NC inlet to rest before continuing on. But we were having so much fun, the wind was perfect and we had the gulf stream pushing us along, that we decided to stay out. At one point we were about 140 miles from shore but then we gradually started coming back west and, of course, the land started coming more east so we averaged something less than 100 miles from shore.
On day two, we saw our first dolphin and even got to see the "Green Flash" as the sun set! It was so cool! We kept sailing and marveled at the still blue waters (definitely not the FL Keys or Bahamas) but, hey, way better than we'd seen for the last month or so. We made great timing and had amazing weather for the first four to five days. We'd be sailing along with everything from 10-15 knots of wind and then no wind for a couple of hours and then it would start all over again. All in all, it really was practically perfect conditions other than being really cool at night. We used the no wind hours to run the engine to make hot water for our showers so we could warm up. We saw several pods of dolphin (very different from the Bottlenose dolphins we're used to in FL). My dad looked them up for us and we think they are White Sided dolphins. Very playful and jumped completely out of the water a lot! Really loved seeing them.
By day six, the weather was changing and we went from little to no wind to about 20-25 knots with gusts up to 30 knots. At one point, we had double reefed (that means to shorten the sail to make it smaller so that the boat is not overpowered) the main sail, kept only the smaller staysail out and we were still averaging 6 knots of speed (with no more gulf stream because we were only about 30 miles from shore at this point). We heard on the marine radio that there was a small craft advisory in effect for the area so we decided to head into Cape May, NJ inlet to "ride" out the weather. Found a great anchorage just inside the inlet and instantly fell in love with the town. It's so cute and it really looks just like the pictures we've always seen of New England seaside villages. We're only staying here for one day (we'll be back this way as we head back south so we'll explore more then) to let the weather pass us by and then we'll take off tomorrow morning for NYC.
Until next post!
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