Thursday - Atlantic Highlands, Sandy Hook Bay, New Jersey, on a mooring ball. I won't go into a lot of details so I will just say our first time trying to get hooked into a mooring ball was not fun in a 20 mile per hour wind.

Stayed one night then left the next morning to start down the east coast. Haven't decided yet if we will make it an all night passage or stop in one of the inlets.

Saturday & Sunday - Sunset Marina, Ocean City, Maryland. We did the overnight passage leaving Sandy Hook at 7:30 am and arrived here at 3:00 pm on Saturday. Long, long night with wind at our bow. Some time during the night we lost Captain Jack O'Lantern. Sad to see him go! Actually did sail for several hours on Friday but about sunset the wind changed and we had to motor until morning. The highlights were first seeing dolphins. Bill at first thought it was jumping fish then we got closer and saw 3 dolphins. A couple of hours later I saw a water spout and a large black shape come out of the water. Looked again and saw another water spout. I'm pretty sure it was humpback whales. I looked on the internet and sure enough the same day several people reported seeing humpback whales in the same area. That was definitely a thrill!!

In the evening I was not feeling well at all, not sure if I was seasick, feeling the effects of smelling diesel fumes for so many hours or some bug or a combination. Bill ended up staying up most of the night, finally getting a couple of hours sleep from around 5 to 7 am.

We decided to stay here another day to rest up and for me to feel better since it looks like we may have another overnight passage coming up on Monday with our destination being Norfolk Virginia and the start of the Intracoastal Water Way (ICW). We hope to be able to stop in Chincoteague Inlet and Wachaprague Inlet but will need to call and see if we can get in without grounding. According to the charts we should be okay with our 4.5 foot draft but want to try and call the harbormasters to verify. If not, then it is the all night passage (about 120 miles).

Did some provisioning today and did a good scrub of the boat. Since we are now in salt water it will be important to try and rinse off the boat as often as possible with fresh water to stop things from corroding, something we didn't need to worry about on Lake Superior. Come to think of it, we didn't have salt to wash off before but we had something just as bad, black dust from the taconite (iron ore) plant next to our marina.

Beautiful weather here and looks like we will have another couple of days of sunshine.