Saturday September 8th...... Hudson River

It was apparent early on today that even at 6 miles an hour we were going way too fast to deal with the history that was racing by on each shore. Thanks to Kurt (and his dad) we had in the cockpit, a mile by mile guide to the Hudson River complete with a description of all the castles, mansions and other cool stuff. It was a long day motoring and not without excitement. On our way out of the Creek our engine started racing plus or minus 300rpms .... it turned out to be a primary filter so I switched to the back up and ran smoothly all day. Then, with our anchorage in sight a few miles away, our bilge pump went off and wouldn't stop which is a real bad sign...I checked all the thru-hulls and everything was fine. The only thing left was the packing gland on our drive shaft which is located in the basement of our boat.... and boat basements are not the easiest places to operate a wrench. After emptying the area under the cockpit, I slid down...did I mention that it has been about 90 degrees the last week....and found a steady spray instead of the one drip per minute that is normal. So the good news was that we were not going to sink... the bad news was that as soon as we were anchored I had a nasty job with which to deal.

Anyway, it was a great day. Hot, long and loud with the motor running all the time and tons of traffic. Even better when Ellie called with football scores... we won and THEY didn't for the second week in a row. We passed West Point today and there looked to be tailgaters everywhere. The roof of one of the building said "Beat Air Force" so I assume they had a home game as well. By the way, West Point looks a lot like Hogwarts from the water... but with the haze, photography was tough today.

We are about 30 miles north of New York City and hope to anchor at the Statue of Liberty tomorrow afternoon. It looks like we may be there for a couple of days. Our next run will be in the Atlantic and we would like to dispense with New Jersey in one fell swoop... 120 miles to Cape May. We'll see. There are lots of places to bail if we decide to, but if we leave at about dusk and sail all night, we'll be there with good light.

We met some folks last night in Catskill who are heading the same direction as we..... their boat is a Valiant 42 that is not only beautiful but equipped as a cruising boat should be. We were moored next to them in Put in Bay but never spoke. We saw their boat in Waterford as we were leaving but never had the chance to chat until last night.

Later....

I would like to add that we drove through mountains all day and they were beautiful, reminding us of the Smokies. It has been HOT and humid. We have sunshine every day and have had unbelievable weather.