Finally the day arrived for us to leave on our trip. Hurricane Ernesto had pushed the departure date out from Wednesday Aug 30th. The plan was to pick Philip's colleague, Tony Flores up from his home in Bloomfield, NJ. He was to crew with us. We'd then drop Philip's car at Liberty Harbor Marina and drive down to Georgetown in my car. We were very excited to have managed to set up a strategic meeting with Dr. J.T. Dock Houk in Galena, MD for that afternoon on our way down.

All a-glow, in convoy, Philip, the kids and I headed off for Tony's house. Bloomfield, we soon realized, was not an easy place to find. We got horribly lost and after numerous u-turns, phone calls and muttering we found Tony and his daughter waiting outside his house for us. We went inside, met his lovely family, asked for directions for the way out and headed off again in both our cars.

Well, some u-turns and mistaken turns on the way we finally made it to Liberty Harbor Marina. Without too much ado, we left Philip's car there.

Off to Georgetown. By this time it was raining steadily and we had been en-route for as long as it would have taken us to get all the way there. The poor kids were doing there best to be patient, tough hungry and tired of being strapped in. Traffic was bumper to bumper a fair amount of the way down. We arrived in Galena exactly 17 minutes after Dr. Houk had left. Very disappointing to have missed the opportunity.

We arrived safely and dinghyed all the last bags and ourselves on board for a well deserved rest that evening.

About 5 minutes after checking that the navigation lights were working, a huge bird crashed into the masthead, breaking the lense to the Tri-color lense. This would be essential for the overnight offshore passage from Cape May to Sandy Hook.