Happy Birthday, Linda. 52 today. Living the dream that I've had for so long....I am absolutely blessed!!
We decided to stay in Newport for a few days to give Tom time to catch up on much neglected work. We had dinner at Benjamin's in town. I ordered fish!! I always stay away from seafood. But if I am going to live on the water, I better start finding ways to like it. I had fluke caught that day and drowned with alot of lemon. It was actually pretty good. Thanks Tom, for bringing me to one of my favorite places for my birthday!

We've had an uneventful and successful first overnight passage! And fly free!! Until 6:30 am when a few started appearing. Our destination was originally for Block Island. Tom changed the course to Newport, RI. Good choice! We got to Newport at 2:30 pm and moored. Then off to the town. For both of us, this is the first doing this town by water. There is a different scene from the mooring field. The boats left us speechless. Quite a few 100' plus. And from all over the world. Sailboats with 5 spreaders! The "toys" some people have. By 7:30 pm we were both feeling the lack of sleep from the overnight passage. An early night.

We left Atlantic City at 9 am, after some work of untangling the anchors. We were so excited to pick up where we left off the day before with wind and sails. But...no wind! So we motored. At 9:30 am we started being bothered with a few flies. A few turned into a never ending stream of constant flies swarming and biting us ALL day. There was no relief. There was no peace. We sprayed layers of OFF! bug spray on ourselves, the Deep Woods for biting flies. We're not sure if they ever really tested th stuff because it did NOT work against these flying piranhas. Even direct hits did NOTHING!! If anyone is interested, we can tell you that the expensive stiff Black Flag fly swatters are no match for these creatures. The cheap flimsy ones turned out to be the effective weapon. At one point Tom took to chasing them on the deck....no more waiting for them to come to us...a more aggressive tactic was needed. It didn't help. Hours later and 40 miles offshore, we had perfected our swatting technique that occasionally we would get a double or triple hit with one swat. The cockpit looked like a true war zone: dead fly carcases, dissected wings and legs and blood streaks littered the cockpit. At one point, to keep our sanity, we talked about using the situation as a movie plot. Going below to make food was frustrating. The attack was so focused on human ankles, we had to do a jig of jumping around in attempts of not being bitten. Tom went below with both hands swatting. When the pile of dead flies got so big, Tom broke out the dust buster.....the one Linda said was not neceessary to buy. We found delight in sucking them up alive and watching their frantic and denied attempts of escape. We didn't realize we had such "dark" sides to ourselves. We found such delight with each kill. At 7:30 pm, ten hours later, we were beginning to find relief. I was getting very concerned this would go on throughout our night passage. We decided to go straight through to Block Island because the weather was good. Tom took the first watch until midnight when Linda relieved him. The ocean was very calm, the moon was at half and the stars were bright and plentiful. Finally, cooler temperatures and NO FLIES!!

Fogged in! We made a phone call to West Marine and they said they had the card for the charts. So, into the dinghy and the fog we go to take a "walk" to West Marine, accompanied by Tom's handy dandy GPS on his phone. When we get there, it is the wrong card. Back to Grace we go, but the fog appears to be burning off a bit. We are on the boat for less than 2 minutes when Tom frantically calls for Linda to come up from below. The anchor had come loose and we had started drifting into the channel! With the anchor up, Tom decided it would be a good time to leave. We didn't get far before we realized the fog was still too heavy to venture out, so we turned around and waited for an hour. Visability was back and up came the anchor again. Once we were in the ocean the winds were blowing at 10-15 as forcasted. Up came the sails. This was what we had been anticipating. Not too long out we spotted dolphins! And again at Strathmere. What beautiful creatures. We anchored in Atlantic City for the night.....dropping 2 anchors.

We are finally leaving the marina after two months! It's been a frustrating time....the transmisson has had a total of three rebuilds. But it looks like the third was the charm and we are finally heading out. We left Summit North Marina, DE at 9:00 am, heading through the C & D Canal to the Delaware River into the Delaware Bay. Our destination is Cape May, NJ for our first night on the hook. We motored the whole way...no wind. Just before we got into the bay, I noticed we didn't have charts on the GPS. Tom did some investigating and we realized we don't have anything for north of the Chesapeake. Good thing we have all the paper charts. At 5:45 pm fog rolled in. We couldn't see much past our bow. We had gone into Cape May last year, so we were familiar with the jetty at the entrance. Linda took the position of horn blower on the bow while Tom was at the helm. It was very unnerving, but 3 hours later we dropped anchor and secured ourselves for the night. Throughout it all, Darwin faired rather well. Little does he realize he will not be on land for a very ling time.