We are in Cape May, New Jersey. We arrived at about 1am after a 21-hour from New York and just crept into the harbor and anchored. later this morning we'll move to a slip in the marina a secure the boat for the gales that are expected tonight and over the weekend.

After days of getting pounded by bashing into waves and strong winds, this passage was almost completely different. for one thing, the winds were from behind us so the motion of the boat was very different: side-to-side rolling as waves ran past us instead of fore-and-aft pitching and crashing into oncoming waves. For another, the winds were almost never above 15 knots and for the vast majority of the passage, they were less than 10 knots.

We set off at 4am and navigated out of New York harbor, through the Narrows, and out the shipping channels off Sandy Hook in darkness, dodging anchored boats, tugs, barges, and a veritable parade of large container ships coming in off the Atlantic...Three cheers for radar and AIS!

Once we were out in the ocean,we turned south along the New Jersey coast and motorsailed....We got some rolly bouncing in moderate waves for the first few hours but gradually the winds weakened until the waves lost their sharp edges and began to spread out. We continued south following the coast (few miles out) The seas calmed, the winds shifted but stayed light and from behind us, and the moon lit the water until close to midnight. The nighttime entry to the Cape May inlet itself was much easier than I had feared (even having done it several times before in daylight) and then it was over....Not with the crashing bangs of Long Island Sound, but the quiet, hissing whisper of our bow wave curling over in gentle swells.

This port marks the end of a major phase of our journey: The North Atlantic.
From Cape May south to Key West, Florida we will no longer be exposed to the open ocean. Our route lies in bays, canals, and rivers. Our progress is less constrained by winds and waves and, even when things do kick up, they tend to lay back down faster than the ocean. it also marks the end of a long push to get here: Tomorrow I head off on business travel and Anne, Evelyn, and Leslie will continue on without me for a bit.

It's a wrench leaving the boat and knowing they'll have adventures without me but its an important next step: Over the years, as a matter of safety, I've worked to eliminate things that only I could do and make it so that they could do them too. But there are still too many things that are just so easy for me to do that we just fall into having me do them. Having me off the boat will make better sailors of them all or, rather, let them discover how good they already are.