Back when we thought we'd be leaving Herrington Harbour the last week of June, we had planned to make Baltimore our first stop. The tall ships of OpSail were there, and a lot of good tourist things to do, and we would stay through the Independence Day fireworks. As things turned out, we didn't get moving until the 4th of July, long after the tall ships had left, but we decided to go up for the fireworks anyway.
We couldn't sail any of the 42 miles, since the Spartite we'd poured as a mast support needed to harden at least 48 hours before stressing the mast, but it was a good day on the water anyway. It was so relaxing to be out of work mode and in travel mode again. Myriad sails dotted the Bay, and as we turned up the Patapsco River and drew close to Baltimore we could see that lots of other people had the same idea as us. The marine police had set up a temporary anchorage in the channel just outside Fells Point, and it was already crowded when we arrived around 4 pm.
But we wanted to stay the night, and we couldn't do that in the temporary anchorage. So we crossed our fingers and crossed through the mass of boats, making for the Inner Harbor. Dozens of pedal boats in bright primary colors buzzed around the basin like a swarm of vivid butterflies, but amazingly enough there were only ten or so other boats at anchor among the permanently moored historic vessels. We waltzed right in like we owned the joint, dropping our hook next to the old Chesapeake lightship.
It
turned out to be only an okay fireworks viewing spot; we were really
close to one of the pyrotechnics barges and had a terrific view of
the rockets they shot off, but many of the more spectacular fireworks
shot from the other barge were hidden by the triangular roof of the
National Aquarium. It was really fun being right in the middle of the
action, though, surrounded by the huge crowd on the waterfront all
around the basin. The lights and noise and music were incredible.
Needless to say, it wasn't the ideal spot for a good night's sleep.
But we weren't in Baltimore for sleeping.
The next day we got over to the aquarium early and enjoyed the exhibits before the crowds. Even though we'd just spent several months swimming around in the World's Biggest Aquarium, the displays captivated us. Many of the exhibits reproduce habitats in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, so they showed fish not found in the Bahamas. The strangest creatures were those from the freshwater ecosystems of the Amazon; delicately spotted rays, slender fish with outsized tails, grossly huge fish which, according to the display beside the tank, swam up the flooded rivers and ate fruit from the drowned branches of trees along the underwater bank.
We visited the Museum of Public Works and the Maryland Science Center, ate lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and breakfasted in Harborplace. We were just typical tourists -- except we didn't have to find a place to park our car. Our dinghy we parked on the back side of one of the water taxi docks, right next to the WWII submarine Torsk. (We'd seen the historic ships which comprise the Baltimore Maritime Museum on a previous visit, before becoming boat people, so we didn't go aboard this time.)
We'd passed by the guns of Fort McHenry on our way in to Baltimore, and on Thursday afternoon we dinghied out for a closer look. There's no dinghy dock, but we tied up discreetly at the corner of the tourboat dock and threw ourselves on the mercy of the park rangers. Despite it being illegal to enter government property by any but the front gate, they took pity on us.
What a kick to wander around Fort McHenry right after seeing Independence Day fireworks! After all, this is where, in 1814, the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air impressed and inspired Francis Scott Key. The fort became a holding barracks for prisoners during the Civil War, and a hospital during the early 1900's, but it proudly remembers its big claim to fame, as a star-spangled banner yet waves from a flagpole sited on the original spot. In light winds they fly a replica of the original 30' by 40' flag, but the day we were there the "storm flag" was up. At around 19' by 25' it's not exactly small either. Both flags have15 stars and 15 stripes and fly during the day; in the evening, the historic flag is lowered and a modern flag flown in its place, so that a US flag gallantly streams 24 hours a day. We were there just before closing time, so along with two other couples we helped a ranger lower and fold the flag. Even with seven of us trying to keep the huge and surprisingly heavy flag under control, the 15-knot breeze still tried to turn it into a sail to carry us off.
We didn't actually sail off until the next morning, but the winds held and we made most of the way to the C & D canal under sail. We stopped for the night at Chesapeake City, and left early the next morning (7:00 am, early for us!) so we'd get a favorable current for most of the trip. We motored the entire distance, nearly 70 dreary miles of listening to the engine drone, and made Cape May shortly after five in the afternoon.
Cruising friends from the northeast had recommended going from Cape May straight to Block Island, rather than hopping up the New Jersey coast. We nodded and said, sure, that's what we plan to do, and then when nobody was looking we went straight for the atlas to find out where the heck was Block Island, anyway? We found it off the eastern tip of Long Island, south of the rest of Rhode Island by 12 or so miles. It stands like a sentry guarding the New England coast, a reasonable place to head for as a way station toward Maine.
The weather looked good for the Block Island run, although other sailors might question our definition of "good". We wanted to leave early in the morning, and to make the 200+ miles and get in before sunset the next day we needed to sail fast. The forecast 15-25 knots from the southwest would be a lot of weather for an ocean passage, but since we were going northeast, and Windom needs a lot of wind for downwind running, it was perfect for us.
The first part of the trip was beautiful, gentle seas and a steady 12-15 knots of wind. When the wind built to above 20 knots, the waves took a while to catch up, so for some time we were scooting along at over 7 knots over fairly placid water. Alas, this didn't last, and we found ourselves rolling and surfing along big seas. The boat would slide sideways down a wave, the autopilot would think, "hey, we're going off too far to leeward, here!" and turn to windward. Then the boat's natural tendency to round up would push us even further to windward. The autopilot would finally catch up after a few moments, but the net effect was a series of S-curves. We sailed for a while on main alone in 25-30 knots, and then on jib alone in 20-25, both of which helped minimize the rolling and curving -- using the main worked a bit better, but in less than 25 knots it was too slow.
The waves were interesting. Looking back from the cockpit, I didn't think they were too big; then they'd pass under our stern, lifting us up, and break into a mass of white foam underneath us. They seemed much bigger when I looked at them sideways-on, the valleys accentuated, the peaks more obviously breaking. The wave period was shorter than that of the storm waves we'd encountered off of Beaufort when we crossed over from the Bahamas. Instead of steadily advancing lines of rollers, they were steeper, more confused. Not the most comfortable motion in the world, but it wasn't horrible, and it wasn't scary.
We neared the Long Island coast the next morning in a misty haze which cut visibility down to a few miles. We could dimly see a pair of tall ships making their way under sail. The wind calmed down to under 20 knots, and we both finally managed to catch some sleep (not at the same time, of course!). We plunked down the anchor in the enormous New Harbor of Block Island at 5 p.m., just in time for cocktail hour.
The passage to Block Island gave us a chance to experiment with some of our new equipment. After leaving the Cape May jetties, we had a short leg reaching east, to get away from the coast; the wind angle was absolutely ideal, but then we had to turn more downwind for the bulk of the trip. No problem, now that we have a whisker pole, right? Ahem. The instructions for pole deployment might have made sense to someone who's been racing boats since toddlerhood, but we could hardly figure out what we were supposed to do. Then, once we got an idea of what we needed to do, we discovered the wide gap between theory and practice.
In theory, one end of the pole attaches to the mast, and the other end to the lazy sheet on the jib (the windward, unused sheet), and the pole is telescoped to its full extent as the jib is sheeted over to windward. In practice, the end of the pole on the jib sheet lands in the water on the windward side of the boat, crushing the lifelines, and no amount of pulling on the telescoping line will induce the thing to telescope. In practice, the sailors discover they need a number of extra lines and blocks, some to hold things up, others to hold things down, and while they run around deck trying to set these things up, the pole waves around wildly in improbable directions. In practice, jibing takes half an hour as the sails go in, go out, flap around, do everything but the hokey pokey as we try to turn ourselves about. It's clear we need more...practice.
Despite our incredible ineptitude, having the pole helped. We never managed to extend it all the way, but even only partly extended it kept our boatspeed up and prevented the jib from alternately filling and collapsing, which is hard on the equipment and noisy, as well as inefficient. We were a little nervous about setting and dousing the pole safely in big waves and heavy wind, so we only used it during the periods of "lighter" winds, in the lower 20's and under. Once we get the system figured out, though, things will go a lot smoother.
The radar was a little easier to figure out. Push the button, watch the blips, run up on deck and see if you can see what they are. We had experimented with the radar in the Delaware, so by the time we left Cape May we had some idea of how to translate what the screen showed into reality. The screen didn't show much as we paralleled the New Jersey coast. Then we got near the New York approach channels, and blips were everywhere. It was strange to "see" ships at 12 miles out, long before their lights were visible, and it almost made things scarier, since we could "see" many more vessels with the radar than ever got close enough to us to see with our eyes.
It turned out to be harder than we expected to use the radar to determine whether or not a given boat was on a collision course with us, as the blips refused to remain obligingly at constant relative angles to us, swinging back and forth as we S-curved down the waves. Tuning the radar to ignore the noise made by big waves was tricky, too. But we were grateful for it on that hazy morning, when we strained to see the ship that the radar told us was two miles off our starboard bow. It was also really nifty to see the radar signatures of racon buoys, and to be able to determine exactly how far away we were from the coastline or a passing ship.