My first ever off-shore experience! Cape May to Block Island - two hundred
miles. Actually, what I’m hoping for is
my first offshore experience without puking my guts out. My only previous overnight passage happened
in Maine four or five years ago in Rick’s Alberg 30. I was so seasick that I
was reduced to laying on the cockpit seat, wrapped in a damp sleeping bag,
periodically dry-heaving into a disgusting bucket (yes, Wilson). I remember with absolute certainty that it
lasted three full days (Rick assures me that it was in fact twenty-two hours). Three days, one day, why would anybody voluntarily sign up for more of that?
Well, our plan for this summer got a bit whacked along with
the mast last month. This is my third summer sailing with Rick, and we have yet
to get any farther north than Southport, Maine. My dream is to get at least to Penobscot
Bay and hopefully to Mt. Desert Island (pronounced Mount deSERT by the locals).
Without that bridge accident, Rick would have gotten the boat up there by the
beginning of July, but now that we’re sailing together we will have to do some
of that dreaded off-shore sailing if we are to have any chance of reaching our
goal.
The southern coast of New England could be thought of as a kind of
triangle, with the Jersey coast on one side and Long Island on another. In both of the last two summers it took us
nine days to cover those two sides of the triangle. Our plan this year is to sail along the hypotenuse - just go non-stop
from Cape May to Block Island – which should take just under two days.
I have gotten a lot more “salty” in the last two summers,
and the new boat Valkyrie has helped a lot as well. Rick thinks we have a good
weather window to make it fairly easily from Cape May to Block Island on a thirty-six
to forty hour sail. The wind will not be that strong and we may have to motor
some of the time, but these are just the right conditions for a crewmember
prone to seasickness. I slap on a scopolamine patch and ready my anti-nausea
pills.
We set out early in the morning, and the fog is pretty
heavy. We can barely make out the sides of the channel, and even though we’ve
just left I’m already freaking out. Valkyrie is outfitted very well for fog; we
have a chart plotter/GPS, which shows us exactly where we are and how deep the
water is, and we have radar to tell us if any other boats or buoys are nearby.
It still feels horrible not to be able to see anything, and I take the coward’s
way out – I trust Rick to the equipment and go back to bed.
When I get up the fog has lifted and it turns out to be a
beautiful day. The air is light and Rick is happy to have an opportunity to try
out his new spinnaker. Made this year, ours is a red and white sail that is
designed for light air. After a bit of tweaking the sail trim, Rick is happy
with the performance.
The thing that has always creeped me out about the idea of off-shore
sailing is that you are so far away from land you don’t see anybody. No boats,
no birds, not even trash. Well, that turns out to be somewhat false after all.
We did see one boat on the first day. And we see a LOT of trash in the form of
balloons. You know, when you let go of those helium balloons, celebrating a
birthday or a wedding or just for fun, and they seem like they just go forever
up into the sky? They don’t. They end up in the ocean.
We also see birds – sweet little things called shearwaters
that live only offshore. They show up in groups of four to six and fly low
across the water, angling their wings so that one wing tip almost touches the
waves.
Meals offshore, at least for this trip with fairly calm
seas, are easy to prepare as we go. The stove in the galley is gimbaled – it
swings free so the top pretty much always remains level – and cooking up some
pasta with a sauce that we made yesterday is a breeze. Sometimes I think we eat
better on the boat than we do at home; or maybe everything just TASTES better
here.
The first night offshore is a lovely sail with the spinnaker
and no engine. The fading sunset is really quite beautiful:
I wish I could say that I was a master sailor and that Rick
and I split up the watches so that each of us could get some sleep through the
night. Rick is the one who took ALL the watches – I went to bed. The truth is,
I end up sleeping most of the two days it takes to get to Block Island. Is it
the meds, or am I just sleep deprived? I don’t know, but hey, it sure beats
seasickness any day of the week! Rick does manage to get in a few naps of a
half an hour or less, and he says he’s doing great, so don’t worry.
The second day of the trip brings us more shearwaters, and
even a couple of whales! They are hard to miss even at a distance when they
spray water from their blowholes, but they are very difficult to get a decent
picture of, so I’m thrilled to get something that doesn’t just look like a
black blob.
After the sun sets on our second day at sea, I can’t stay
awake (surprise, surprise) and turn in for the night. We will be pulling into
Block Island just after midnight and I hope Rick will wake me up so that I can
help him navigate through all the other boats and set the anchor...
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