Cape May, NJ USA …
This shakedown cruise has been mostly a series of short sails interspersed with long stretches at anchor hunkered down to avoid a series of tropical and extra tropical cyclonic storms. In the 33 days since leaving our berth in the Chesapeake we have managed to get ashore only nine times. Block Island had us hiding from hurricane Lee, Phinney’s Harbor gave us shelter from the close pass of Ophelia, Katama Bay in Martha’s Vineyard was a refuge from a five day classic nor’easter and now here we are in Cape May hanging out in 30+ kts as TS Phillipe passes well to the east but is sucking a lot of wind in from west of us.
We did finally make it to Nantucket and had two absolutely lovely days of sunshine and no wind. With its large natural harbor and easy access to both the mainland and the open Atlantic, Nantucket has a long seafaring history and many of its classic New England shingled or red brick buildings have been around for more than a century. It is also a tourist mecca with hourly ferry boat arrivals from the Cape disgorging day trippers who amble the streets trying to make sense of the free visitor maps they were given. Nantucket is not a bargain destination. If there is a sandwich available for less than $15 we couldn’t find it and forget about being able to afford anything in clothing, scrimshaw or jewelry boutiques which line the cobblestone streets. But there are bargains to be found.
Next to dumpster diving in wealthy marinas where all sorts of cast-off boat gear finds its way back to Kailani, we gravitate to thrift stores where the locals tend to buy and eventually discard perfectly good items that we could not normally afford. It just so happened that the Nantucket Cottage Hospital Thrift Store was in its last week before closing for the season, and its normally low prices were slashed by half. Three bags of clothes and galley items are now stored aboard Kailani, but sadly, no trousers in Nantucket red.found.
The major draw for us to the island was to catch up with Jen’s cousin, Cassie, who is the pastry chef at PPX which provides victuals to large on island events and, four days a week, operates a small pastry shop. Cassie’s cakes, pies, cookies and other wondrous concoctions will pretty much stop your heart. We were able to meet her colleagues and several of her friends and then dined at Nautilus, rumored to be the best restaurant on the island. If you can only go ashore one day a week, it would be difficult to imagine a better day to pick.
We left Nantucket motoring with no wind with the plan of spending the night anchored off Edgartown to catch the best weather window we have seen in several weeks to take us back southwest. We got up well before dawn on Thursday and motor sailed around the east end of Martha’s Vineyard with a three knot current pushing us south through the narrow Muskeget Channel. Over the next 40 hours we sailed slowly, motored a little faster and every once in a while caught a nice breeze so Kailani could do her thing at 8.5-9kts. During the wee hours of Friday morning we found ourselves having to pick our way through a 50 boat strong scallop fishing fleet in dense fog and managed to do so without getting single irate fisherman calling us on the VHF. The miracles of radar and AIS.
Alas, our recent passages were not without a couple of low points, both the result of operator error. On the way to the Vineyard from Nantucket the cold-water inlet to the water heater blew off and nearly 100 gallons of precious fresh water was pumped overboard by the engine room bilge pump. Not the end of the world as it was eventually replaced by running the watermaker off the genset for 4 hours, but it prompted Harley to add “tighten all hose clamps” to his pre passage list. The second mishap resulted in a 2 ft tear in the main sail when Harl got overly aggressive when reefing the main using the electric winch. Bad boy. Fortunately, Jen will be able to repair the tear as soon as we get a calm day to get the sail down on deck.
We made our landfall here last night in full dark and anchored with no wind. The calm continued until 1100 this morning when right on schedule the wind piped up to 30+ kts bringing the crew of virtually every boat in the anchorage on deck. Kalani’s oversized anchor began plowing up the soft mud so we, along with a few other boats, had to move and reset. Now we are keeping one eye on our position as we finish up dinner and hope the wind dies a bit so we don’t have to set an anchor watch.
The forecast has us here until at least Monday when everything dies down enough to make the last 130 nm back to Edgewater.
38 57 N 074 51 W
at anchor
Cape May, NJ USA
