Successfully Escaped Winter

Our passage from sunny Atlantic City to our home base at Shennecossett Yacht Club in Groton, Connecticut took 36 hours. At three different times we were able to sail at 5 knots. However, that amounted to only 5 hours of the passage. So we motored on a calm sea the majority of the time. Thankfully, our electric auto pilot did all the steering of this open ocean passage. About 4 hours south of Montauk, Long Island we were surrounded by thick fog. Thankfully we are equipped with radar, and AIS positions of most commercial and some pleasure boats appear right on the chart plotter. We also recently added an automatic fog horn, so it was automatically blasting our position to boats as an auditory signal. We were disappointed that the fog never lifted all day. We had to slowly feel our way into our own little harbor and trust our instruments!A big thank you to Bill Hooper for taking this photo of us from E deck! It made us smile to hear the cheers of fellow club members that were on a boat at the nearby dock. Thank you for the welcome home at 7:00PM on Saturday, June 1st.

About a half hour later we caught a brief glimpse of shore, yes we are in the right place! We were still outside covering sails, setting up our porta-bote dinghy, and stowing our offshore gear.Spring was cool and very wet here in New England. However, after a cold front blasted through the next day, the long range forecast looks pretty good. When we first arrived we were enjoying sleeping in slightly cooler weather: high 50’s and low 60’s rather than 70’s. Daytime highs have been in the 60’s or 70’s so quite comfortable. Summer weather finally arrived at the end of June.

The first project Tom worked on was a used Burley Travoy Trailer. Soon he was attaching it to his bicycle and pedaling to the hardware store with the empty propane tank strapped to the trailer. Tom said he had to keep looking back to be sure it was still there. He used to commute to work on this bike, so he feels right at home. Tom’s current project is replacing our inverter.

Anita is back into the groove of a morning exercise walk around the nearby UCONN campus. Tom signed up to use the UCONN pool this summer.

We are learning about grocery delivery via Instacart and Loving the convenience of placing Amazon orders too. We are currently hauled out at Essex Boat Works, more on that in the next blog. We are making lists and ordering parts for various projects.

It’s good to be back in familiar cruising grounds, meeting up with friends and family.

Statistics for our round trip to the Bahamas:

Total miles: 3822 nautical miles

Total Engine hours: 368 (note: 47 hours were for charging purposes only, solar day was too short to charge batteries through clouds; add more solar)

Total hours sailing: 355

Nights at sea: 18

Nights at anchor: 226

Nights at a dock: 8

Total days away: 253

We plan to sail south again in the fall; we loved escaping winter! Summer weather is so much more pleasant when living on a boat.