It is midnight and Im on watch. Cap’t K is below in the cabin sleeping and I am curled up in the cockpit with a blanket and a thermos of tea, trying to stay awake. At around sunset we were flying along at well over 7 knots, now we are creeping along at a sleepy 3-4 knots. All is calm. We have about 70 more miles to go before we make it to Norfolk.

The stars are keeping me company, as they have for thousands of other sailors before me. Im watching the constellations track across the huge sky and have seen an unusual number of shooting stars. It is a very dark night with no moon. The night feels endless and deep, the kind that makes you long for dreamless sleep.

–
Lala

Location:Off the coast of Maryland

We are at sea. The eastern horizon is beginning to lighten. Stars are shooting right and left. A pod of right whales is nearby. We are heading southwest to Norfolk. Hope to arrive by tomorrow afternoon. Travelling with a buddy boat named Azure Mist. Cold. Moderate nw winds.

– Capt’n K & Lala

We are preparing to haul anchor and depart cape may nj momentarily. Goal: ocean city, MD by sunset to anchor for the night before continuing on to norfolk the next day.

– Capt’n K & Lala

Got new information by radio from some Quebecois guinea pigs that went out before us, and we have revised our plan. The sea swells are still built up from the last 24 hours of 30 knot winds from the sw, which means they are right on the nose. Now the winds are nw at 20, which is great, but it would be a powerful run right into strong swell chop on the nose for all day racing to get in before dark. No thanks. Rather get a stick in the eye.

So we have decided to wait until tomorrow morning very early to take off. Like 3:00am early. The idea is to let the chop and winds settle down a bit so we dont beat ourselves up more than necessary. The latest weather report now looks like the winds would blow us all the way to Norfolk in 28-37 hours straight from here in Cape May. That would put us into Norfolk in one run with no stopover in Ocean City MD, which means that we wont have to deal with navigating that inlet and anchoring inside there. Inlets and anchoring are often the most stressful parts of the passage, whereas just sailing along in nice weather can be almost boring and mundane by comparison.

I dont know about you, but I am not a stress lover. Sure, I’ll rise to meet the occasion when it comes, but if I can avoid the stress then I will. The trouble is that we just pulled up the dinghy and strapped it down on deck partially deflated for the trip. So now we are stuck on the sailboat and cant get off unless we undo all that work we just did! That should teach us to make our final go/dont go decision BEFORE stowing the dinghy!

I guess we can use this unforeseen opportunity to clean the barnacles off the bottom of the dighy! Woo Hoo! This is the life! 😉 Barnacle cleaners unite!

Meanwhile Lala is being fantastically productive on her new loom. What an awesome loom it is for a boat too. Just feel the awesomeness:

– Capt’n K & Lala

We met someone crazier than us. No really, we mean it. Crazy crazy, and so full of stories and tales that you feel like a kid in an iMax theater.

We were dinghying through the harbor past the Coast Guard station minding our own business and checking out all the other boats here. Then my eyes fell upon a very very wee vessel. A mere day sailor me thinks. Nice lines, low freeboard, blue hull. Looks fast and sleek.

Wait, wait, there is a person on board. Not just a person, but it looks like someone is living on that tiny thing. Not just a person living on that tiny thing, but a WOMAN!

That’s more rare than a Made in the U.S.A product in Wal-mart!

So of course we had to go over and say hello. Meet Linda, skipper and owner of a 22 foot full keeled Pearson Ensign day sailor. She has had the boat in New Hampshire for years on stands but recently moved to Florida. So on October 1st she launched her wee vessel from Maine, and is sailing it down to Florida. There she’s going to live on an 80 by 25 foot steel barge that her brother built from scratch. Their plan is to go to Panama, where there aren’t many people, so they can get away from it all.

No, we aren’t making this up for our dear readers. This is reality blogging in action! This living breathing 62 year old woman is single handing a 22 foot day sailor named “summer wind” from Maine to Florida in October.

As far as I’m concerned, no one ever gets to call us crazy again! Now, we love this lady already. When we call her crazy, it is with adoration and affection and respect, but DAMN, she’s salty! Look at this boat! It’s almost all cockpit, and you can’t even sit up all the way in the cabin. Not only that, but the cabin leaks a bit, and the bunk is always wet. Wow! But, hey it has a U.S. coast Guard licensed 100-ton master captain at the helm, so she definitely knows what she’s doing. Hell, she grew up with 6 siblings on a 70 foot schooner in the Bahamas!

So, seeing her lovely wee vessel and knowing how wet it was outside (e.g. It’s been raining all day), we stole her away to our boat for a little hot tea and a dry towel and warm cabin couch and conversation.

I know, I know, land people would never dream of meeting someone in a parking lot who has a really small car and inviting them over to their house for tea, but that’s just how it goes here on the water. Maybe the next time you see a wee little SmartCar or one of those new Fiats, go over and ask the person over to your house for a drink just to see what they do. You can always tell them that we said it was okay and that you read about it on a blog online somewhere called Way Happy.

-Capt’n K & Lala

PS. It looks like we’ll be shut in here in Cape May for a few days. (Wow, that’s news, right! 😉 The next weather window for heading south may be on Friday night or Saturday, and we hope to run outside, e.g. on the Atlantic, from here to Norfolk, Virginia. That’s the way the pickle wrinkles.

Location:Cape May, NJ

This morning we launched at dawn. Literally as the crimson star rose above the horizon to the east, we were making our way out the Atlantic City inlet.

Windless.

Another missed opportunity yesterday, and today we launched into serenity and calm. The feeling of joy at leaving Atlantic City was more powerful than our resistance to using the four cylinder diesel beast in our craft, and we motored happily out into the rolling southeast swells of the Atlantic.

Earplugs deep in our heads, we coasted over rolling black waves that started long ago and thousand of miles away off the coast of West Africa. We were so happy to be free of the clutches of that port.

To make our exit even more poetic, there happened to be a building on fire in Atlantic City as were leaving, and the city was covered in a nasty cloud of thick black smoke. As we headed to the clear sea, we spotted the first pelican of our trip, leading the way south. The pelican is Lala’s favorite bird, and seeing this lone bird this far north was a good omen indeed!

15 miles into our 40 mile run we felt a puff of a breeze from the east. Another gift from Africa? We’ll take it! It wasn’t enough to keep our jib full, so we debated putting the genoa back up. Tha’ts the sail that we took down the day before, so it was painfully ironic to be considering putting it back up the mast again. We’re lazy cruising sailors, I guess.

But then again, maybe not. We pulled out the biggest sail in our inventory, the spinnaker. This sail hasn’t been out of its bag in 30 years, and we decided to inspect it. Turns out it’s like new. We figured out how to rig it and took our time to get everything ready.

Like a perfect bell ringing a true note through the air, our spinnaker took a long slow deep breath, filled with wind, and then filled our hearts with joy. We choked the diesel to death, dug the earplugs out of our brains, and breathed sighs of relief. We were sailing. FINALLY!

Sure other sailboats passed us, but they were all motoring, and we were getting infinite mileage. Who doesn’t want that? Infinite miles per gallon. Thank you Africa.

Capt’n K & Lala

Location:Cape May, NJ

Update: 11:50 AM.
We had trouble this morning changing our headsail, and we’ve been delayed. So, we are not taking off today. Of well.

The headsail, our nice big Genoa/Jenny, wouldn’t come down so I had to go up the mast in the bosun chair to check it out. While about 3/4 of the way up the mast, my line got stuck, and I couldn’t go further up nor come back down. *ugh* It was wrapped around the winch and bound up on itself and Lala, who was working the winch on deck, couldn’t get it unstuck.

I debated trying to climb up the rest of the way by myself, without the aid of the chair and security line, but that was just a moment of pure insanity. We still had the main halyard available, so Lala sent it up to me on the flag runner, and I clipped into that instead. Then I was able to make it the last ten feet up to the mast head successfully. I cleared the blockage on the jib furler and headed back down to the deck, exhausted and sore. Going up the mast is like doing 100 leg lifts and ab crunches, along with a dozen pull ups for dessert.

Nothing like a little headsail-change-and-climb-up-the-mast drill at 6:00 in the morning to wake you up! And all this before breakfast! Then we lowered the Jenny and raised the working (smaller) jib without any problems. It was a reasonably fast headsail change, as far as we are concerned. Fast for us is under 15 minutes…enough to make a racer have a heart attack for sure.

Finally all ready “to go” then we raised both of our anchors to find them covered with the foulest stickiest oiliest black tar mud you’ve ever seen. This stuff is seriously vile. It’s like a cross between crude oil, permanent ink and velcro. It laughs at water and soap. Even WD-40 and bleach leave leave it unscarred. The only way to get it off is water pressure. You know, take a fire hose and blast the crap off.

So we headed out of the anchorage to cross the inlet and go to the marina on the other side, where there is fresh water available in a hose with a pressure nozzle. Our water tanks were empty anyway, and we needed to fill them before taking off.

Now, we’ve come into this anchorage twice now *in the dark* with strong currents and cross winds while exhausted, so we figured it would be nothing to head out in daylight with light winds on a rising tide. I’d checked google satellite images to see what it looks like recently from above, and it seems that we should head almost all the way out and then turn south near the tip of the north grass edge.

Well apparently I turned just a little too soon because *BAM* the bow dipped and the stern rose and everything lurched forward.  We hit ground.  At least I was going slowly!  Full throttle in reverse, and we pulled off.  I turned a bit more to the west and shifted into forward again and *BAM* free instant replay.  Heart beat pounding in my throat, blood pressure through the roof, I aimed back to the northwest and poked my way slowly right to within five feet of the grassy edge. Then I turned south and found the deep water.  Thank God!

So we made it to the marina, cleaned off all the black glue goo that was all over both anchors and the bow and deck, and filled our water storage tanks to the brim.  By the time we were done and cast off the dock lines, it was nearly 11:00am–much too late to start a run to Cape May and expect to get there in daylight.  Rather than head back into the lagoon anchorage, we decided to park it on the west side of the river, near to Atlantic City and the marinas.  Besides, a friend is coming to visit us and stay tonight on the boat! It’s Kurt from Drifter, who we got to know and make music and perform firedancing with in Marathon Florida last winter. He’s heading down to Drifter in his new car, and he’s stopping by to see us on his way.  So, it’ll be easier to pick him up at on of the marinas if we just anchor here:

Hopefully our weather window will continue into tomorrow, and we can make it to Cape May by dusk tomorrow.

We’ve consulted with a professional weatheman named Chris Parker who is also a cruising sailor, and it looks like we have a 12 hour window today to get south, so we are running 40 miles south to the tip of New Jersey. That should put us into Cape May NH by this afternoon.

Sorry if any of you have been checking up on us on weehappy.com and didn’t know that we had changed over to way-happy.com. We just posted the link there last night.

Today we are recovering from yesterday’s adventure of getting our boat off the tidal flats in the dark. The episode included a bunch of disgusting mud that got pulled up with the anchors we had out, and this morning we awoke feeling hung over from stress to find our boat a disaster, with mud, anchor lines, and stuff everywhere. So we’ve been cleaning today. That feels good to get things back in order, getting ourselves ready to leave. We have a hopeful window on Monday or Tuesday to at least get to Cape May. We want to be ready to cast off as soon as the wind changes. But for now it continues to howl relentlessly at 20-25 knots from the west-southwest.

So to all you readers out there who are following our adventures with dreams of doing this yourself one day, and to those of you who may think cruising on a sailboat is a never ending sail into the sunset and moonlight encounters with dolphins, here is a reality check. Sometimes you end up stuck in a crappy place for a week with nothing to do but stress out about the weather. Sometimes a simple trip to the grocery store turns into an all day adrenaline filled hell that you were not in the mood for. Some nights you crawl into bed covered in mud and all you want to do is cry.

Maybe that’s what makes the good moments so good, the fact that you have to endure a lot of crap to be able to enjoy this lifestyle. Maybe, as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I don’t really know, and there are days like yesterday that make me convinced we really are insane to be out here doing this. But here we are in the middle of it now, so we’re gonna keep going.