We are so glad we succeeded in our longest to date ocean passage and made it safely to Atlantic City, but now we’re stuck here! At least for a few days, and even on the weekend, the weather window is small and not super ideal. But we are hoping to make our next passage to Cape May, NJ in a few days. Until then, we are going to try to enjoy Atlantic City, although I must admit this is one of the last places I want to be stuck in for days. We are not a gamblers, and even if we were, we have no extra money to lose right now. This is not a good place to be on a super tight budget! (although winning some money would be nice, so we’ll at least put a couple bucks in some machines, I’m sure!)
Yesterday the wind was howling so strong and the weather was so dismal we didn’t even leave the boat. The anchorage here is a ways from any access to the scene of Atlantic City, and to get there requires crossing a channel with a strong current, so we didn’t venture out in our new, very wee dinghy that only has a 3 horsepower motor. We just stayed put and baked cookies, did some deep cleaning, watched movies, and rested from our long sail. I even got to weave on my new loom that I just got for our boat, which is working out great. (the one I had on Wee Happy belonged to someone else, and I had to give it back)

So I will take this time to fill you all in on a bit of random news. First of all, we decided on a name for our new boat! It was quite a process to decide, and we had a long list of possible names ranging from Snonomo to Delilah to Invictus, but finally we couldn’t resist the segue of the name WAY HAPPY. It is after all, a continuation of the Wee Happy journey, only now we feel we can do it way better on this boat! Not that we have been way happy every moment on this trip….but it is all a journey, and not a single destination, right? New boat lettering is on the way (for now we have temporary lettering on the transom) and we will soon be putting up a new and improved blog site.

Just in case any of you were wondering as intensely as I was about what the heck a wren was doing way out at sea, I may have solved the mystery. Last night I was looking in the great bird guide my dad recently gave me (Thanks, Dad!) and discovered that our bird friend was actually not a wren but a sparrow. A “Seaside Sparrow” to be exact. There is a variety of sparrow that only lives along the Atlantic Coast of North America, and whose habitat is grassy tidal marshes. So we were in this bird’s conceivable range. A part of me loves unexplainable weird mysteries, and that part of me is disappointed to find such a rational truth, and there is another part of me that NEEDS TO KNOW things, and that part of me is satisfied to have the answer.

As long as I’m talking about needing to know the identification of things, here is another mystery. We found a strange fruit on Block Island that I have never seen before. Green, brain like hard tissue about the size of a large orange. The tree was bigger than an apple tree, maybe related to a walnut tree. In fact the smell kind of reminded me of fresh walnuts. A fresh, grassy citrusy smell. I asked some locals and they called it things like “ugly fruit” and “bitter orange” and recommended that we don’t eat it. One guy said that this fruit is found no where else but Block Island. We tried looking it up on the internet but only managed to find a few other people asking what it was and no answers. Do you have the answer? Does anyone out there know what this fruit is?

Last on my random bits of news list, yesterday Slowmo was the winner of the daily cat fight. Our two cats are brothers from the same litter, and they love each other dearly. Every day they fight as a form of play and they can get quite rowdy. But Mojo almost always “wins” because he is way bigger and fatter than Slowmo. But yesterday Slowmo prevailed, and here is the video. Feel the tension….

Ok, that’s enough rambling for now. I’m going to go help Capt K climb up the mast in his attempt to stop the banging of the mast cables. This morning it is very calm in the anchorage (in fact, the first thing he said upon waking this morning is that it was so calm it woke him up! We’ve been getting used to constant rocking and banging for a week now!) Will report back later on the success of that project.