Our new site is up, and obviously if you are reading this, you made it here!  Thanks for bearing with us as we do the switch-over!

Yesterday we ventured into Atlantic City.  I have had a bad feeling about this place ever since we first got here….just looking at it from a distance from the secluded anchorage made me feel uneasy.  It feels like a city with no soul.  But, I thought, let’s go and check it out, give the place a chance.  Our first impressions of the city upon finally finding a neglected and crappy little beach to land our dinghy near the gated and locked area of the Trump Marina (Golden Nugget) was barbed wire fences, keep out signs, trashy broken sidewalks, forlorn ugly apartments, and a generally depressed looking city.   The gray, dismal fog that had descended  didn’t help our impression of the place.  We walked for about a mile toward the highlight of town, the famed Trump’s Taj Mahal.  As Cap’t K commented, it was as if we were being led by a hypnotic light to give our money to Donald Trump.

  What a place.  Casinos are so weird.  All the beeping noises from the machines, the people who look like zombies in front of them, the lights….

The Taj Mahal is a temple to money, for sure.  And the money does not seem to be helping the people of Atlantic City out too much.  Most of the people inside gambling didn’t look very happy, either.

We found some slot machines called “Dreamweaver”.  That happens to be the name of my artistic website and business, so we tried that one.  I put $5 in and promptly lost it.  Then Cap’t K gave it a try with $5, and had a streak of luck that at the high point got him up to a whopping $23, almost enough to pay for our lunch!  But he pushed his luck and it ran out, and we ended up walking away having lost $20, which is nothing compared to what most people in there were spending. 

We walked around the Boardwalk in the fog.  Atlantic City is home to the street names from Monopoly, and Boardwalk is the culmination of a bunch of familiar street names:  Ventnor Ave., Baltic Ave, Pennsylvania Ave…it was a bit like walking around a Monopoly Board.  The coolest thing we saw was a bunch of cats who live on the beach near the Boardwalk.  Some volunteers feed them and they happily live there as strays.

As we were walking back we found a fishing store, and since Capt K has been wanting to get set up with the proper gear to start trolling for fish as we are going down the coast, we stopped in.  The nice but incredibly overwhelmed owner hooked him up with a good deal on a used rod and reel and even offered to give us a ride down to where our dinghy was, because he thought we might get mugged and have the rod stolen if we walked around town with it!

When we got back to the boat we decided to re-anchor our boat since the winds were clocking around from the opposite direction and were going to keep strengthening through the night.  We had a bit of trouble getting the anchor to set well, and in the middle of the night when the winds picked up, our boat started dragging.  The anchor alarm went off and we had the joy of hauling ourselves out of bed into 30 knot gusts to re-anchor the boat again.  I hate that!!  Luckily, we got it reset ok and went back to bed…..adrenaline still pumping.

This morning we are studying the weather forecasts, which don’t look great no matter how many times we check them.  Strong winds coming from the south and southwest are continuing for days.  There may be a small window for us to leave tomorrow morning to get to Cape May with some strong west winds, but we are nervous about how high the seas will be built up and about how uncomfortable a ride it may be.  While we are building our salt up as sailors, we are still kind of wimpy about big seas and rough conditions.  We met a guy yesterday who claimed to have come over here from Australia in a 24 foot daysailer, and encountered days of 30 foot waves and 40 knot winds in the Indian Ocean….and here we are not wanting to go out in 25 knot winds….but to each his own level of comfort and adventure!  We have decided to consult with the famed sailing meteorologist Chris Parker on choosing the right window to get out of here.  We are waiting to talk to him this afternoon. Atlantic City is about the last place I want to be stuck!!  Although, the anchorage is protected and calm, so it isn’t all bad.