Sat June 5: AC to Manasquan 'marina'

 In which we hope the bad times will make us better appreciate the good times  ...

 Rick here:

We were waiting in AC for a weather window - that is, a day when the wind and waves are conducive to travel up the coast of NJ on the Atlantic Ocean.   For days I have been obsessing about wave height, direction and period, in addition to wind strength and direction, all relative to our direction of travel.   It turns out that waves from the rear of the boat (behind you) are easier to handle as the don’t hit you straight on (makes sense), and the period, that is how often the waves come, is very important.  So with waves from the south and southeast (we are going north and northwest) and a period of 7 seconds (one wave about every 7 seconds) we were just at our threshold for comfort.  Any bigger or more frequent would not have been good. On Meander, Lynn has a max wave height agreement in place with Carolyn - but we don't have enough experience to have such a thing in place yet!

 

Again we traveled with two other boats: Meander and KayDee, so we were never far from help if we needed it.  The first 20 minutes of the trip were a bit scary as we met large waves head on and worried that the weather might not be as good as we had hoped, but after we turned northward and adjusted our speed things settled down and it became much more bearable.  Melanie only had to shut her eyes for a few minutes! We had planned on a long day, calculated to be about 8 hours.  It turned out to be closer to 7 hours and we approached our next stop, Manasquan River, happily just after noon (did I mention that when you start the day at 5:30 you have a lot of time!).  

 Unfortunately, it was a weekend (we try not to travel at the weekend) and the narrow channel in was JAMMED with boats, none of which cared about hitting the others with a big wake.

We stopped at the fuel dock at Capt’n Bills to fuel up and then asked to be directed to our marina slips.  It turns out that Capt’n Bills isn’t actually a 'marina'.  He put KayDee on the fuel dock for the night, and directed Meander and us to some random fishing slips. He was awfully nice, but the place was not what all the reviews had led us to expect. To make matters worse, backing into the slip proved difficult, with no space to maneuver and some dumb-ass fishing boat docked but running his engine which created wake.  Posts were bumped, tempers flared, a fender was pulled off (I recovered it later).  We finally ended up docked but on such a strange finger pier that we needed fenders in all kinds of weird places, and lines in even more.  It looked like Blue Horizon had been outfitted by a crew on crack.

Our lovely view. Made even more palatable by the freeway going over our heads.

This might make a great puzzle!

In addition, the east coast has been gripped by a heat wave and we sat around sweating in 92 degree weather without AC as the marina didn’t have electricity that worked with the boat.  Mel was starting to get cranky-pants.  Sweaty ones.

We joined our friends on Meander for a light dinner, but the heat and sun had taken its toll and we were looking forward to a good night's sleep in AC provided by the generator.  BUT - because it was that kind of day, the generator wouldn't work.  I did what I could, assisted by Lynn, but the battery was dead in the water. (I can laugh about it now, but not at the time).  The generator needs to be run regularly, with a load on it (under strain) and we hadn't run it at all.... Arrrrggggg.

 Mel suggested (in a very cranky way) that we sleep on the upper deck in order to get some breeze.  Unfortunately the “marina” was located almost directly under the above mentioned large highway bridge and the almost constant traffic noise made it tough to get any sleep....

As Melanie says, “it will make a good story later".

Featured Boat Name (this is how we feel about our boat right now):