Magic in the Night
The tide was right for us to leave City Island at about 10 am, so we slipped under the Throg’s Neck Bridge and the Whitestone Bridge, past LaGuardia Airport and Riker’s Island, and bumped through Hellsgate. Following the path down the East River we’d taken with Scott a couple of days before, benevolent tides helped Billy Pilgrim pass the car traffic on FDR drive. Keeping the Statue of Liberty to starboard, we veered left and out under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and across Sandy Hook Bay to Atlantic Highlands. Once there, we provisioned, and prepared ourselves for the New Jersey Coast.
Au Revoir, Madame.
Getting out the ocean inlet felt like riding a horse with four legs of different lengths. Things calmed down a little when we got out into deeper water, but we had decided we didn’t have enough daylight here in October to make it the 80 miles to Atlantic City before nightfall. We cranked the Springsteen and pushed on through.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
The water’s surface was an intense topographical map, maybe not of the Himalayas, but perhaps New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, all acute angles of peaks within peaks surrounding deep concave valleys. Tim had prepared me for the night ahead of us—we had our inflatable life vests on with tethers to clip in whenever we were on deck so we wouldn’t be flung overboard. We set up a sleeping schedule to take turns overnight. We reviewed the sailor’s rhymes about how to read the lights we’d see—white over white, towing at night, but they all sound the same to me. Red over yellow, have you never been mellow? We ate little sandwiches we’d made ahead of time. More Springsteen: “Oh Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us…” And the sky got dimmer, and the water became silver-full of light until all the light drained out of it into the blackness. We read other boats’ lights in the distance like hieroglyphics, with the Jersey Shore twinkling to the West, and thick complete darkness to the East. One of us would go down to the aft cabin for a two-hour nap in the swinging and swaying turbulence, then we’d trade places. Tim has delivered countless boats up and down the coast, but this was my first time on an overnight watch. I was underprepared.
But how can you prepare to ride a mechanical bull without actually riding a mechanical bull? You can talk about the darkness and how to read the lights you might see, but before being immersed in that darkness alone on a boat, how do you practice? It seems that the deep end is the only place to learn to swim. The aft cabin has a nice porthole onto the cockpit, and I knew Tim wouldn’t get mad if I woke him up with any kind of stupid question. So, we took turns, and I looked at the blackness and checked where we were on the chart and listened to more Springsteen. And, when it was my turn, I napped hard in my rocking and rolling berth.
Delaware Bay
I woke up at dawn and we were just past Cape May, New Jersey, entering Delaware Bay. The water was more turbulent than it had been, but it was uneventful. Gigantic container ships hulked past us from time to time. We’d see tugboats with barges, but nothing particularly significant. The banks were low, the light was warm; it all seemed a bit like a Dutch landscape painting with an industrial twist. The C&D canal (Chesapeake and Delaware) didn’t offer us any threats either, and we dumb-lucked into having the tide with us the whole way. We entered Chesapeake Bay as the sun was starting to sink, and made it another 20 miles to the Sassafras river before it actually was setting. It didn’t seem possible that the water we found ourselves in at the end of the day was the same element we’d been in off of New Jersey—this was as soft and smooth and gentle as the previous water had been pointy and lively. We dropped the anchor and together made a spectacular decision: we wouldn’t cook.
Today we’d have beer for dinner.
The softness of the Chesapeake.
