Atlantic Highlands - at anchor - where's summer??

Goodbye Atlantic City until the fall

During the night we heard the winds rattle the rigging and thought that we might not have a good day to go north after all. However, the forecast was for light winds less than 10 kts so we decided to go. We left Atlantic City at 6:00 am and headed north with overcast skies. The ocean was a little lumpy  but not bad for going outside. The winds were exactly as predicted but we did have rain showers throughout the day. I do have one complaint, the temperature was nothing like we're used to, in the 50's! After all, this is the end of May, where's the warm weather?!

Curled up for heat! Notice the ceramic heater in the bottom right. 

So I put our ceramic heater in the cockpit turned on high. That helped a lot but with no sun at all, it was bleak outside. After 11.5 hours, we reached our anchorage at Atlantic Highlands and found just one boat at anchor, we had lots of room.

We had thought it just another boat broken loose that went ashore

We also noticed a boat up on land. We had seen such boats often along the ICW, they either drag an anchor or break a mooring and wind up on the side. So I thought nothing of it at first and took Hoolie ashore. On the way back to the boat, I saw a New Jersey police boat following my path. They pulled along side and started asking questions. It seems that there was a body found next to the boat and the police were there to investigate a possible homicide and I was a potential witness as well as Ann, my wife! I reported that we had pulled into the anchorage at 5:37 pm (Ann keeps the arrival times so we can record engine hours) and saw the boat up on land but with nobody around it. So they asked for driver licenses and boat registrations and I took a trip to their dock for further questioning. They had about 1/2 dozen policemen on the scene headed by a detective which asked me what I had seen.

After about 2 hours they returned me to Fleetwing and all is calm now. Nothing like a nice, dull anchorage... We'll head up the Hudson River on Friday and with the tide in our favor, hopefully make it all the way to the Poughkeepsie YC, our home port provided we don't encounter any ice along the way..