Atlantic Highlands - at anchor, the only boat in the anchorage

Magnificent Skyline!  

I think this will be the last time we use the Hook Mountain anchorage. There was not much wind, no problem there but the small waves were fine when hitting the boat on the bow. However, when the tide changed and the boat was side to the incoming waves, it rocked quite a bit. Unfortunately, the tide change occurred at 1:00 am an so we rocked all through the night. The rocking stopped with the tide change at 5:00 am but the damage was done as far as getting a good night's sleep. We'll take one of the other two anchorages in Haverstraw Bay the next time.

Boat Beacon - round icons are anchored boats, icons with lines off the bow are underway

The tide was really ebbing in the morning, much more than predicted by the current charts. We were routinely reaching 9.2 kts over ground and occasionally up to 9.8 kts! We made the Battery in 2:45 from Haverstraw Bay, a record for us and we anchored in the Atlantic Highlands anchorage by 12:45 pm. The passage through New York harbor was eased by having a new app for the iPad, "Boat Beacon". It displays all the boats with AIS signals on an easy to read and interpret chart of the bay. Boats at anchor have a different icon from those underway and a line is drawn on the chart where the underway boats will be in 3 minutes, easy to see if there's a collision potential. In fact, the app will automatically alert you to a potential collision course automatically. It's a great help in transiting New York Harbor.

We leave the harbor under the Verrazano Narrows bridge 

Meanwhile, we had been looking all over the boat for our reef runner shoes, good for taking Hoolie ashore when your feet might get wet. I looked in the starboard locker, the aft locker and finally gave up. So I was putting away the folding step and noticed the pail turned upside down, removing the pail, I discovered the reef runners under the pail! I had thought I had to try the "never fail" solution to finding stuff - buy another one. After that, whatever you've lost will turn up immediately! Luckily, I didn't have to do that this time.

Hopefully, tomorrow brings a good day for going south

So we had a swift ride down the Hudson with little wind and made good time. We are now anchored at Atlantic Highlands in preparation for our trip down the New Jersey coast to Atlantic City on Tuesday. We use four weather forecast sites and was concerned that the NOAA site on Coastal Forecasts differed from the other three. We've found that the NOAA CoastalForecasts are usually much more pessimistic than grib, Stormsurf or Swellinfo - the other three we use. Finally, this afternoon, the NOAA forecast fell in line with what the other three had been saying all day which is a calm ride down the coast. I think that sometimes NOAA just likes to discourage boaters from going out, maybe less work for the Coast Guard??

We plan on raising anchor at 6:00 am and hope to make the Golden Nugget by 5:00 pm. I found that after new bottom paint on a clean bottom, Fleetwing will now do 7.7 kts at 2300 rpm where it used to only reach 7.3 kts after several months in the water. We will take advantage of the extra speed going south!