Cape May to Atlantic City and The Story of O

We got up early on Saturday morning to catch all the sunlight possible for our first venture offshore with the boat.  It had rained through Friday night, but we woke to a beautiful sunny morning.  It promised to be a great day sailing offshore, with winds predicted out of the southwest.  We warmed up the diesel and were about to cast off lines, when Ernie Utsch came down to hand us some warm blueberry muffins and wish us safe travels.  The family at Utsch's Marina really made our stay memorable.

We had just backed out of our transient slip and turned to head out of the marina, when the diesel sputtered and died.  We had just enough steerage to coast over to the opposite side of the narrow channel in the marina, and we grabbed a piling.  The injector pump was making a loud noise, so I assumed we had not primed the fuel circuit sufficiently.  We pulled the engine cover, reprimed the circuit, and started the engine up again.  We got about a quarter of a mile from the marina, when the engine died again.  Not a great confidence builder as we were heading offshore, but we had wind, so we unfurled the jib and coasted slowly out of the breakwater and into the Atlantic.  As we rounded the buoy outside of Cape May, we headed northeast up the Jersey shore.  We set the mainsail and trimmed the boat up into a broad reach making six knots.  The plan for the day was to parallel the coast all the way to AC.

I tried hard to think what could have gone wrong with the fuel filter change.  The only thing I could come up with was that one of the O-rings for the filter vent must have been damaged.  With the whole day to try to come up with a fix, it did not seem too concerning.  We didn't have any replacement O-rings aboard, but we did have some caulk.  While Niki sailed the boat, I goobered caulk around the head of the vent screws.  We let it set up and then reprimed the engine a third time.  The fix seemed to take, as we were able to motorsail for an hour.

There were very few other boats out with us.  The clouds kept threatening to push offshore and give us a little weather.  A pod of fifty dolphins matched our course for awhile.  They were a good hundred yards off, but we did get to see one guy broach out of the water.  A line of something moving on the horizon turned out to be a flight of seabirds gliding south just inches above the waves.

The Jersey shore is a strange mix of industrial and commercial and residential development.  The view of this ferris wheel next to a water tower and commercial processing plant was odd.

We saw the highrise towers of Atlantic City hours before we could see the beach or the harbor entrance.  You get a true appreciation for the roundness of planet Earth when traveling on open ocean. It seemed to take fully half the day to close in on those casinos.

Finally what were shadows on the horizon for the whole afternoon became recognizable buildings and a harbor entrance.  The casinos all occupy the prime beachfront, and the harbor is back behind them to the west.  It was going to be a long motor into Kammerman's Marina with the wind on the nose of the boat.

We primed the fuel system one last time, and prayed that it would hold fuel long enough for us to get all the way into the dock.  The exiting fishing boats in the channel gave us a little pause.  We decided to go for it.  The motor ran well all the way into the back basin and up to our next slip, but we were nervous all the way in until we set the lines at the dock.

I promised Niki to search AC for new O-rings on Sunday morning.  With the winds still predicted favorable for Sunday night, we planned to leave AC at noon the next day for the long overnight sail into Sandy Hook.