Atlantic City NJ (2013-10-22)

N39° 23.245', W74° 24.538'

Today we're anchored in a small bay near Atlantic City, just off of the Absecon Inlet.  We had a challenging couple days travelling on the outside down the New Jersey Atlantic coast, so between that and the rain forecasted for today we decided to reward ourselves with a down day.

It was tough leaving New York City without doing the tourist thing.  We even tried getting a mooring ball at the 79th Street Boat Basin, about the only economical way to stay close to the city, but they didn't have any available for us.  In the end, we do need to beat feet southward, so we left New York City in our wake, with a promise of a more thorough visit on our return in the spring.

Manhattan skyline from the lower New York harbour - Mmm, smog-erific!

While the upper New York harbour was 'busy', the lower harbour, where most of the commercial traffic travels, was downright crazy.  Our track from the chartplotter looks like we were trying to visit all parts of the harbour, zig-zagging all over the place, as we tried to avoid all the barges and large ships that were going in all directions at once.  At one point the Staten Island ferry was bearing down on us and we had to change course to avoid it.  Apparently we didn't change course enough, and the nice Coastie manning the bow machinegun in the Coast Guard RIB that intercepted us informed us about the 100 yard security zone around the Staten Island ferry boats.  I'm thinking that the Canadian flag flying on the stern and the deer in the headlights look that both Dar and I were sporting caused him to go easy on us...

Once we cleared the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge everything quieted down nicely, and we got our first look at the Atlantic Ocean.  As we approached Sandy Hook we were pleasantly surprised at how calm it seemed.  That lasted for a couple hours, but then started to get rough as we approached the Manasquan Inlet.  We learned an important lesson about the Atlantic Ocean shortly after that.  If you have to ask yourself if the conditions will worsen if you continue, the automatic answer should be an emphatic "YES". :-)

While we were starting to pound pretty hard as we passed Manasquan, it was nothing compared to how bad it was by the time we reached the Barnegat Inlet.  By the time we reached Barnegat, the waves were breaking over the bow so hard that the spray was reaching the isinglass on the flybridge, which thankfully we had already closed up.

Needless to say we were very happy when we had managed to thread our way through the inlet and get ourselves anchored for the night.

Dock in Barnegat Bay

The next morning we checked the marine weather forecast and it was calling for the same conditions as our first day.  So, we poked our nose out into the Atlantic to check.  It was rough, but better than when we had pulled into the inlet, so we decided to continue.  We had an uncomfortable 3.5 hours on the outside to the Absecon Inlet, and a bit of a squirrelly time entering the inlet, but it put us that much closer to being done the New Jersey part of our trip south.



Here's a video I shot while underway showing a couple minutes of what we were dealing with yesterday.  As is always the case with videos like this, it is a lot rougher than it appears.

I think I should probably explain about New Jersey.  There is an inside route down the New Jersey coast, but it is has not been maintained from Sandy Hook at the north to Manasquan Inlet 25 miles south of there and is impassable through this section.  The remainder, from Manasquan to Cape May at the south end of New Jersey is very poorly maintained and dangerously shallow in many areas.  It is generally considered to be too difficult to traverse for boaters that don't have familiarity with the region.  That being said, some people do take the inside, and make it through without any major problems, but many more who try it end up grounded on an uncharted shoal somewhere along the way, waiting for TowBoatUS or SeaTow to come pull them off.

There is also the time aspect.  Because of the meandering nature of the inside route, it normally takes about twice as long to do the inside route as it does taking the outside.

Of course, with the outside route, as is the case with any travel on an ocean, one must carefully select an appropriate weather window before venturing out.  The conditions for Monday and Tuesday were forecasted to be westerly winds with seas of 2-3 feet.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with weather forecasts, that was wrong.  We started out with westerly winds on Monday, but they shifted around to the south, causing us to get some significant wind waves on the bow.  On Tuesday, they never were westerly, but at best out of the southwest.

So, after a couple days of pounding through the waves we decided that that was enough for now, and took a day off to rest and recuperate.  When we got in to Atlantic City we went to Gardners Basin and tied up to the free dock to do some sight seeing.

Revel Hotel and Casino

Trump Taj Mahal

Showboat Casino

There are some very spectacular buildings here in Atlantic City, as well as some that fall somewhere below that description.

A more modest Atlantic City building

 The views at night were as we expected, with all of the buildings lighting up and burning through the kilowatt-hours. :-)

Atlantic City night lights

More night lights

One of the buildings, the Harrah's Casino, even lights up like a billboard, running ads most of the night.  Classy...

Tomorrow we're going to head over to the Frank S Farley marina, which is run by the Golden Nugget casino, and see if they'll let us tie up to their courtesy dock for a few hours to do some laundry and shopping.  We're hoping the offer to go leave some money in their casino will make them amenable to this idea... :-)

After that it will be up to the weather forecast as to whether we do the final outside hop to Cape May, or give the inside route between here and there a try.  I've been researching it, and it looks tricky, but doable.  Maybe this will end up being another one of those 'Lessons Learned' type of situations... :-)