What the HELL???

June 16

Y’all know what this is right? Smoke & Carbon Monoxide detector. One of the first things we put on the boat. Put one in the forward cabin, the one you see below at the lower helm and one in the aft cabin/master bedroom. As stated in the previous post of this august journal we had a helluva day yesterday, Up at 4:15, underway at 5:15, washed the boat, changed the oil, brief naps, went out for a slice of pizza and in bed by 10. Totally exhausted. Well, startng at midnight the lil’ bastard you see below starts goin’ off. First it’s hollerin’ FIRE! No fire. Then it starts hollerin’ CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTED! No damn carbon monoxide. Nuttin is running, not the main engines, not the generator and no other boats around us are running their engines or gensets. Push the shut up button and it stops. At 1 AM it starts acting up again. At 3 AM it starts acting up AGAIN.

At 4 AM when it starts acting up AGAIN, I made a few modifications with two of my favorite tools…

Cut every damn wire in it after banging on it with the hammer to get it open, Yeah, maybe I was relieving some frustration too.

These things have 10 year batteries. Not gonna put up with this nonsense for 8 more years. Get a new one today.

BTW, I know what you’re thinking. These things do NOT detect methane gas. Debbie and I would never do that while we slept.

Back to bed, slept like a baby and up at 7 feeling like a hundred dollars! Probably looking like $10.

Took a walk around the marina yesterday to see if there was a receptacle to dispose of the 10 gallons of oil I drained from the engines yesterday. Came across this beautiful sport fisherman out of the water. Must be at least 70 feet long. Look at the top of the tower. Captain drives the boat from up there looking for fish. Imagine being up there in rough seas. Damn, I don’t even want to think about climbing up or down from there in rough seas.

I was amazed at the size of the propellers. Heck, I thought mine were big at 24″. These guys were probably 42″. Apologies for making this photo a selfie. Terribly handsome fellow, right?

So just for the heck of it I called Dave Shaw at Kentuckiana Yacht Service and asked him what a set of props this size would cost. He said when they get this big they have special tweaks. Maybe $10,000 per prop. Yikes!

Milton called Sunday morning and suggested a Father’s Day outing for the dads to the Naval Air Museum in Cape May. Below is a F-14 Tomcat and you simply can’t imagine how large an airplane this is. There were other fighters on exhibit and this thing dwarfs them.

No airplane museum would be complete without a Cessna 152, the airplane I learned to fly in. Way back in the late 70’s I got my license when you could rent one of these airplanes for $20 an hour INCLUDING FUEL!!! That’s how old I am…

Ever see the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? There was a replica (I hope) of a nuclear bomb. I tried to ride it like Slim Pickins did in Dr. Strangelove when none of the museum staff were looking. If you haven’t seen this classic go to You Tube and search “Slim Pickins rides the bomb”.

Walked around Cape May, New Jersey. Cute lil town.

Bloody Mary’s for Lunch Bunch.

At lunch, Milton told us about this place…

Ya think this guy is ready to fish?

Moonrise Sunday night. Uh-Oh, full moon.

Monday morning. Decided to get up at 4 AM again and depart for the long run to New York. We had 3 bail out points if the seas got too rough. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) forecasts for wave and winds was about as ideal as you can get in the Atlantic Ocean. Minor hiccup though, At 5 AM when we had planned to depart, we were experiencing a very low Low Tide due to the full moon you saw in the above photo. We were close to the bottom so we had to wait an hour to get enough water under us to depart. Tide had started to rise at 4 AM. At 6 a 60 footer tied up near us departed so we followed him out with no issues.

Coast Guard station across from the marina.

Carried Away under way. This boat is 40′ long, weighs almost half of what Whisky Business weighs and has 950 horse power compared to our 840 HP. It is a really fast boat!

Carried Away in the lead with Here’s an Idea in front of us.

This is a 30 second video giving you an idea of what the seas were like. We had 3 and sometimes 4′ waves but they were really wide, with as much as 8 seconds between them. This means they are pretty flat but since they were coming from the right rear quarter of the boat it rolled us rather than rock us like waves will with only a few seconds between them. Those waves are steeper and make white caps. They will beat you up pretty badly at 3′ and 4′ heights.

Real pretty day. Notice the “swells” rather than waves?

Atlantic City.

Drop line fishing boat. Operator will get a big group of tourists on these boats to catch BIG fish, take ’em about a mile offshore and everybody drops their lines straight down. Then the only thing they catch is the line of the guy standing next to them. Notice the fog? Ran our radar for most of the day but visibility was 2 miles.

Our original bogey for New York was the Great Kills Yacht Club but it was full. Found room at The Mansion Marina which is a series of docks adjacent and walking distance to GKYC where Milton and Julie are tied up.

View of Great Kills Harbor on Staten Island. The circle with the 2 denotes Carried Away and WB.

This is a view from the NEBO app of our trip yesterday. The color green denotes our speed at over 10 MPH, yellow at over 15 and red at over 20. On flat water at our “cruise speed” we are running around 18-19 MPH. Had we been running flat and calm water yesterday at cruise the line would have been an unbroken yellow line. Since we had those “swells” or really wide waves we would slow down as we “climbed” the nearest side of the wave but our speed would increase to over 20 as we “sped” down the other side. Close to the top of the photo you can see where we went into “stealth” mode. Not really, NEBO just dropped us for a bit, maybe poor cell signal. We ran 11 hours and covered 135 miles. One Hundred, Thirty Five miles in 11 hours and burned over 100 gallons of fuel. Coulda done it in a car in 2 hours burning less than 5 gallons of gas. ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????