Walking from Danny

We awoke again at 5:00 am with plans of heading out to Sandy Hook. The latest forecast showed that Danny was going to be much less of a threat to western Long Island - there was almost no chance of 50 MPH winds. We now had a lot more options.

Going to Sandy Hook would mean we'd be stuck on the boat with almost nothing around for a few days. It had already been more than 3 days since we'd been off the boat and the team was in need of exercise, especially Dylan. Northport, NY has a wonderfully protected bay area. ActiveCaptain had a couple of anchorage areas for it. We've anchored ourselves in one of them before. Northport also has a town dock, a beach, restaurants - it would give us much more to do. We figured we'd be stuck because of the storm and rain for a few days. Everyone voted to change plans and go there instead.

The route to Northport is only 35 nm away. Leaving by 7:00 got us anchored in the harbor by noon. We have almost a quarter mile between us and the closest other boat anchored here. With 250 feet of chain out in 11 feet of water, this would be an excellent place to hunker down and ride out any storm. It's times like this that I'm happy we installed that new monster Rocna anchor.

It was a cloudy day with no waves and no wind. The perfect type of day to move the boat from one place to another. Once again our crew was ready at a moment's notice for anything. Well, as long as you had enough time to wake them up or allowed them to finish playing their cell phone game.

Running from Danny

We spent most of Wednesday night planning our options for tropical storm/hurricane Danny. The current path shows it headed directly for Long Island, perhaps a little east. These things have a way of moving out to sea further to the east so we decided that the best plan would be to move west. And move west as fast as possible.

The weather outlook is pretty good for the next 2 days. That gives us a nice set of options - but we have to move now. We have to get as far west into the Long Island Sound as possible today. That would allow us to get to Sandy Hook, NJ on Friday or head up the Hudson River to Yonkers if the storm moved west toward New York City. Once in Yonkers, we'd have another day to get deep into the Hudson River with little chance of great storm damage because of the land barriers. Either way, today was the day to move west.

We awoke at 5:00 am (yikes!) and were pulling up the anchor at 5:45. By 6:00 we were heading out of Cuttyhunk's protected harbor. It had been a dead calm night - it would have been nice to stay here another day. Our destination was 85 nm to the west to Joshua Cove off Sachem Head, CT. All projected winds were from the north there for today so anchoring off Connecticut would give us the best protection.

It was a beautiful day with no waves beyond the slightest ripple. There was a lot of sleeping going on especially by our canine crew. We picked up some wonderful current around "The Race" at Fishers Island which sped us to our destination. By 4:00 pm we were anchored and enjoying the stillness and incredible homes lining the cove.

All eyes are glued to NOAA forecasts and the National Hurricane Center right now.