Le Petit Canard Sailing

Sailing Day One

Le Petit Canard in the Atlantic

We were up until after midnight packing and re-sorting all of the final things to go on the boat.  We were supposed to leave at 4:30 a.m., but I just didn’t see how it was going to happen.  After we both had mini-breakdowns from exhaustion and lack of nourishment, we re-checked the tides and realized that we should actually leave at 11:00.  Finally, something worked in our favor!

Monday, June 15^th was a gorgeous day – clear and warm without being too muggy.  We untied the lines right on time, waved our goodbyes and headed down Tom’s River toward Barnegat Bay.  Because of a plethora of shoals and being unfamiliar with the river, we had decided to motor.  I still managed to run us aground, but fast acting Joey got us out of it.  On one of the channel markers we passed, there was a nest full of hawk hatchlings being fed.

As we approached the bay, Joey asked a boat that we passed where exactly the channel out was located.  We wound our way through the markers with incredibly shallow shoals on either side of us.  Joey asked me to check the gauges for the engine – all perfect.  Ahead of us were three sport fishers anchored in one of the narrowest parts of the channel, real wise guys, and we now had a huge luxury yacht speeding towards us.  He flew by and caused a tremendous wake.  As we bounced off it, the engine began to make a cantankerous clanking sound.  Joey jumped below to check on it, but couldn’t figure anything out; all of the gauges were still great, no smoke, no oil leaking and everything looked good.  We had a shoal on one side, were surrounded by these idiots anchored in the channel and the shore was scattered with other fishermen.  We didn’t really have any options, so we continued on for a few minutes until we got past the other boats, the channel widened and it was deep enough just outside of the channel for us to get out of the way and anchor.

Joey turned the engine off in hopes that letting it cool down might help.  He further inspected it and still couldn’t find any apparent reason for all of the noise.  As we waited for the engine to cool, we weighed our options.  We were about a half of a mile from a real anchorage and marine services and another mile from there to the ocean.  We could head for the ocean with the anchorage as a back up if we needed it.  We could also head back to de Rouville’s Boat Shop, but that was about 3 ½ hours back.  Once we were in the ocean, we really didn’t need the engine; we had solar panels to re-charge the batteries.  We may need the engine in Halifax and St. Pierre and we would definitely need it to get into the channel in Morlaix.  We decided to head on – we were in a sailboat, meant to be sailed, we were so close to the Atlantic and we had come so far!

We fired up the engine, still clanking away and pulled up the anchor.  Off we went.  Everyone had warned us about the breakers at Barnegat so I was sweating bullets – watch the motor go out right as we got into some mess…But the breakers turned out to be nothing and the engine held strong.  We popped the sails and we were sailing in the ATLANTIC!

The wind was fair, but not great and we couldn’t quite get to our preferred heading.  This meant that we were closer to shore than what we had hoped; it wasn’t horrible, but it didn’t give us much room.  For dinner, we had a stir-fry that I had prepared the night before, but that didn’t sit too well with me and a few minutes later it was back on its way out.  One thing that Joey had suffered from on his trip back from Hawaii was dehydration despite constantly drinking.  I really didn’t want to feel the effects of that, so I began drinking water regularly.  The downside to this is having to pee a lot and it takes bloody forever to get out of your foulies.  I started to plan about thirty minutes ahead of time for pee breaks.

Shortly before sunset, we saw something floating in the water ahead on our starboard side.  Neither one of us could identify it even as we got closer.   I knew that it wasn’t, but I thought that it almost looked like a head floating in a PFD.  We passed it and still couldn’t tell.  A huge power yacht cruised by and Joey turned on the VHF; we heard them calling someone else to report the “Mickey Mouse balloon in the water”.  The only trash that we encountered while bobbing around were balloons and we saw at least one each day.

We lit the nav lights, double checked everything and I went below to try and get some sleep.  I’m not sure how long I was down there and it didn’t even feel like I was sleeping until Joey’s voice woke me; “Heather, get out here immediately – something’s going on.”  He had been able to see lights from a tower on shore and some lights from other boats.  Suddenly, all of the lights had disappeared and the GPS had gone out.  Eerie…  Everything came back within a few minutes and along with it came a squall.  

Sailing Day Two

Time takes on an entirely different existence when you’re sailing; for me, it stood still at an entirely accelerated rate.  At 2:30 in the morning, I would think, “two hours ‘til sunrise” and the time would creep along, but suddenly the sun would be out.  By 10:00 am, it would feel like an entire day had already passed and nothing had been accomplished.  One afternoon, we made up our minds to anchor for the night.  We made that decision around 4:00 and we weren’t able to set the anchor until after midnight.

Tuesday morning, the sun revealed a foggy day and commercial fishers around us.  We had reasonable swells, but the wind was pushing us right along after a night of flukey breezes and an accidental jibe.  By now, the seas were making the worst of me and I couldn’t keep anything down – I had never felt like this on a boat before.  Still worried about dehydration, I was trying to drink lots of water, but that was a no-go.  I had to get something down so I tried an apple bar, similar to a fig-newton, thinking that it was easily digestible.  Part of that came back up through my nose, twice as sweet as it had started.  Knowing that ginger is supposed to help upset stomachs and the like, I had stocked up on ginger chews.  So ginger chew and water for Second Breakfast – that didn’t work.  I was worried about dehydration when I thought that I would be able to drink; think how I felt now that I couldn’t even keep water down!  Joey was a little better off, but I was supposed to be in charge of the galley and food.  Going down below was a disaster for me, so he was stuck with PB&J that morning.

Later in the morning, we got into the shipping channels for the Newark and Manhattan areas.  It was still foggy, but the visibility was fine and all of the ships were at a reasonable distance.  The whole thing was incredibly surreal:  the sky was almost the same color as the water and we were just skimming along through all of these immense freighters.  Until there was one that we just seemed to be on a collision course with… but then again, it was probably just me; I’m always hyper-sensitive to other boats around us.  It just didn’t seem to be going as fast as it should be, though.  The thing is, ships that big haul ass and move a lot faster than it appears (except for the belief of one sailing acquaintance who always said they move a lot slower than it appears).  I pointed it out to Joey who wasn’t concerned at all; it was miles from us and was definitely going to clear ahead of us.  Thirty minutes later, I still wasn’t convinced that it would pass in front of us.  Finally, we were close enough that I could make out some details with the binoculars.  The bloody ship was anchored!  As were a few others near it.  At least I didn’t have to worry about it going anywhere!  It also proved the sailing acquaintance whose theories were always wrong right; freighters do move slower than it appears (when they’re anchored).

Past the shipping channel, we could see Manhattan and we approached Long Island.  This is where the wind direction really started to hamper us.  In order to make any progress towards Europe, we had to make several short tacks.  On a port tack, we were headed almost due south and were seemingly affected very little by the current.  On a starboard tack, we were headed about 60* northeast, but were affected dramatically by the current pushing us back north.  This kept us uncomfortably close to land.  On one particular tack, the wind nearly died altogether.  Around 4:00 pm, we decided to fire up the engine and head out to sea in a more favorably direction.  We started it up with only a small clank, but all gauges read normal and it seemed to be running fine.  Less than five minutes later, there was a huge clank and Joey rushed to shut it off, but the engine did that for itself before he got there.  He ran below to check on it and saw a huge crack in the port side of the block and copious amounts of oil leaking from it into our beautifully and freshly painted bilge.  Joey tried to clean up the mess as we flopped around in small swells with little wind.  The awful smell of diesel and oil, the heat and the motion turned Joey into a barfing mess.  He came into the cockpit for some fresh air and to puke overboard.  I still wasn’t over my seasickness and the 7 Saltines and Cherry Coke that I had already regurgitated for the day really hadn’t done anything for me.  Seeing him hanging overboard put me right at his side.

With the mess cleaned up, we continued to drift somewhat in the right direction.  Around 10:30 that night, the wind completely died and the current was pushing us back due west, toward Manhattan and almost parallel with the coast of Long Island.  It was too deep to anchor so we were stuck with what we had.  The moon rise, a half moon of deep, dark sanguine was beautiful.  We both stayed in the cockpit because the smell of oil below was too unbearable.  Large fishing boats on the horizon around us glowed like wraths of the sea; dark silhouetted figures with outstretched arms and beams of light shooting in all directions.  Around 2 am, we had finally drifted to a shoal with a depth of 54’ of water so we dropped the anchor and tried to sleep for a couple of hours until sunrise.