Hi All, I wanted to share an experience from which others may learn. Its a trip report that veterans here may not find too interesting but others might be interested in. In our 8000 miles of cruising as full time live aboard cruisers its a first for us.
Thursday afternoon we left the Chesapeake Bay at Norfolk bound for New York. We stayed off shore in the North Atlantic till we got to Sandy Hook, the entry to New York City and to Atlantic Highlands which was our first stop. We passed all of Delaware and the busy sea lanes outside Delaware Bay all the way to Cape May, NJ in heavy fog... using chartplotters, radar, foghorn, radio and AIS to stay as safe as we could. The fog lifted Friday morning before we were off Atlantic City. At the end of our trip, In the dark of night outside NYC, while coming around Sandy Hook, we put the boat partly on the beach, and have now updated our charts. Day time would not be a problem here, but dark with no moon was. The lat long of our 'careening' was just inside the Southern Markers on the East Channel, on the port side, as we entered at 3:15 am according to Sue. North 40 deg 28.88' West 074 deg 00.25' We call it a careening as we did not call Towboat US and considered it an unintentional careening as opposed to a grounding! We are spending today putting the boat back together in Atlantic Highlands as we pulled out all kinds of gear yesterday, when we placed our left hull on the beach in the outbound tidal rush on Sandy Hook. Our left side hull of the boat was propped up on the sandy bank of the extreme NE corner of Sandy Hook's beach while the right hull was still floating. We waited for 3 hours on the left and after a 2 1/2 foot fall we had about 25 degrees of heel and stuff was sliding. Sue was grabbing some winks while waiting and noticed her cushions were moving... The tide here is big enough. Its over 5 feet of drop & rise every 6 hours. Low was at 7:30am with the next high at 1:30 pm. With all the expanse of the water, from the huge NJ bay we are in, and NYC harbors and the Hudson and East Rivers, going out the opening to the Atlantic at a speed of something like 3 knots. We were coming into the flow in darkness around 3:15, doing just about 3 knots .. and staying to the left of the big ship channel... when we hit the sand and glided firmly on with the water still dropping fast... so we had no chance of getting off. Wind was off our port to the deep water so we had no surf. We had come over this same route before, last in 2008 according to my GPS readings, but the sea and tides changed where the land sits inside the channel. A mass of sand, shells and land formed where none had been before. It reinforced that even if they are new, charts are not always correct as to the land masses next to channels. You can see the lights of the buoys, and if we'd been inside the channel we would have had no problem, we had one as we wanted to avoid conflict with entering or leaving ships... we had gentle contact with land instead. So from 3:30 until about 9:45am we were referred to as "a large catamaran on the NW side of the East Channel" going around Sandy Hook. WHAT WE DID.... When we stopped we immediately killed both engines and launched the dinghy off the back of Angel Louise, but realized we would not pull Angel Louise's 16 Tons off the sand with our 15hp outboard in an outgoing tide, so we did not stress over it. So we dug out one of the anchors aboard (a large Bruce with over 300+ feet of line) and hauled it out 200 +/- feet or so into the darkness of the channel behind the boat. It was dropped into the bottom in about 50 feet of water ... holding onto part of the anchor line as it dropped. The outboard died while dropping the anchor (which focuses a mind as the current going into the Atlantic was 3 knots pushing away from civilization). The rode was held and not let go of between the anchor and Angel Louise until after we had pulled the dinghy back to Angel Louise with it. We then moved the anchor line to the bow via a large snatch block to the powerful anchor windlass that normally pulls the anchor and chain back aboard, to 'turn' the line and allow it to pull the front of the boat away from the beach. Since we knew it would be 9 or 10 till the water rose to float the boat we just kept pressure on the line to keep her stable. Sue tried to sleep as the boat tilted more and more to the right. Stuff started sliding in the process, which we expected. Several fishermen on the beach stopped by and said they seem to have one boat a week coming ashore here. Our charts and two different electronic chart plotters showed we were in more than 32 feet of water ... which must have been accurate earlier. We had purchased our most recent chart in January of 2010, so it shows how quickly they go out of date. But the channel info was accurate and we resolve to STAY in the channel in the future and disregard info on shoreline and depths near it. Had it been daylight we would not have had this problem as we would have seen the beach we landed upon. When we got off the beach we had clogged water inputs on both engines (later resolved by cleaning strainers). As we pulled off the beach, we were concerned with getting up the Kedge Anchor, but could not immediately use the engines so we sailed off the beach. We also had our little impeller paddlewheel on the left side (telling speed of water going by boat) not working and likely to be plugged by sand as it was in the sand. With the boat under sail, we got the restarted Caribe and her 15 hp to go to the place off the beach where the kedge anchor was and it was taken up with the dinghy. I will send a PDF graphic of the MACENC chart picture where we went aground to anyone requesting a copy, as I do not think I can attach the 150 KB file to this message. Ed and Sue at Atlantic Highlands, NJ Ed & Sue Kelly aboard USSV Angel Louise DC Based SKYPE Phone # (202) 657-6357 please leave message for us You can see map and travel progress at http://tinyurl.com/EdandSue _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
