Need to Round Cape May in an Impenetrable Fog? There's an APP for That !

Friday, May 21 was hectic at best--more fixing, more rearranging of sails, bags, and supplies. Later in the afternoon, Yanik, our designated navigator, called to tell me that he needed to bail out. Said something about a job that required him to be in town on Monday. I'd been counting on him to navigate; he had the charts in his laptop with waypoints pre-plotted. But he figured Sweeney could fill in for him and that we had paper charts on board. What I didn't have was the safety factor--back-up GPS systems, and the short-cut route around Cape May. Not to mention that being down a crew meant that watch schedules would be more demanding.
Then came Saturday morning, and with it thick and heavy clouds. Not at all what I had expected nor what the weatherman predicted. Post arrived by 9 and together we installed the bilge pump (wired to run manually). The sky, meanwhile, tried to lighten up.
Left the dock at 11:00 and headed down the Barrington River, being ever so careful to avoid the ledge. Once on the Narrangasett Bay, we raised sail and headed down the channel toward Newport. Somewhere between the lawn chairs on Castle Hill and the Newport bridge, fog fell fast and thick, obscuring the channel markers and the creepy house on the little island. And that creepy little house was the last thing we'd see for a very long time.
Out came the tourist charts and Post's handheld GPS (a Garmin model even older than my own). Sweeney plotted waypoints and set the course to steer. We made a hard-copy backup the old-fashioned way, by writing the lat/long of each waypoint on a piece of paper, and stored the same waypoints in my Garmin for redundancy.
The fog didn't quit.

The first night at sea was plain nerve-wracking. Visibility was about 75 yards, if that, and every little glimmer on the horizon was potentially a ship's light hell-bent on bearing down on us. We had two people on watch at all times, but still, Sweeney and I were stunned when a vessel emerged out of the fog on our port bow--coming toward us. It sped passed us and then it was gone. 
Morning broke as best it could given you couldn't see the sun. There were about 4-5 hours during that second day when we could actually see a horizon. And other ships. Lots of other ships. Scary to think that they were out there the whole time, but we just couldn't see them. But we were sailing! We got a solid 11 hours of pure sailing without the engine running. (Good thing, too, because Post twice had to fill the fuel tank from the jugs of diesel we had on board.).
But by dusk the fog lowered the lights and dimmed our view. There was the odd glimpse of a moon and hints of phosphorescence in the wake. We were tired, having stood four-hour watches with two hours off in between to catch whatever sleep we could.


We motor-sailed with jib furled to give us a full view of whatever there was lurking out there. By 1 AM we should have been seeing navigation markers at the entrance to the shipping channel around Cape May. (By the way, did I mention that my GPS broke during the day when it fell out of its pocket on the binnacle? You can't have too much redundancy!) But we saw nothing. No lights, no Cape. And we were missing the little edge of the charts that would have contained all the nav aids we needed. So yeah, we were lost. Kind of. That is, we knew where we were in terms of lat/long because Post's GPS told us. What it couldn't tell us was where we were supposed to go from here. Or how to get there. Need to round Cape May in an impenetrable fog when you've missed your turn into Delaware Bay? Well, there's an app for that! I powered up my iPhone and launched the Navionics chart plotter/GPS app I'd downloaded to my iPhone for the very-worthy price of $9.95. Within seconds it located Flyer on a color chart that contained all the detail for all the nav aids in the channel. Plus, we could move a little purple dot to any position and we'd get bearing and distance to the target. We held our breaths while hunting for the flashing yellow light that marked the entrance of the channel. And it was right where it was supposed to be!
The fog was so thick that we couldn't see it till we were practically on top of it, but it gave us the confidence to continue up the channel into Delaware Bay.

The fog lifted as the sun fought its way up and over the horizon. Our spirits lifted too--we were SAILING!

From there it was easy to follow the channel to the mouth of the C&D canal, though we had the iPhone at hand the entire way. Mid way down the canal you come to a point where you are no longer returning from sea (leaving red markers to starboard), but are leaving the Chesapeake (leaving the red markers to port). A bit confusing, even when you're not sleep-deprived. Luckily there's fair warning (sort of)--marked by several red and several green markers in a row.

 It rained as we entered the Chesapeake. The Johns handled it admirably while I was curled up in the quarter berth. Little by little the fog lifted and we saw very welcome rays of light. Just too bad that dusk was lurking around the corner.
Arrived in my slip in Easport about 8:45 PM,  57.5 hours after leaving the dock at Stanley's Yacht Yard.
The twin Johns, in matching white long-sleeved shirts, shorts, and boots, shared their thoughts about the relative merits of  Musto's off-shore jackets and continued for a long while with other such sartorial sea-speak. That was, of course, between glasses of well-deserved Dark and Stormies and other rum concoctions. There's no telling when we actually went to sleep that night, but I can say for certain that morning came too soon.

Thank you crew. Thank you Apple.