This ended up being a bigger sail that originally planned. We were going to sail a single night outside to Cap May, stay a night then continue to New York, but weather turned a little in our favour and it ended up being good winds to do it all in one go.

We got a good early start and left the anchorage at 6am. We put up full sails after getting out of the anchorage as the winds were light early morning. But that didn't last long at all and within about 30 minutes we were double reefed on the main and struggling with too much head sail. The sea state was pretty ugly at the mouth of the Chesapeake and after getting the genoa furled away we decided to just keep going under double main alone.

It was a long few hours to cross the mouth of the bay in those conditions but as we got to the other side the sea state calmed down a lot without the fetch of the Chesapeake, and it was much smoother sailing. We knew that the start of the sail was going to be challenging so it wasn't much worse than expected, but it certainly wasn't any better.

I rigged up the gale sail and we were going along much nicer then. The double reef with the gale sail balances pretty nicely in strong winds. And then as the day went on the wind just kept dropping and we slowly unreefed, and worked our way back to full sails, and then after all of that fun the wind pretty might died out. And so that evening we turned the engine on and motored the rest of the night into the next day.

We were then coming into Cape May, but after checking the weather we made the choice to just continue on. Originally it was looking like the winds would die out for that whole day, so going into Cape May and anchoring for the night and doing a long day sail to New York made sense. But with more wind in the forecast and less the following day, it was now making sense to just keep going.

So we sailed on, and found the wind filling in as we came by Atlantic City. Pretty light, but on our quarter and so we put the spinnaker and were sailing along very nicely. The other nice thing about continuing on is that we weren't in a giant rush, we knew we'd need another night, so that put us getting into New York the next morning, which gave us lots of leeway in terms of just sailing along slow and not having to make some particular speed.

The wind died out later that evening, and we motored for about an hour before it picked up again, and we had a nice slow sail through the night. We got passed by a few sailboats motor sailing through the night. The wind was getting a little gusty in the morning, we'd be going along perfect at 6 knots on the gust but only 3 or 4 knots in the lulls. Somewhat frustrating, but we had lots of time as we made pretty good time through the night.

The calm conditions meant we were pretty well rested this time as well which was nice. We sailed right down to the entrance at Sheepshead Bay and then put the sails down to motor into the bay. The entrance has some shoaling and we saw down to 6.8 feet as we came through which was a bit stressful, but although that isn't a lot of depth, it was enough.

The yacht club was a little confused about the ball we'd end up on, but after some idling around we got situated and tied up. It's nice to get in, but also a little sad as that will be our last bit of ocean sailing for a long while at least. Glad it was a nice easy one to remember it by.

We've got a week booked here on the ball, and then we'll start heading up the Hudson River!