Today is the big day, we transit New York City. We had to time the tides today to make things easy on us. There can be quite a current running through the channels so you want to make sure you time things up correctly. We left with a slight current against us at the beginning but then it changes to slack, and then we ride the current out the entire day.

We took advantage of the free pump out machine and picked up some water at the town dock in Port Washington before we left. It's ~5 feet a low tide, but the tide was up, and so we made in there without any problem. And then off we went out of Port Washington and down towards NYC.

The beginning was pretty easy, we were following a couple other sailboats, and we just meandered down the channel, passing a few barges and other traffic along the way, but nothing major. As we got closer to the city things got busier. The East River channel wasn't too bad, but as we got down to the tip of Manhattan, things get pretty nuts. Helicopters everywhere, ferries in all directions and the usual crazy nonsensical waves of a busy harbour. We had to circle out of the way of a couple of ferries, and seemed to nearly got run over by one of the rather large Staten Island ferries, they don't seem to slow down or change course for anything. Anyways that little bit between Manhattan and Governors Island was rather insane, but we found some more room after getting out of there and things were a bit more normal.

The Statue of Liberty is certainly a cool sight to see while sailing by, and after that there is a lot more industrial area stuff with big giant container ships coming in, which is always neat to see. They look rather colourful with all the different containers at a distance.

And then that was it, we passed under the very large Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and we are back into channels heading towards the Atlantic Ocean again. The winds were good, and the chaos largely behind us, so we put up sail and tacked upwind to find anchorage at Sandy Hook. This is a popular spot to wait before getting weather to head down the long New Jersey coast, and that is what we were planning to do. Luckily our weather window seems to be coming together right on schedule again, and it looked like we were going to be heading out for an overnight sail the next day.

So we got to bed early, which was an easy thing to do after today. Not exactly a hard sailing day, mostly motoring, but a lot to see and very busy!