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As if the NYC Police did not have enough to deal with between the Halloween Parade and election day the following Tuesday, we had learned during our walk around Central Park that the NY Marathon was being held on Sunday (Nov 2^nd). A record number of participants was expected (over 38,000) so there was no question of being able to jog along the same route as I had accidentally done at the Newport Marathon. Thus, we decided that leaving on Saturday before the city was taken over by this event was a good idea. The forecast also encouraged us to leave early so we motored out of the harbor under sunny skies and on calm seas. In fact it was calm enough for us to be able to watch the Gator football game (thrashing arch-rival Georgia) on TV as we cruised down the New Jersey coast.

That night we were enchanted by the bioluminescence which lit the leading edge of the bow wave a bright, neon, turquoise and made the wake glow green. But by 4 am, when I was due to take over a three-hour watch from Randall, the wind had increased from 5 knots to 25 knots with 30 knot gusts and the glassy seas now had 6 ft waves with occasional 8 – 10 ft waves and a short interval of only 4 – 5 seconds. The wind and waves were racing past us from behind and it took me a while to get used to seeing wave crests behind us that were several feet higher than the deck…but which passed under the rising stern of the boat without a drop getting on deck. We dropped the mainsail, which we had raised in the evening, and flew along on just the jib. These conditions continued through Sunday and most of that night and by the time we arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay early on Monday morning, anything that could move had either been placed or shaken onto the floor, and we were pretty exhausted.

After motoring alongside the shipping channels heading toward Norfolk, and being passed by a submarine with a Coast Guard escort, we anchored in the harbor at Hampton, VA, and slept for much of Monday (especially Randall who managed longer watches during the rough conditions than I did). We stayed in the boat on Tuesday and Wednesday which were very wet and windy. On Tuesday night we anxiously watched the election results on TV and when Obama’s victory was announced we were happy to hear the cheers, and see a few fireworks, from the neighboring Hampton University (no prizes for guessing how we voted). Since we were in Virginia, we were rather pleased that this swing state ended up supporting Obama, although it was a close call. On Thursday we took our bikes ashore and cycled around in misty drizzle to get groceries and run a few other errands before our departure for the Intra-coastal Waterway (ICW).

We had talked about making the outside run around Cape Hatteras but our rough passage to Hampton encouraged me to argue that this part of the ICW would be less stressful than the ocean route. We also wanted to have a couple of things on the boat looked at in a boatyard and the one in Oriental, NC, was well recommended. We had not stopped before at the "Sailing Capital of North Carolina" so we were looking forward to visiting Oriental for a few days which would also give us a chance to catch up with our mail. We might go back out to sea from Beaufort, NC, to avoid the more boring "ditch" part of the ICW but that would be determined by the weather.

The marinas and the anchorage in Hampton were busier than we had expected. We had become rather used to being on our own heading south from Nova Scotia as marinas, yacht clubs, etc, closed for the season behind us. One reason for the crowd was that a yacht race to the Caribbean that had been due to leave Hampton before we got there had been held up by the stormy weather in which we had arrived. They were then being further delayed by the threat that the strong Hurricane Paloma, which had just developed in the western Caribbean and was aiming to pass over the center of Cuba and the southern Bahamas, might cross the racers’ route somewhere in the North Atlantic. Little did we know that our experience of the crush of boats in Hampton was just the beginning of a southward parade of boats and crowded anchorages/marinas on the ICW, the like of which we had not experienced before.