What a day. Where do I begin? We left the anchorage near the statue at 9am to catch the flush leaving the harbour. We are close to the last bridge, the Varazanno-Narrows bridge. All major ship traffic travels under the 4260 foot span bridge with a 228 foot clearance – it’s very impressive. There were a few moments that took our breath away today – here is the first. As were approaching the bridge, fog started to settle in a bit and what comes out of the fog was a monster freighter. No problem, we are far away on the other side of the channel. Just then we heard a loud, HOOONNNK. It was the ship indicating something….now, what was does that mean again….hummm….oh, my – now we remember – it means that it is about to turn….towards us. All in all we were fine. It is just that we are so small in the harbour compared to most of the other traffic. The fog seemed to settle in more as we continued to leave. Our radar was spinning away looking for other ships. We stuck to the outside of the channel and plotted our course on the paper charts as well – just to be extra cautious. Our charts, however, didn’t align well with respect to the bouy markers. We had our GPS which is the ‘newest’ and should have the most up to date information….so, we stuck with that. We would watch for channel markers as they slowly appeared into our vision. They were right on track. We plotted them and looked for the next. The next nervous moment was when we heard another ‘HOOOONNK” – another ship is out there and about to turn. We looked on the chart and determined that it was approaching the channel and would go right by us. We didn’t even see it, but new it went by as the wake rocked our little boat. Another ship appeared out of the fog, but we were in the straight park of the channel, no sweat. As we approached the outermost part of the channel we breathed a sigh of relief – we would be heading south now and maintain 3 miles off of the shore line for Manasquan Inlet. What could go wrong? About ¾ of the way to Manasquan, I was inside with the kids when I the engines reved up and Kerry said something that I couldn’t quite make out…but, I wouldn’t be able to repeat it anyway I am sure if I did know what he said. He tracked something on the radar that was coming at us quick. Before he could really assess what it was it appeared out of the fog. It was a large sport fish boat that was going at least 30 knots, tearing through the fog. It went right behind us and no harm….but, he should not have been travelling that fast. We were heading in to the Inlet –phew – what a day. You probably think that that was the last thing that would get our hearts pumping…..well, you are wrong. To land in an anchorage that Skipper Bob had described we have to go under the Glimmer Glass Bridge. This bridge, we now have read, was built in 1898 and has most of the original mechanisms used to open it. The bridge operator explained that the max width in the bridge is 26 feet (we are 18) but when the bridge opens the max clearance under is 52 feet as it doesn’t open all of the way (we are 47 feet). He said he would open it and we can make a decision. Sailboats can make it through if they stick to the left side of the bridge…but with a catamaran our mast is in the centre of our boat which is over a couple of feet of a regular sailboat. So, Kerry told the bridge operator that we’ll ‘take a run at it’…. Hummm. Anyway, we approached the bridge. We had fenders down, Kerry kept us close to the wall, I grabbed the boat hook to keep us as close as we could. When I heard the operator say, ‘your good’ – that’s when I thought we could now breathe a sigh of relief. Because what else could go wrong? As we approached this very small anchorage there was one boat in the water that was submerged up to the roof. We would tell that it was on the bottom and that the water it was in wasn’t too deep. We made a nervous but steady approach and managed to throw our hook down in about 5-6 feet of water and turned the engines off. Whew! Now we could relax.
