Currents, Tides and Weather

It has been unseasonably cold and the weather has been a bit unsettled since a cold front moved through about four days ago. Even the Brits are complaining that it’s been cold. We have a lovely down duvet on our bed but have ended up breaking out some extra blankets the past several nights. We have a diesel heater on board but given the high cost of fuel we have opted not to run it and to just bundle up in long underwear and puffy jackets. Flight was built in Sweden and has an insulated hull.  In addition to the diesel heater, we also have air conditioning which will be great when we head further south into warmer climates.

The weather and tides dictate when and where we go. We knew that storms were predicted so we hung out on a mooring buoy in Newtown Creek for a couple of days. We were protected from the swell, but the land around is fairly flat and we did get some strong winds that blew us around our mooring bouy. We were safe and warm inside flight and watched the storms go by. At one point, we even got some hail which sounded like pebbles hitting the cabin top and made columnar splashes in the water. After the storms passed there was a beautiful double rainbow.

The small town of Shafleet is not far from Newtown Ceek. We asked the harbor master about how to get there and he advised that you need to go to the ladder on the pier and that it is inaccessible for two hours before and after low tide. We headed over in our dingy, tied it up and walked about a mile into town.

We found the local family-run shop that had a little of everything and shared an ice cream to fuel us for the return trip. The Church of St. Michael the Archangel was on our way and we walked through the grounds. The earliest part of the church is over a thousand years old and many of the gravestones are so weathered that they are impossible to read.

On our way back to Flight, we rode through some lime green seaweed that got sucked into our mighty 2.5 hp Yamaha  outboard and clogged the cooling water intake. Roman shut it down immediately to prevent it from overheating and given that I was in a better position, I rowed us back to Flight using the oars. Some of our adventures can turn into much more than originally planned!