Scott,

For your New England trip you might consider adding Salem, Mass - the home
of Nathanial Botwitch and a wonder little town about early navigation and
shipping.

Regards, John Harris

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Well, after a 3 month break from ocean travel, Alanui has found herself back
in the salt!  We have cruised up the ICW, then Chesapeake Bay, down the
Delaware Bay and out into the Atlantic via Cape May.  We anticipate arriving
NYC on Aug 29th, one day less than 1 year from when we left Seattle!  How
exciting it will be to see the Statue of Liberty and take a slip at Liberty
Landing Marina!

My reflection today is on the nature of wave angle and comfort.  When we
left Cape May yesterday it was not comfortable.  We had a 3 foot swell from
the E, but worse a 2 foot chop from the NE.  The resulting ride was very
bouncy.  As many have described, the entry on the big fat Nordhavn has a lot
of bounce back, so it took a fair amount of monkeying with the throttle to
get the boat to settle into the swell pattern.  The result was a reduction
in speed to about 4.8 knots.  Today, with a slight decrease in wind chop,
but more importantly a much better angle of waves on the bow we were able to
maintain 7 knots.  It's funny, but this trip has been 95% downhill, the only
significant headseas we have experienced were departing Colon to the San
Blas, the N from the San Blas to Cuba, and now this segment of the Jersey
coast.  What was also very interesting was how much difference it makes to
adjust the gain on the stabilizers.  Many Nordhavn's have their stabilizer
speed programmed to 20 knots.  For some reason they have settled in on this
being the right value.  For some reason my boat was configured with a
default speed of 12 knots.  I had James Knight reconfigure the default to 20
knots and finally got a chance to notice the difference.  It is dramatic,
and not in a good way.  I've noticed a dramatic difference by reducing the
speed value back to the original setting of 12 knots.  While people have
said it might result in the stabalizers working harder I'm not so sure?
They seem to be quicker to stop the roll of the boat, and therefore perhaps
not working as hard?  Anyway one thing is certain, I'm going to program it
back to a default speed of 12 knots, it's MUCH better.

We are going to spend the night in Shark River and make the short trip to NY
in the morning.  Something about going in there at night seemed to be
raising the hair on the back of my neck.  Also, we would much rather enjoy
the experience of arriving in NY rather than rushing to get in the slip.

We anticipate arriving in Boston in a few weeks.  We are going to visit
Newport, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Block Island, Mystic and all the
other can't miss spots, then turn around and head to the Delaware Bay where
we will leave the boat for two weeks.  We are getting an RV to go into
Vermont and the rest of New England to see the Fall Colors from the ground.
Then at the end of Oct we will head back to FL.

Scott Bulger, Alanui, N40II, Seattle WA

Off the NJ coast heading N at 7 k