Hi Mark,

...although it's currently sleeting here, you can see from this Sailflow image that this system has the classic eye of a tropical storm... It's blowing pretty hard in here right now, it must be really honking "out there"...

I departed Manasquan Wed AM, had a nice sail that day down the coast in a brisk NW breeze... But that night turned out to be pretty brutal, the wind moved more westerly and increased, and passing by the Delaware Bay Entrance I got pasted pretty good... And, damn, it was COLD... (grin) But, I was hauling ass, consistently seeing over 7 knots under a double-reefed main and staysail alone - that's pretty fast for my little tub with that sail plan, especially as she was still laid on her ear...

I had gotten blown pretty far away from the coast, but was planning to shoot for Oregon Inlet anyway, so no problem... But, the more I heard about this storm, the worse it was sounding, so I bailed out into Norfolk instead... Probably one of the luckiest decisions I've made in a long time, I really could have been in the shit if I'd headed down there. Instead, I had a really nice sail into Norfolk, even nailed the tide flooding into the Bay entrance, ran straight though all the bridges overnight, and pulled into Coinjock at 1000 this morning, whereupon I promptly went to sleep.... (grin)

I'll probably be here tomorrow as well, forecast looks like Sunday will be favorable for hitting the road again... Good start to the trip so far, though I'm still a bit spooked by how close I did come to proceeding down to Oregon inlet. It was the fact that I was gonna be hitting it at low tide which was the final deal-breaker, I sort of had a bad feeling about it anyway on this trip, I used up a lot of my Oregon Inlet karma 2 years ago in a similar situation, sneaking in there just before dark in a building northeaster... As much of a PITA as it can be to run though the gauntlet of bridges on the start of the ICW, doing it in the middle of the night is usually pretty painless, I flew through there last night...

best regards,

Jon