Just like Captain Christopher Jones, Myles Standish, and the plucky band of Pilgrims aboard Mayflower, the Belknaps from Arizona aboard Misty Pearl left the relative safety of a harbor and set forth across the mighty Atlantic Ocean, albeit in the opposite direction. The Puritans of course had the benefit of celestial navigation skills, meticulously hand-crafted charts showing exactly where sea monsters guard the edges of the world, citrus to fight scurvy, and livestock to provide meat for a year. We were saddled with Global Positioning System satellites, Garmin chartplotters, and iPad Navionics for added redundancy, not enough lime slices for our Coronas, and two dogs too small to feed us for a week. So because of our limitations we turned north from Cape May and headed to Atlantic City after topping off the tanks with $1,900 worth of diesel fuel. Hopefully that fuel will get us through the Canada stretch of our trip, which we note the Mayflower cowards didn’t even attempt. (They likely would’ve been amazed to see their boat carried by the Big Chute marine railway.)
About two hours into the day, we passed a large pod of dolphins traveling the other way, apparently unconcerned about the risk of sneaky shark fishermen trying to pass them off as tournament trophies. We couldn’t mobilize the camera quickly enough but trust us they were cool. After some rough stuff at the mouth of the Cape May Inlet, we settled in to quartering seas off the starboard bow with fairly soft eight-second rollers. Nice. A second dolphin pod gave Dana another chance. No photos. It’s a steep learning curve.
Off our port side we watched the southern Jersey shore roll by. From three miles away we thought we could see a bloated Chris Christie sunning himself on a wide empty beach, but maybe it was just a dark shadow cast by a buffoon-shaped cloud. Soon Atlantic City appeared on the horizon like a giant cash-sucking Stonehenge.
The modern-day druids already were taking our money and we hadn’t even arrived.
A sharp turn at the out-of-place and somewhat phallic lighthouse and a short pass down Absecon Inlet later, we docked at the Golden Nugget. Doug ducked in to lose a few poker hands, mostly so that the title of this post—which Mallory and Shannon immediately will recognize as a line from The Parent Trap—will be relevant. Dana walked the dogs and ran (for fun, not from muggers).
We met up with Blue Goose, Tyro, Second Wave, and Blue Moon to discuss the weather and various options for traveling further north tomorrow. Right now it’s looking iffy. We don’t do iffy.