Atlantic City to Staten Island

As you can probably intuit from the title, we were in fact able to start the motor and make today a "go" day. And WHAT A DAY!!!

I'll continue our story from last night, when the battery to the port engine was dead, and thus no port engine. Just before he went to bed Russ was emailing a fellow Endeavour owner when he thought to himself, "Hey, I'll just give Greg a call, it's only 9:30 pm." After a bit of chat and some back story Greg mentioned a switch that separates or combines all the batteries, so they could pool off of each other's power. Sure enough, switch flipped, the port engine started right up. Relieved, we both went to bed.

A perfect weather window for the day made us plan to push through to New York. It would be a loooooong day, but we'd get to take a couple of day and do touristy things. Up at 5 am (second time this week), we fed dogs, dinghy-ed them to the little beach (recall we are on anchor here), and made some coffee. The last bit of chore was to lift the dinghy back on the davits. 

Calm Atlantic in the early morning hours

And that's when Russ realized the dinghy was leaking.

Apparently, there was a fiberglass patch on the bow. And the beach entry, which involved a bit of scraping, just tore it to shreds. As he was raising the dinghy off the water he heard water running. That's when he discovered water pouring from the nose of the craft.

Welp, I always wanted a new one. So there's that.
Engine started up with a little help from the other batteries on the boat, then we were on our way. A long day, a little hazy, coolish in the mid 60s, but almost no wind and astounding waters. 

Needless to say, we have a couple of chores to do here. First we need to check the port engine's battery to see if the drain damaged it. If so, we need to replace it. Secondly, we need to see if we can adequately repair our tiny boat, and if not, can we find a replacement. It's a critical part of the whole anchoring thing, sadly. 

I mean, seriously calm waters...

Never a dull moment on the loop.

That all said, OH MY GOD WE'RE IN NEW YORK!!! For some reason this feels like a big milestone for me. We left the Tampa area just over 3 months ago, and we've been making progress, but seeing the NY city line makes the whole trip, well, doable. We've made our first real milestone on the route. Canada is just a few weeks away.