WOW, what a ride! 27 knots, 7.5speed

Team Island Spirit had a fantastic run from Rock Hall, Md direct overnight to Cape May, NJ 110 miles. We left Rock Hall Sun at 1pm and with 10 knots of wind we ended up sailing over towards Baltimore hoping that the next tack onto Port would allow us to make turkey point. Not so due to current on the nose and a north wind making it a very close beat. After 1.5 hrs of having fun sailing, we decided we needed to make way towards the C&D. We had no plan other than to NOT get into the C&D before 5:45pm when the current would then turn east running into the Delaware Bay. Blasting through the C&D we tested out our broadband onboard Verizon network and place a Skype video call back to Jeff’s family and realized that we had one cool set up onboard! Laptop #2 was listening to AIS with Sea Clear displaying their info on our free ENC charts. Laptop # 3 was Jeff’s laptop and he was tapping into his email and checking weather and surfing the web. Yes, we are techno geeks and wanted to really hit this setup with all we had, sure enough, it is working very well. We exited the C&D at 2300 hrs and decided with this north wind of 15 and a full moon, we would not stop at Reedy but rather we would keep on the ebb tide and run this to Cape May. With 50 miles to go, we ran all night with 2 on deck at all times and one off watch taking 2 hrs to sleep. ( I sleep from 2am to 3:44am) The wind built to a high of 27 knots with an average of 18 to 20 knots from the port beam. We arrived at the Cape May Canal at 6am, and ran the canal pulling into Utches Marine fuel dock at 7am. After taking on fuel we motored over to the anchorage area next to the Coast Guard station and drop the hook and got to use my NEW Lofrans Tigress windlass. What a dream that machine is, it works great! Now we are testing out the network with 3 laptops online, and performing speed test and we have 800Kbps download speeds and 500Kbps upload speeds from the boat via the Verizon EV-DO broadband network. Check out your own speeds at: http://speedtest.net/ . OK, time to catch up on some sleep.

Sent via email blogging, cool!

PS: We took some videos that we will upload and of course tons of photos.