We woke up this morning and thought we were going to wait at the marina for a few days..... for a break in the weather. Then George came back from his visiting the neighbor boats and said that they were all leaving now. Half had already left. What!? I checked, and it seemed like a really bad idea. He said that they checked, and quite possibly they knew better, so we packed up to go. It was an uneventful and beautiful trip through the canal to get to Manasquan Inlet. Lots of beautiful homes, and lots of fisherpeople. I was almost thinking that the idea of going out was a good one. To be clear, there are only a few places that you are forced to go outside into the ocean. This is one of them. There is no ICW here, so outside it is. Its also where they include 'swells' in the weather forecast, because they are now a thing. We got to the inlet, and it looked gnarly. I've already said that they are typically like a washing machine, agitating you every which way, but this was worse then we've ever seen. It was tossing us aroung , changing direction, and throwing stuff everything. Ugh. We made it through that, but it just didn't change much. We had a side wind, which meant that the waves were every 4 or 5 seconds, they were 3 to 4 feet, which means that occasionally there is a 5 or 6 in there, and the trough from top to bottom is double whatever the wave height is. Yeah, it was rough. Rougher than anything we'd ever done. George handled it like a pro though.

This is a picture of poor Devon and Dolly. They were getting beat up pretty bad.

When you look out over the water, it almost looks nice. You can't see the swells, and the waves were facing wrong here. I tried to catch a good picture, but I was holding on too much.

It's hard to see behind the boat, but I could sit down while taking the picture.

Anyway..... we made it to the marina in Raritan Bay. yay! We traveled around Sandy Hook, and several of the folks that we were in the group with saw whales. I saw a couple of dolphins, but no whales. I really wanted to see whales.

The marina was really nothing to write home about. It was a super shallow area, but we're getting used to that around here. My captain put the boat right into the slip, and we had a quiet night.

Next stop - New York City! We will be staying at Liberty Landing for a night, then heading into Chelsea Piers to meet Dan and Chris.

So excited!