September 19, 2003
Back on the boat....

Last night as soon as I touched the bed I was out cold. Not quite as fast as my friend Jason, who in Grand Canyon was able to fall asleep before the zipper was up in his sleeping bag, but almost as fast. Johannes for some unexplained reasons was sleeping with his pocket knife.

We got up late and felt great. We hadn't have a good night, uninterrupted sleep for awhile now. When anchoring I stick my head out every few hours to check if we're still hooked up. When really blows I can have a panic attack, like any other skipper I believe and jump out of the bed every hour to check if our ground tackle still holds on. This night however was the most restful of them all, even though outside trees were getting smashed and some NJ beeches disappeared through the night.

Christopher, bless his heart drove us to the library in the Red Banks. Library had this elaborate security system preventing us from using floppies, so we couldn't upload updates on our website. So we end up checking our e-mail only. Well almost... I discovered that I was able to launch command prompt and was able to use the floppy drive through some DOS commands which I couldn't believe are still useful, but our time was up and library didn't let us extend our time on their puters.

Our outspoken traveler was chatting with the librarian for another half an hour, but after he was done we took off to check out of the motel because I was anxious to see if my boat survived the night as well as we did.

The problem was that check out time in the motel was at 11am and it was now 2pm. We were locked out of our room and all our stuff was inside. The motel dude wanted to charge Christopher for another day. Poor Christopher didn't take it well and had quite a fit, which was getting us worried more and more. Finally the motel released us to go and we went off back to the marina. Christopher was quite disturbed so I end up driving, which I really didn't mind. The life on the land has it's little enjoyments as well.

At the marina we said our good-byes to Christopher. It was a quite emotional time. He is a very good man and we were very grateful for all that he did for us, but we were ready to leave his company as well. Maybe even other sailors wouldn't take care of couple of guys stranded in the port with no place to stay. Christopher had his problems, but he also was a human being that extended his hand and went out of his way to help couple of strangers.

These couple of days were so surreal that we both felt like we're in someone else's story.

We got to our boat, which did remarkably well during the storm and after making some food, trying some fishing and reading some books we went to sleep couldn't believe how calm the Sandy Hook Bay was just a day after the storm.

(M)