Sandy Hook

We were to leave to go thru New York yesterday but it rained quite hard most of the morning so we decided to delay until today. The day off allowed me to get some maintenance items done on the boat.

Today was a perfect day, we had to leave at the right time so that we would have favorable currents as there can be quite the chop in spots due to several rivers coming together. The Navonics program that is on the Ipad and Iphone make it a breeze to see the amount of current and where in the river it is, so it allows you to plan accordingly. There were quite a few bridges to go under today, the first was intimating but after a while you don’t even thing about it. There is however a lot of garbage and debris floating around, plus the East river smells really bad....... The river is marked well and plenty deep so navigation was not an issue plus it being midweek meant there were very few pleasure boaters, only the odd barge. Just before the East river (that we were on) meets the Hudson, the engine started making a load “clacking” noise! First thing I thought was I had run out of oil! A quick check of pressure and temperature gauges seemed to say that was ok. Looking at the exhaust however revealed no water, thus the noise. I figured either the alternator belt had broken, raw water pump gone or my first guess the impellor had broken some vanes. I quickly shut down the engine to keep it from overheating and steered us to a concrete pier, which was close to us as we had to get off of the busy river. Heather quickly got the fenders and lines ready. I had to start the engine once again for a short time to push us toward the pier, fortunately a construction worker was around to grab a line. I was able to get on the pulpit and jump up to the pier to get the other line wrapped around some scaffolding that was there, as there was no cleats or bollards to tie to L. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for a security guard to come over to see what we were doing there. A quick check of the engine revealed that none of my guesses about the engine were correct. I started it again and after a few seconds everything sounded fine and water was coming back out of the exhaust. It dawned on me that it must have been a piece of plastic or other garbage which had blocked the water inlet and had been held there by suction until the engine had been shut down. We were about ½ km from 7 or 8 helicopters which were lifting off and landing giving tours of the harbour, along with the multitude of ferries and sight seeing boats, this made it a very hectic and noisy spot to trouble shoot the engine. In any case we departed and headed toward the main part of the harbour where the statue of Liberty is. It was neat to see and larger than I had thought it would be. We then continued under our last bridge and went 10 more miles until we arrived in Sandy Hook NJ to anchor for the night. As you may recall this area was devastated by hurricane Sandy in 2012. It's been a great trip with a month and 500 NM covered but we are sure glad this day is over!!!