Boat Girls in the Big City

July 2018

I sat at the helm, slouched forward and using the blue flotation device as a cushion, lazily steering with my right foot. I was in a slump. It was a bright, sunny day, and Elpis was out on the open ocean, but my mind was fixated on what I had been thinking about since we left the Bahamas two months ago: New York. The destination of our current passage, and my future home starting in August. Every time I thought about it, I felt a tightening in the pit of my stomach. The girl who had thought it was a good idea to apply to grad school the previous fall was no longer someone with whom I identified; tan and ocean-salty and perfectly content living on a boat, I didn’t really recognize the previous me at all.

We had left Cape May that morning with only slight incident (Elpis’ draft did not agree with the depth of the water near the fuel dock, after which we decided we didn’t *really* need fuel after all). Our radar told us that Tropical Storm Chris was making its way up the east coast, but our day started off windless and in lumpy water. After about an hour of bouncing in place, we decided to just motorsail. I watched the broken fuel gauge fluctuate between empty and half full (witchcraft?), moodily reflecting on my life decisions as I realized this was our last overnight passage of the trip, hoping the wind would pick up soon and somehow whisk us back to Exuma.

Most of the thirty-something-hour passage was uneventful. The wind picked up enough to shut down the engine. Grace figured out that if she jammed a conch shell between the side of the cockpit and the motor of the autohelm, the belt would stay tight enough on the wheel that it wouldn’t slip in the waves. I accidentally wrapped the jib around the forestay (“That doesn’t sound like a good noise” -Grace poking her head up into the cockpit at 3 am). I remember I kept looking up and trying to appreciate the stars, knowing this would be my last ocean passage for a long time.

At about 6 pm the next day, Grace and I found ourselves pulling into New York Harbor, taking note of the very abrupt color change of ocean blue to Hudson River brown, trying to reconcile what we knew from the movies with what we were seeing in real life. First came the bridges, then the gargantuan buildings, shiny and metallic and totally contrasting all of the houses we’d seen while island hopping in the Bahamas and Florida, small and painted cheerful in bright pinks and purples. For so long it had just been Grace and me, two people in a confined space, so the concept of 8 million people running around a city was hard to comprehend. We just stared at the massive amount of buildings, not beautiful like the islands but magnificent in their own way. Elpis felt minuscule in comparison.

The current ripped through New York Harbor, alarmingly strong as we pushed our way up to the Statue of Liberty. Seeing two other boats anchored there, we decided to drop anchor there as well, letting out extra scope to handle the heavy current and tide changes. Grace and I sat on deck and watched a truly spectacular sunset. The sky turned purple, and in the well-lit dusk (and without glasses), the buildings looked like they were made out of sequins.

Grace slept on deck and woke up in time to catch sunrise, which is a very "Grace" thing to do, and then we made our slow trek up the Hudson River to the 79th street boat basin. The mooring field at the boat basin is a steal, possibly the only thing in New York that isn’t exorbitantly priced. Free showers. Laundry. A short walk to the subway. Grace and I decided we should hang out there for a couple of days.

Land highlights included:

-Eating tacos (!!!) while watching the world cup

-Visiting Columbia’s campus for the first time (Grace acting like a proud parent, me feeling like an embarrassed teenager)

-Periodically stopping back at the boat to re-inflate and bail our leaky dinghy so it didn’t sink

-Going to Central Park to read and hearing a musician play Frank Sinatra on a trumpet. It felt like we were in a movie.

-Eating bagels on a bench outside the Natural History Museum

-Eating lunch at a fabulous place called Hummus with my mom’s cousin Jean (thank you, Jean!) and catching up on the last ~20 years

-Wandering around Times Square (Toto we are NOT in the Bahamas anymore)

- Going to the Patagonia store to have my jacket zipper fixed! The guy who worked there saw the salt water corrosion and said “have you been spending a lot of time at the beach?” to which I responded, “actually I’ve been spending a lot of time on the OCEAN” and he gave us 40% off our purchases because he thought we were cool. I got a pair of baggies and my hero Liz Clark’s book “Swell.”

On our second night moored in Manhattan, Grace dinghied to shore to read in Riverside Park, and I stayed on Elpis, journaling about life. Arriving to New York was bittersweet. It marked the end of our time adventuring on the ocean. The last point at which we could have turned back. The fact that I was going to school in the fall was starting to feel real, and it wasn’t something I was sure was the right decision. I wondered if Grace and I should have kept going south from the Bahamas, sailed another year, waited on real life a little bit longer… but then I stuck my head out into the cockpit and heard a street musician, and later some fireworks went off downriver, and I thought that even if leaving Elpis in a couple weeks would be one of the most difficult things I would ever do, maybe New York wouldn’t be so bad after all.

The two highlight pics: Grace's sunrise picture from sleeping on deck, and BFFs make it to New York

Lots of pictures from Cape May through NYC:

Cape May celebrations with warm beer and canned chili, as one does on a boat without refrigeration

Sunset in Cape May

Seemed relevant

Sophie (from Exuma) visited us in Cape May and insisted we stop at Rita's (and also drove us around and took us to Wawa and hung out on the beach with us because even when you live on a boat, you always go immediately back to the ocean when you get to land)

Getting ready to drag Lil El back to the water

Motivation to get moving- Tropical storm Chris getting a little too close for comfort. We had safely made it to New York by this time.

Sailing from Cape May to New York

Hi friend

hot dogs or legs? (is the blog not the right audience for this joke?)

A bridge

Grace + bridge

Getting closer

Taking panoramas is my true calling

really close now

going in for what Grace and I fondly call the Michigan hand hug

Emily with hat

Emily with no hat (I wish we could change it up a bit more too but there were only two of us on board, working with what we've got, sorry)

What's up snap map! We found snap chat good for many things, including but not limited to proving how close we were to famous landmarks *and* checking the weather.