The morning started out great with this beautiful sunrise, decent seas, and we saw two whales! They surfaced so quickly, I couldn’t get a picture but the dorsal fin looked like a Fin Whale.

In the distance behind Greg, you can see Atlantic City. Notice that his hands are not on the wheel. That’s because we have auto-pilot, which is a nautical version of a self-driving car. The boat is more efficient when operating on auto-pilot because it maintains a steadier track and pace, plus it’s a lot less tiring for the person at the helm.

If the day had remained as pretty as the sunrise, we would be in Norfolk, VA this evening, but the weather had other plans for us. We knew today was going to be a wild ride so we set Atlantic City as our “conservative” destination, Cape May as “maybe”, and Ocean City, MD as our “optimistic” one. Well, as the seas built up to 4-6 foot waves, we slowed from 25 knots to 16, then 14, where we were doing ok with only the occasional wave washing over our roof.

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The first picture is the normal view through the windshield and the second picture is how it looks when a wave washes over the bow and sometimes the roof. This morning, I would have named the auto-pilot as my favorite feature, but now the windshield wipers take the prize.

An engine alarm sounded when we were about 5 miles from Cape May, which slowed us to 11 knots, then 8 knots for the last few miles. The alarm was a high exhaust temperature warning, but both engines were running cool and after a few trips down to the engine room by Captain Rob, neither exhaust tube felt hot. Our mechanic was kind enough to answer his cell phone on a Sunday and he and Captain Rob agree that it is most likely a faulty sensor, which we will fix tomorrow if we can get the part.

We docked at Canyon Club Marina in Cape May around noon and Greg whipped up some chili dogs for lunch.

Tomorrow we will remain under gale warnings with 25 knot winds so we will likely stay put in Cape May until Tuesday. That will give us time to figure out the engine alarm situation too.