Water colors and our longest passage so far

We've left the heat and humidity of FL for the coolness of the north-east, Block Island, RI, to be exact. Given my reluctance to run the engine, the trip from St Augustine took a looong nine days, studded with adventure, awe, and torment.

Torment? Sure... we had nights and days with enough wave action to toss the boat and make living aboard noisy and miserable, with occasional surprisingly massive waves that rolled us twenty or thirty degrees, throwing loose items around. And the heat kept us rather miserable until we reached the latitude of DC, about six days into our journey.

Adventure? Well... we saw a group of three whales, probably fin whales. Nice big swells lifted and dropped us for a few days, gradually becoming more and more gentle, but remaining six to eight feet tall. Fog enveloped us when we reached Long Island and Block Island Sound and we sailed through, watching other boats on our AIS, feeling gratitude for modern navigational aids! A damaging storm swept through when we were still hours south of Block Island Sound and gave us some thunder and lightning and TORRENTIAL rain....

but we are well prepared for water and continued peacefully through it. Our jib ripped, a nice 8' gash, so we lowered it, made repairs,

and raised it up again. Cynthia READ INSTRUCTIONS and discovered the CORRECT way to use the hot knife to cut sailcloth...thank goodness for people who read the manual!

Awe...  

>A few days into our sail, near Cape Hatteras, the wind and waves died enough that we could heave-to (NEVER swim without heaving-to! The boat may sail off without you...), swim in the 2-mile-deep water, clean the boat bottom, visit fish, and....maybe....cool off (VERY warm water). The water was liquid blueness, the sargassum a lovely gold,

the largest of the fifty or so fish that followed us showed two blue stripes while the smaller just shone silver-gray against the red boat hull.

>Departing the Gulf Stream, the water turns from blue to a green-brown, rich with algae and plankton. Phosphorescence increases greatly and the ocean even SMELLS of life.

>gliding from the abyssal plains to the continental shelf near Hudson Canyon, we came across a whale sleeping peacefully, breath puffing into the air every 30 seconds or so, waves gently washing over it's sleeping form as we silently passed well within 100 yards.

>Dark skies let us see dark clouds and the glowing Milky Way... as well as the incredible starry skies and light-filled waters. And, when I turned off the running lights (no boats within even 20 miles!) I could see a comet trail of turbulence running behind our rudder, reaching back at least a boat length.

>Sunrises and sunsets! 

Awesome!

Now we need to decide on Onset vs Chatham for the next few days... AND we heard that the Cape Cod Canal was closed part time, so need to check on THAT. And my to-do list seems to get longer and longer.