Tides and Currents - bad weather today

Timing of Hell Gate

Well I think I have it right only cuz our good sailing mentoring friends Darrell and Nancy helped us out. The Hudson is a river that runs north and south. The tides come in and rise that brings current. Sounds easy unless you are the east river it has two entering point. One that the ocean pours in from the north east and one where the ocean pours in from the south west and where they meet is he'll gate oh and there is one more river  the Harlem river so three merging currents. So I thought you go to hells gate and look at the flow going out but in this case you have to look at the south west entrance area of when that flows in. So I had the exact wrong time. The simple way would be when hells gate flows out but when it flows out it really is flowing out the south west side opposite what a simple current flow would behave. So our friends told me of my wrong thinking and straightened me out. (I have to say I was not going to go thru until we knew we were doing it right and someone experienced helped us. Do you all feel better. ) if you hit hells gate at the wrong time picture three currents battling it out with wind and traffic and waves plus 4-5 knot currents when out boat only motors at 6-7 tops. We would have little maneuvering abilities.  Now it's always good to have a double check so Ben look on our iPhone navonic charts and there they have current measure at each designated point each day. This confirmed what Darrell and Nancy said. So we have two sources so I'm feeling good we will leave tomorrow unless the weather gets worse. Scattered thunderstorms for tomorrow. We will wait and see how they progress.

This morning the weather was 80% chance thunderstorms and heavy rain 1-2 inches even though Ben said, “we can go cuz we will have to experience thunderstorms and rain sometime but you are the captain and I will be happy to do what you want.” That is hard for a co-dependent thinker like me… want to make everyone happy but I’m glad we stayed here. I looked out the window at 10am and it was coming down in sheets of rain. I was happy to take a day to catch up on work and finally get to video chat with the staff a little.

Tomorrows weather sunny and windy.

That’s all for now.