On another night we were invited to dinner at Mory's, a private club that is a long-established university hangout.

We bought half a cord of wood from a farmer in Hamden and I spent some time cutting it to fit our stove with a borrowed chainsaw and splitting the pieces that were too big. For a while we had quite a pile on the after deck.

Eventually we had to get going or we would never get to Baltimore for Christmas, and besides, it was starting to get cold in New Haven. On our last night, as we were heading back to the boat after dinner ashore, we saw the lights of a tug coming very close to our berth. She slid by us, nudged up to the pier just inshore of us, and picked up several bags of groceries before heading back across the harbor to where her barge was moored.

We said our good-byes, and on December 9th we waited for daylight, then slid out of the harbor, past Lighthouse Point and through the breakwaters, then turned right, headed for New York City, by way of Execution Rocks at the west end of the Sound.

The tides would naturally not come right, so we spent a night between City Island and Hart Island, at the extreme western end of Long Island Sound. City Island is a yachting center, and when I first visited in the 60s was all boatyards and small-ish houses. Now the boatyards are mostly still there, but they are hemmed in on all sides by high-rise condos.

Hart Island is another story. It is the New York Potter's Field, and has been a prison, a hospital, and part of a Nike base. It seems that very little has been demolished, so there are generations of buildings, mostly in bad repair. The plus side of this, however, is that it is not overrun with condos.

We lay very snug between the two islands, along with a few sailboats still on their moorings. The next day we wanted to hit the tides right through New York Harbor, and also hoped not to arrive too early at Cape May, so we did not leave until 11:00.

We raced down the East River, past the United Nations Headquarters and its "Delegates' Garden" (no delegates visible on the this raw day) that reaches out over the expressway along the riverbank (the FDR Drive) so it has a good view. Our passage was noticed only by an occasional jogger, and we have wondered often at the way the city turns its back on its waterfronts.

It took us only a half-hour to get from Randall's Island to the Brooklyn Bridge, and as we passed South Street Seaport we noticed hundreds of Santas on the museum wharves and still more waiting on the Long Island side for the next ferry. A convention?

We slid past Governor's Island, avoiding the Staten Island Ferry slips at the Battery, and down the eastern side of the harbor, threading our way between anchored tug-barge units waiting for a berth to load, some of them old friends.

At 2:30 we took our departure from the Sandy Hook sea buoy and headed south along the New Jersey shore. We were running between two and four miles off the coast, and as the day wore on and it began to get dark the sport fishermen headed for harbor and the only boats left outside were the commercial clam dredges, towboats, and us.

We arrived at 5:15 on the morning of the 11th, but even though we have been in Cape May Harbor, we are not really familiar with the inlet, and we especially did not want to try running through the Cape May Canal in the dark, so we jogged back and forth until the false dawn gave us enough light to see the jetties on either side of the inlet.

The Cape May Canal leads through the southern tip of New Jersey to Delaware Bay, giving small craft a shortcut -- the shoals off Cape May extend quite far out. It was Sunday morning and there was a lot of small sport fisherman traffic heading for Delaware Bay.

We had a quiet and uneventful passage up Delaware Bay, tsaking care to leave as much of the channel as we could to the ship traffic bound up for Wilmington or even Philadelphia. Maersk Walvis Bay and Dole Colombia passed us inbound.

By 1:00 we were turning into the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. We had the tide with us, and just after 2:00 we passed the entrance to the Chesapeake City harbor ("Engineers' Cove") and turned so as to approach the entrance up-current. The last time we were here the harbor was full, so there was no room for us, but this time there was plenty, and we were soon tied up at the free dock maintained by the city.

We felt a little self-indulgent, so we went to a local restaurant (the Chesapeake Inn) for drinks, dinnner, and part of a football game. Altogether a pleasant evening. The next morning the Dockmaster, Buddy Shepherd, stopped by and offered to drive us to a supermarket, or to do anything else we needed. As it happened, we didn't need anything, but we were very touched (and we took care to point out that we had supported the local economy the previous evening).

We didn't actually get away until 9:15, but it is a short run to Baltimore from Chesapeake City, so by 2:00 we were running along the edge of the ship channel up the river into Baltimore harbor. We ran past Sparrows Point, former home of a steel mill and then a shipyard, and past the point, marked with a buoy, where Francis Scott Key was imprisoned in a British ship at the time during the attack on Fort McHenry, when he wrote the national anthem.

As we got closer to Christmas, family members began to arrive and our focus shifted to family gatherings.

One night my brother and his family came to dinner on the boat, which was very pleasant and nice and warm, thanks to the woodstove. On the 23rd our daughter Anne arrived and spent one night with us before going off to share a hotel suite with her brother.

At this point we were spending all our time out at my brother's house in Glyndon, about a half-hour from downtown. We had Christmas Eve dinner there, drove back to the boat, then drove out again Christmas morning for presents and Christmas dinner. In between there were furious games of Scrabble and Boggle, card games I have no idea how to play, and epic tickle fights among the younger cousins.

The day after Christmas most of the crew came down to the boat to hang out and have lunch, which made a close-packed but happy crowd in our saloon.

We would have liked to leave on the 28th, but a low was forecast to be sitting over Chesapeake Bay on that day, so leaving did not seem like the best idea. In the event, the low went north, but we did have 30-knot winds, and the Bay would have been very uncomfortable, with a steep short chop.