Tied to a dock, with shore power, listening to the wind howl.

I prefer to be at anchor in high winds. We have really good ground tackle. It does, however, mean we're trapped the boat. We're not up to playing dinghy in high winds.

But. I also prefer having shore power when it's really cold. In this case, the cold has trumped the wind and waves.

I'd like to have a smaller energy footprint. One way to do that is to be further south when the Nor'Easter hits. Two other choices:

1. A diesel generator so we can run an electric heater. The heaters we have are good and draw about 1000W. That's a bit much for our batteries, but a small generator will easily handle this load.

2. A diesel heater, like an Espar or Webasto. (We once had a household kerosene heater on the boat. It was nice, but bulky and kind of scary.) These require a little bit of sophistication to handle the exhaust gas output and the fuel connection.

For now, the dock is very nice. It has the advantage of laundry, showers, and walkies for CA. Also, the few times we need the dock may net out to less cost than the fancy heater.

Today's weather report… Complicated.

"There is vast disagreement between the Euro model and GFS in where the LO/GALE is going Mon8 onward."

There are two possibilities for us:

• The LO weakens Mon8-Tue9 then moves out to sea Wed10-Thu11. A strong FRONT arrives late Fri12 into Sat13. This means travel Tue9-Wed10-Thu11.

• The LO/GALE is trapped off the Carolinas before it weakens Thu11-Fri12 ahead of another significant Cold FRONT Fri12. This might mean travel Th11-Fri12, which may be too short a window for us. We need 36 hours night-day-night.

Weakening would be good. We could move south in the resulting calms. Otherwise, we'll be trudging down the AIWW (sometimes called the ICW).