Delaware to Cape May

Tuesday night the bridge issue turned out OK, though not without it's own bit of excitement and drama. About 30 minutes after reporting the lowering of the train bridge, the bridge master reported that the bridge was opening...Yea! About 30 minutes after that, just as we got the bridge in sight, the bridge master reported that the bridge was closing for another train ... Oh no! We slowed a bit, the train went by, and all was well. We got to the end of the C&D Canal and saw a little shortcut into the planned anchorage, which was a bonus in the waning daylight. It was a narrow entrance, the current was strong, and we were right at high tide (which gives us the advantage of lots of water, but the disadvantage that if we went hard aground, it would be about 6 long hours of slowly laying over on our side followed by 6 hours of righting before we would be off the shoal). Well at this exact moment, our chart plotter (the computer program that uses GPS to put us on a digital map) appeared to fail! We were moving sideways in the channel instead of the direction we were pointing. I am now madly scrambling to restart it, as Greg begins to dead reckon and keeps a close eye on our depth to make sure that we don't get in water that is too shallow. By the time I got the plotter restarted, the excitement was over, we were back in decent water and our stress level slowly returned to normal as we continued the last 2 miles of our day to set the anchor down off a sleepy little town called Port Penn.

Wednesday morning we checked the weather again before heading out down the Delaware Bay. All seemed well, we knew we would be facing a bit of a headwind in the afternoon, but with speeds predicted at 5-10 knots, nothing that should be a problem. Not quite how it turned out. By 11:00, the headwind over opposing favourable current was making the bay quite choppy. We were also running down the side of a fairly big ship channel, and about 8 of these monstrosities passed us over the course of a couple of hours. A one point we lost all forward motion, being stopped by huge wake and unable to get forward speed again over the wave action. We increased our engine speed, and were oddly thankful when the current began to turn against us, as that calmed the sea state to something we were all more comfortable with. At 3:00, we had the beginning of the Cape May Channel in sight, but were suddenly alarmed at the radio chatter of a sailboat turning out of the canal, and having to go into the Atlantic around the tip of Cape May to get back into protected waters. We radioed ahead for local knowledge of the situation and were very relieved to hear that it was his mast height that made him unable to get under a bridge over the canal. We were thankful for our little 48' mast and motored though the canal without incident. We later talked to the captain of that boat, a native of New York who often sails the Atlantic, and he said he had never been in such terrible conditions. His wife got off the boat and took a bus home!

Cape May was the point at which we knew we would have to be prepared to wait for good weather to go up the New Jersey coast. These 3 day-hops up the coast had for Greg, been the boogie man in the closet. We had heard horror stories from many cruisers both before and during our trip of how nasty the sea conditions can be, how often forecasts are wrong, and how quickly the fog can roll in and limit visibility. We had 110 miles to go on the ocean before the protection of Sandy Hook, and then 18 miles across New York Harbor to the Hudson River, after which we would be in protected or familiar waters until our home port.