8/27/99 | Down the Delaware River to Cape May

somewhere down the lazy river

We timed our departure from Philadelphia to catch a favorable current. As it turned out, we also had wind, so we got to sail nearly the whole way to Reedy Island, an anchorage near the C&D canal. We put the sails up on starboard tack and that's how we stayed, although with the turns of the river and the vagaries of the wind, we spent time sailing upwind, downwind, and at all points of sail in between.

Reedy Island is practically in the shadow of the Salem nuclear power plant. The huge haystack-shaped cooling tower dominates the skyline for miles in all directions. We used the distance/height grid on our binoculars to estimate its size at 400-600 feet.

Below the Salem plant, the Delaware begins to open up, and a bit beyond the plant it morphs into the Delaware Bay. The green and red buoys of the ship channel are supplemented every so often by a big lighthouse marking some major navigational hazard; even though we mostly stayed out of the actual channel, we followed alongside it as the shoreline receded into horizon on each side of us.

Cape May hangs off the southeastern tip of New Jersey, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay. The harbor can be entered from either side:  Cold Spring Inlet leads in from the ocean, and the Cape May Canal is entered from the bay. Although the latter would have been a more direct route, our mast is two feet too high to make it under two fixed (non-opening) bridges which span the canal. Maybe at low tide...but we'd be getting there at high tide, and anyway, the whole prospect of trying to squeak under a barely-high-enough bridge was not too attractive. The Atlantic entrance is a bit farther, though, and we figured we would be getting there late enough in the day that we'd best stop at Cape Henlopen, on the Delaware side of the bay, which has a nice big harbor formed from artificial breakwaters.

We barrelled down the Delaware with a favorable current, motoring as it was an absolutely windless day, but by the time we reached the Miah Maull lighthouse the tide had turned against us. It was such a comedown, after having seen our 7-knot speed transformed into 8.5 knots, to see the numbers on the GPS drop below our knotmeter readings. Annoyingly, the contrary current was much worse than the favorable current was helpful, setting us down to 4.5 knots.

the miracles of modern navigation

Everywhere we'd been so far -- the upper Chesapeake, the C&D Canal, and the Delaware River -- had been navigable by line-of-sight piloting. In the few cases where the next buoy wasn't immediately visible, we'd set a compass course, but we could also see other landmarks to keep us on track. But when departed the main ship channel toward Cape Henlopen, we depended on the GPS. Even though we set a compass course, we rapidly realized that the strong current was setting us sideways as well as back, so that if we were to steer strictly by the compass, our true course would not be the one intended.

This was even more noticeable when we departed Cape Henlopen for Cape May the next morning, sailing with winds out of the east. Normally, when a sailboat sails with the wind at some side angle, there is a small amount of "leeway" -- the boat slides sideways as well as forward. (Now you know where that term comes from!) But as we crossed the mouth of the Delaware from one cape to another, we sailed directly across the ebbing tide; the current set pushing us eastward, out into the ocean, far overwhelmed the bit of leeway toward the west. We had figured our heading for the first part of our crossing to be 085°, and that's what the GPS told us, too, but in order to keep our "track" (what the GPS thought we were steering) at 085°, we had to steer 060° by our ship's compass. That's a huge difference -- if we hadn't had the GPS and had steered 085°, we'd have ended up much too far to the east. (We would have had to deduce the current by taking bearings on landmarks before they got out of sight, and then calculate a correction, and then modify it as we went according to the state of the tide.)

Thanks to the GPS, the Cold Spring Inlet entrance buoy showed up right on schedule, and we motored through the jetties and into Cape May Harbor. The harbor is shallow, but we found a place to anchor just outside the marked channel near the Coast Guard training station. We were careful to take the state of the tide into account when choosing our place -- there's about a 4 foot tidal difference here.

the jersey shore

Unlike most of the other towns we've reached by boat, the waterfront in Cape May is not the city center. There are lots of marinas, most of which cater to either sportfishing boats or commercial fishing boats (ocean fishing is a huge industry here), but none of them would let us land our dinghy. We ended up tying up on the beach at the Corinthian Yacht Club of Cape May, who graciously gave us permission. It was a good thing we had our bicycles with us, because downtown Cape May was some distance away, near the long Atlantic beach that is the heart of this seaside resort town.

We picked up mail at the post office, then wandered the streets. Most of the buildings in Cape May were built in the late 19th century; although it has been a resort town since 1766, a fire in 1878 destroyed much of the town. The Victorian houses and hotels are wonderful to look at, classic "painted ladies" with broad porches and ornate woodwork.

On Friday, our friend Jerry, who lives in Cape May, came to see our boat with his almost-ten-year-old daughter Hannah. The storms which had been giving us on-and-off rain were off that afternoon, so we went out sailing and had a great time. Being out in the ocean was a bit different from our previous inland experience. The waves were bigger, but with slower period, so each swell just lifted us gently as we sailed through the water. Hannah steered and I took care of the sails, while Jerry and Britt sat out on the deck and watched the world go by.

Right now the weather is predicted to be unsettled for a while, so we'll probably hang out in Cape May for the weekend. We're waiting for good weather because we've decided to return to the Chesapeake "around the outside". This will be our first offshore passage, but we feel ready to tackle it. It will be an overnight -- also a first for us. Since we're in no hurry, we can afford to wait for the weather to make our first offshore experience a safe and enjoyable one.