Cape May NJ (2014-04-22)

N38° 58.412', W74° 50.647'

Tonight finds us peacefully at anchor in Sunset Lake, about 3 miles northeast of Cape May.  Another large body of water, the Delaware Bay, is now behind us and checked off the list.



We awoke early this morning to check on the forecast and found that while the Delaware River was still forecasted for 1-2' waves, the lower Delaware Bay was now up to 2-3' waves.

Just as an aside, here's a little rule of thumb when you are looking at wave height forecasts.  This was passed on to us by another cruising couple, and I've seen it mentioned in a few blogs and forum posts.  When you see a range of wave heights in a forecast, such as 1-2' for example, and you want to know what you're really likely to be in for, you add the two numbers together and that should be what you actually see. :-)

Now, this is only partly facetious.  The wave height forecasts, at least in the NOAA forecasts, are only the average of what the wave heights will probably be.  Logic would dictate that there are going to be some waves at the top end of the bell curve.

So, seeing 2-3' we had to think hard about whether to go or not.  On the one hand, we've seen enough 5' waves in a forecasted 2-3' sea to know that we really prefer less.  On the other hand, the longer range forecast showed that if we didn't move today, we'd be stuck in Chesapeake City until Friday.

After taking a look at where the two weather zones on the Delaware Bay actually are, we found that the second and lower zone would only account for about two hours of our travel, so worst case we'd be bounced around for a couple hours at the end of the day.  We decided to go for it.

The C&D Canal was nice and smooth as we left Chesapeake City.  It would be so nice if the whole trip could be like that.  Maybe someone should get the governments of Canada and the US to carve a canal straight from Ontario to Florida for us... :-)

As we exited the C&D Canal and entered the Delaware River we found that there was currently an ebb tide, flowing southward.  This gave us a nice 2 knot boost for about three hours, and probably cut the better part of an hour off of our day.

In the end most of the trip was okay.  The upper part of the Delaware was choppy, and a bit rough near Ship John Shoal light, where the tide turned.  Most of the rest of the way down was in a pretty honest 1-2' sea, which was a pleasant surprise.

The waves started to pick up about an hour out of Cape May though, and the last half hour was a bit of a washing machine, with 3' waves coming from a few different directions at the same time.  It seemed like we were seeing the waves curving around the Cape May point.

By 1430 we were entering the Cape May Canal, and were pretty happy to be off of the Delaware Bay, and to have that and the Chesapeake behind us.  While we did get bounced around a bit on both bodies of water, overall the passage through them in the spring was much better than what we had in the fall.

After topping off our fuel tanks in Cape May at Utch's marina we headed over to the anchorage in front of the Coast Guard station.  It was a little rougher than we wanted, so a quick check on the charts revealed a nice little spot a couple miles further up the Jersey ICW.  By 1630 we had the anchor down and set in Sunset Lake, a very picturesque, and more importantly, very calm anchorage.

The weather forecast for the Jersey Atlantic coast for the rest of the week is very rough, so we won't be going on the outside.  Rather than wait for days we're going to give the Jersey ICW a try.  As I had explained in the blog post last fall while we were waiting for weather in Atlantic City, the Jersey ICW has a reputation of being quite a tricky spot, notorious for constantly shifting shoals.  We've got the advantage of having a shallow draft boat, and the tide timings are in our favour for our next couple days of travel.  We'll only be travelling on mid tide or higher, and I've got some detailed notes from a cruising friend that went through the Jersey ICW last year.

With any luck we should be up to Manasquan by Thursday afternoon.  That's as far north as one can go on the Jersey ICW, and the rest to the north of there is no longer maintained and is impassable.  From there we have to do an outside hop to get up and around Sandy Hook and into the NYC harbour.  There's a chance we'll get a weather window on Friday to allow us to do just that, and then it will be a fairly easy run up the Hudson River to get to Waterford in time for the Erie Canal opening on 03 May.