Cape May at Anchor

We decided to lay over another day at Cape May. There was a small craft advisory in effect until 1:00 pm today with 20 kt winds and gusts to 30 kts. There’s a front coming through and Thursday is supposed to be a good day for traveling up the Delaware Bay. We’ll leave at daybreak but we’ll have to go outside, we can’t use the canal due to our mast and the high tide in the morning (low tide is at 2:00 am). The photo shows the height gauge at the first bridge with the water at 0.7 ft over low tide. Putting a ruler next to the gauge shows a clearance of 59.2 ft at low tide (when the tide charts show 0 ft for the tide). Today there was a 5 ft tide so we would not have cleared at high tide with our 55.3 ft mast. However, one can do the math at other times with the aid of a tide chart.

The outside route plan will require going out the inlet, always an exciting experience with incoming waves, which we do not want to do in the dark and taking the route next to shore as Marty suggested to save time.

Meanwhile, we explored the anchorage and found The Lobster House, a huge restaurant near the fishing fleet. We were amazed at the number of people there on a Wednesday afternoon at 1:30! It was packed. It’s actually three restaurants grouped together. The one we ate on used to be a schooner, very nice.

The Coast Guard owns most of the peninsula we were anchored by and we could hear what sounded like boot camp with marching and calling out of orders. We used the sand beach to the north of the main Coast Guard station for Hoolie relief, probably off limits but nobody bothered us.

It’s early to bed tonight for an early hour Thursday.