Chesapeake City at Anchor

Low tide was at 2:00 am and you’re supposed to leave Cape May no later than two hours after low tide to catch the incoming current all the way up Delaware Bay. However, we were not about to leave at 4:00 am in the dark so we slept in until 5:00 am, took Hoolie ashore and hauled anchor at 6:00 am. I had to fool with the anchor since it came up cocked on the chain so we finally got underway at 6:15 at first light.

As I mentioned before, we couldn’t take the canal so we had to go out through the inlet again and head south. There are two routes, one far from shore which is the main channel, safe but longer. The second route is very close to shore and much shorter. The second route goes right by the lighthouse and we joked that we could read the lighthouse schedule on the front door as we passed by. You have to fight the tendency to veer away from shore but that’s the shallow water. The deeper water is almost up on the beach! At any rate, the charts are dead accurate, we followed them on the chartplotter and had no problems.

Since we got started so late (relative to low tide) we thought we might lose the flood tide somewhere along the way but we held it all the way into Chesapeake City, a total of eight hours, arriving there by 2:15 pm. The nuclear plant was on the east bank and one wonders why they had to build air coolers when they had all the water of the bay to cool with – unless there was some EPA ruling about warming the bay waters.

Chesapeake City was dredged at the end of July this year so there was plenty of water in the anchorage with 10 ft everywhere. We must still be ahead of the crowd heading south since there weren’t that many boats here, about six at anchor. Now we are finally in the Chesapeake and can look forward to moving everyday and not having to wait for weather, we hope.