Cape May - at anchor

At anchor, waiting for a weather window

It was a wild ride today. It started out with great help from the marina crew in getting off. The entertainment was finding the path out over the bar without getting stuck. Naturally our departure was at dead low tide (what else?) but I made it out after seeing 5.4 ft on the depth sounder. Our traveling companion found a 7 ft path with his 6.5 ft keel so he did better than I did. Evidently, the path out is very narrow, stray just a little and you find the bottom.

Once out in Delaware Bay, we found visibility out to about 1/4 mile, better than we expected. We had to leave at 6:00 am (!!) in order to catch the outgoing tide before it turned against us. It runs up to 4 kts in flood mode and we needed an ebb tide to get down the bay. So we had the ebb tide long enough to get by the pinch points of maximum flood and started off down the bay in good measure.

However, the further down the bay we went, the rougher it got. The wind picked up higher than predicted (with a gust to 30 kts, what else is new?) but we had enough of an angle that we put up the sails and turned off the engine and still made 8.2 kts through the water. Our joy lasted 2.5 hours before the wind died some and we had to turn on the iron genny again. At least we got some good sailing in!

We are now at the most popular anchorage in Cape May by the Coast Guard Station. The holding is excellent, one of those places that's impossible to drag, especially with our anchor. We plan on leaving at 8:00 am Thursday morning, a more civilized hour for the crew and get into Atlantic City by 1:00 pm hopefully. If the predictions hold, we'll make the trip up the coast on Sunday and ride the tide up to PYC on Monday. John Kwak is with us and we plan to make the trip as a two boat fleet.