Monday, May 18, 2015

Cape May - at anchor

The anchorage at Cape May by the Coast Guard station
Our anchorage last night was calm but in the morning it was buggy in the extreme! We had anchored in 35 ft (it's deep behind the island!) and put out 100 ft of rode which is fine with our setup of a 66 lb Spade anchor and 60 ft of 3/8 BBB chain with 5/8" nylon the rest of the way. We swung with the change in tides but the anchor never moved. The Spade anchor just rotated around its point without having to reset with a change in current.

The bugs are another matter. We had a peaceful evening but in the morning we had an abundance of mosquitoes and no-seeums. I took Hoolie ashore, suffered through many bites and then we hauled anchor as fast as we could, we needed some relative air speed, it was dead still in the morning.

The evening entertainment was provided by the local fire trucks spraying water
Once again Delaware Bay was non-typical, dead calm and flat. If you didn't know better you'd think it was always like that! We had seen the grib report of increasing winds in the afternoon and that played into our decision yesterday of pushing on to Cohansey so we would have a short day today, 36 miles.

We usually take the Cape May canal since it saves having to round the tip and sometimes some nasty stuff along with it. The trouble is you have to time your passage at near low tide since there are two bridges with only 55 ft of clearance at high tide. So we passed through at 0.9 above low tide and the height boards read 58 ft, fine for our 55.3 ft mast. We don't even look up anymore as we pass under the bridges. If you did you would swear you're going to hit! The illusion is overwhelming.

We plan on getting to Atlantic City on Tuesday and then up the coast on a weather window due Thursday followed by a run up with Hudson River with a following tide on Friday to arrive at PYC sometime around 6:00 I would imagine. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate!

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