Chesapeake City - at anchor

Magnificent trees along the shore

The bay was as calm as I've ever seen it, nice and smooth as we headed north. The only problem was the current, it was against us all the way. One phenomenon we're familiar with from living on the Hudson River in New York is the way tides flow. If you're coming up the river (away from the ocean) then a flood tide will travel with you, giving you a 1 to 2 kt boost all the way home. Conversely, if you happen to start your journey at New York City with an ebb tide, the same thing will happen, you'll have an ebb tide all the way to Poughkeepsie. That's what happened to us today. We slogged along against a 1 to 2 kt adverse current all the way to Chesapeake City.

Once we arrived, we had to contend with shoaling in the channel leading to the anchorage. You had to hug the east bulkhead within 10 ft to get in without grounding, 7 MLW by the bulkhead. Once past the  bulkhead you aimed for the flagpole of the marina in front of you and then had to make a 90 degree turn to port and hug the docks with the two ACOE boats docked. Once past the ACOE boats, you had 8 to 13 ft all throughout the anchorage. We anchored in 9 ft MLW.

You can just see the two masted boat stuck between us and the anchorage

A boat behind us with 6 ft of draft did not hug the bulkhead and got stuck for over an hour. The tide came in and they floated off and anchorage just past where they had grounded for the night. There's a shallow section of about 100 ft down to 4.5 MLW towards the two ACOE boats before it deepens to 8 to 13 ft in the rest of the anchorage. However, the bottom is very fine mud and offered no resistant to our keel, it's soupy, we just plowed through.

With that we're set for the night and we're the only boat in the anchorage and I can understand why. The famous free docks are unused since there's only 2  ft MLW there. We plan on staying here on Sunday with rain predicted all day long and high winds and leave at first light on Monday and see how far we can get down the Delaware, hopefully all the way to Cape May.