Cape May - we visit Wildwoods

I can't imagine the scene here at the peak of the summer season

We're sitting in the mud here at low tide with a reading of 2.8 ft and I have a 4 ft 9 in keel. The guy next door has 4.5 ft at low tide so not all the slips are the same, I guess I happened to get a shallow one. Since we want to leave at 6:00 am on Tuesday morning which is right at low tide, we'll move to a face dock for deeper water on Monday when the tide is high.

I repaired the connections to the main VHF so now we have two working radios. Most of the day I was doing routes that incorporated the ACOE waypoints into my Garmin 492 chartplotter. So who ever is at the helm will see the ACOE waypoints come up automatically without having to switch over to the specific route through a shallow spot. All of this information is available for anyone willing to learn how to use GPX routes. It's nothing more than a computer file that contains waypoint and a route that any navigation program can download and display. You can download to an app on your iPad which includes the Garmin Mobile app, Navimatics Charts and Tides, Aqua Map USA and several others with the exception of the otherwise excellent Navionics iPad app which does not accept route downloads in any format per their help desk input.

They have some very original blue palm trees here, never saw their like anywhere in Florida

Downloading and installing a GPX route is easy. Just follow the directions on the blog site under "ICW Tips" in the page "GPX Routes". As the surveys and information changes, this page will be kept up to date. Look for the route with the highest number at the end (e.g., "2" or "3", etc.) for the latest file. It's easier and less error prone than trying to enter the waypoints manually.

We explored Wildwoods today, it's just up the beach from Cape May. We've always taken a condo at Ocean City, NJ during the summer with our kids but I was interested in seeing what Wildwoods looked like. For one thing it's much more built up, many three and four story highrises right on the beach. You don't see that in Ocean City with their maximum of three stories and mostly two story houses. It's well kept but it's got to be very crowded in the summer with all the multiple story hotels right on the water. We'll take Ocean City.

We have one more day here before moving on. Tuesday looks good for getting under the 55 ft bridges and into Chesapeake City which we'll try at a 2 ft and rising tide. The path from the entrance to the deeper water in the eastern part of the anchorage is shoaled in but we ought to be able to shimmy in with a 2 ft tide. On Monday it's thunderstorms followed by showers on Tuesday but with light winds which is good for us going north on Delaware Bay.