Cohansey Island Anchorage - at anchor

The "Little Engine that Could" is pulling away

If you can't make the trip from Chesapeake City to Cape May in one day, then there are not many options. We like to take advantage of the Cape May Canal but that requires us to transit at low tide. For today, that meant at 11:30 which was too early for us to reach the canal. The trip required us to anchor overnight at Cohansey Island. It's not the most protected but does shield you from a south to southwest wind which is predicted for tonight and tomorrow morning. Looking out over the island, we can see whitecaps on the bay in the non-predicted 12 to 15 kt winds (5 to 10 supposedly) but there are no whitecaps in our anchorage.

One of the few remaining nuclear power plants, located on Delaware Bay

Despite the island between us and the bay, we are still rocking a bit from the waves working their way around the edges of the island but at least there are no whitecaps. Another quirk of the anchorage is how deep it is. Once you round the corner into the anchorage, the bottom drops out and you'll see depths all the way to 50 ft! It seems a little perverse that the best potential anchorage has depths too deep to anchor in! We are on the northern edge, anchored in 25 ft, a compromise between depth and being protected by the island but we are still rocking.

Our island of protection. If you look closely, you can see the whitecaps on the bay.

We have to reach the canal by 11:30 am and it's 33 Nm away, a 4 hr, 30 min trip. We will try to get off our anchor by 6:00 am just to be sure to have enough time to reach the two 55 ft bridges before low tide passes us by.

We have reservations at Utsch's Marine for a few days. We're looking at the weather for the trip up the New Jersey coast and now it looks like Tuesday will be a better day but, who knows? Certainly not the weatherman. The forecasts are usually but not always good for the next 24 hours. Beyond that, you might as well roll the dice.