In the morning, feeling the need to get a little exercise, Mark, again went out rowing in the bug infested swamp by our isolated anchorage on the Cohansey River. Sidekick Sue preferred to stay inside as bug-free as possible. Like the previous two days, we were still in an area that experiences strong tidal current, so we wanted to wait until around 11:00 AM to head down the Delaware River to Cape May. Captain Mark worked more on wiring and Sidekick Sue fired up the generator to iron some fabric triangles that will become part of a bunting which will be strung across Kevin and Faye’s reception hall this Fall.
The explorers left right at 11:00 AM. Outside of seeing a few big ships, there wasn’t much to entertain them on the second half of the Delaware river. Sidekick Sue occupied her time researching their destination in the Cape May Harbor inside of the Cape May Canal. She noted that some of the reviews from a couple years ago pointed out that the canal was shallow in spots, and boaters had scraped bottom or grounded. More recent news from the Internet indicated that there were some dredging projects that happened in the canal just last year. Sidekick Sue checked the tide tables, and sure enough, the same favorable tide that was carrying us down the Delaware River, was ironically going to bring us to the entrance of the Cape May Canal EXACTLY at low tide. So now we had a decision to make. Should we intentionally slow down? Should we anchor outside the canal for a while? Do we take our chances and assume that the dredging projects have cleared the low spots from the canal?
Ultimately, we decided to “give it a go”. The area seemed quite sandy, and if we went slow and encountered any trouble, we could just anchor and wait for the tide to rise to lift us off the bottom. There was another trawler, larger and faster than us, that had passed us a few minutes before. We figured we could follow him and see if he encountered any trouble. We were disappointed when he passed the canal entrance and keep going south. Now, we no longer had a leader to be our “test case”. We had already committed to go in, so we turned into the entrance of the canal. As we entered the canal, we noticed that our “test case” was turning around to follow us into the canal. Turns out, he was planning to use us as his “test case”. He must have been reading the same warnings we were reading, and was also a little tentative about being there at low tide.
We were probably holding our breaths through the whole canal into Cape May Harbor where we were planning to anchor for the night. We got to our anchorage without scraping bottom, without grounding, and without encountering any real shallow depths (according to our depth sounder). There were several other boats in the anchorage and Sidekick Sue joked as we anchored in a spot near an old shipwrecked sailboat with its mast sticking out of the water (which hopefully is not an omen). Our anchor seemed to hold well on the first try, so we were home for the night.
We had hoped to go ashore after dinner to do some walking and pick up some groceries, but several factors led to our decision to stay aboard, even though it would mean no fresh eggs in the morning:
1.) The nearest place we could find to park our dinghy was pretty far away for our dinghy with its (previously discussed) weak motor.
2.) The water was starting to get choppy, which would further complicate our progress with our insufficient outboard motor.
3.) We thought it might already be dark by the time we needed to dinghy back and the canal and harbor were very busy with boat traffic. In addition, we don’t have a proper light on our dinghy, so we’d be improvising with a cell phone….. AND we are anchored nearly in front of the Coast Guard Station and they frown on travelling in the dark without proper equipment.
So, we settled in for the night, taking care of small tasks and thinking about the next days. The weather coming up did not look too promising so we may be stuck in Cape May for a few days before another run of good weather. Captain Mark hit the hay early (still catching up from some sleepless nights on anchor) while Sidekick Sue stayed up trying to teach herself how to crochet. The weather was fine in the evening, but tomorrow, we will have some decisions to make because there is wind and rain on the way. Stay? Go? Move?
