Thursday, November 10, 2011

Up Delaware Bay in Photos

The trip up the Delaware Bay was totally uneventful, other than hitting a fog bank.  The winds were out of the east but light.  We managed to ride a slack current bubble most of the way and did around 7.5 knots until the last couple of hours when an ebb current slowed us down to less than 6 knots, and even as slow as 5.3 between the nuclear power plant and the entrance to the C&D Canal.   We had current pushing us from west to east as the photo of the chart plotter below shows.


At one point, our COG (course over ground for my landlubber friends) was 22 degrees off from our heading.   I put the boat on autopilot which compensated, a nice thing to have.  You can see how the boat had to crab sideways a bit to compensate.

Delaware Bay is very shallow.  It seemed odd to me to see something like this lighthouse out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded  by water as far as you could see.


And right nearby this lighthouse is an ex-lighthouse.



And checkout how ornate this lighthouse is.  I wonder if someone lived in it before it was automated?


Stupid question.  Someone would have to live in it before it was automated. 

The trip is very dull.  The only interesting thing to see,  besides the lighthouses, is the Salem nuclear power plant way off in the distance.


The autopilot was doing a good job steering the boat.  I stood watch and moved my beta version Navi Nut™ along every ten or fifteen minutes on the paper chart.  Meanwhile, the crew occupied themselves.



We ran most of the way just east of the shipping channel, between it and numerous shoals.  We only saw a couple of ships.


Check out the bow wave made by the bulb on the bow.



The C&D Canal was first opened in 1829.  The original canal was dug by hand by 2,600 men earning 75 cents a day. The new canal opened in 1927.  It is owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 


It is 14 miles long and 450 feet wide and connects Delaware Bay and the Chesapeake Bay. 

I have a PDF file from NOAA called "Distances Between US Ports" that says it's 67 miles from Cape May to the entrance to the C&D, and so I figured on at least an eleven hour trip against the ebb.   Leaving at 6:30 AM would get us to the canal in the dark.  It was actually only 58 miles, I guess because we went through the Cape May Canal and not out the inlet and around the long way, and we went faster than I thought we would, so we got to the canal at 2 PM and Summit North Marina at 3 PM.


Pam and I sat on the flybridge deck chairs and enjoyed a glass of wine and the full moon.


The sunset was very pretty too.


Yes, that's a make believe riverboat.

The weather forecast isn't good for the next few days.  It's very foggy this morning and a front is going to come through later today.  The winds will be 15 gusting to 25, and Friday it's forecast 20 to 25 gusting to 30.  Saturday isn't bad with winds forecast to be 10 to 15 gusting to 20, but we're in sight seeing mode now and Sunday's winds are forecast at 5 to 10.  It's 57 miles from here to Annapolis, so maybe we'll leave on Sunday and poke along, making the trip in two days.  We're not on a schedule, so why not?

So we have a few days to chill.  Pam wants to do a few loads of laundry and I need to fix a broken wire on the alternator that cut out the tachometer on the starboard engine.  If I stretch it out, that might take me a half hour.    I also have almost two month's of snail mail to sort through as well.  Ain't not working great?

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the virtual trip Pam & Dave.

    Rick & Lori

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  2. Anchor somewhere along the way. There are lots of spots. Enjoy this part of the voyage---this is where you want to linger.

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  3. I'm glad you're in the Chesapeake Dave and Pam. Coming from upstate New York, it's all good from now on.

    I had friends from up in the County in Maine that spent weeks in Baltimore last winter. Dockage was off season and low(their boat only 30 feet).

    They had a blast and never ran out of things to do.

    They finally left their boat there and returned to Maine in January. I asked them why, they said "It was too hot"

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