New Jersey coast and Delaware River

 

10/8 & 10/9 New Jersey coast and the Delaware River

We don’t plan to leave until late morning. It usually takes about 20 hours to get to Cape May. Leaving Sandy Hook around noontime gets us in the next morning around 8:00 AM. This morning there is more more wind out of the north than predicted, although it is suppose to settle down some time later in the morning. Boats leaving early morning are pounding through the waves as they head north to round Sandy Hook to start the trip south. Diana and Alain did not sleep very well beyond the protection of the breakwater from the wind driven waves.

As we pass Barnegat Inlet in the afternoon I thought about texting our friends Wayne and Betty Romburg, "Bright Ayes" that we are going by their home port. I plan to never go into Barnegat, I have heard too many horror stories about boats entering the inlet in the wrong conditions, wind and current opposing, creating surfing conditions. Fine on a surf board, not on a boat. They usually head south on their boat a 47 foot Caliber "Bright Ayes" in the fall.

I did a factory reset, that a Raymarine Technican recommended to solve my autopilot dropout problem. After I did that the autopilot did not work at all. I did not want to take the time to figure it out so decided to hand steer to Cape May. Hand steering is fine in the daylight, but sucks in the dark. I am terrible at steering strictly by compass. Fortunately there were lots of boats heading south overnight, so most of the time we could pickout someone’s running lights to steer to. We had just the head sail out and the engine at idle, sipping fuel and we were doing around 7 knots all night. Unfortunately that got us to Cape May around 4 AM. The other boats around us continued across the Delaware to Cape Henlopen, Delaware to arrive after sunrise and anchor behind the large breakwater.

Sunset of the New Jersey coast

Followed by the moonrise

Nice full moon sail

I decided to go into Cape May to anchor since we are familiar with anchoring there in the daylight.Entering the inlet in the dark, now that the moon was low in the sky was a little disconcerting. The green light on the west breakwater was easy to spot, but the red light on the east breakwater was very hard to distinguish from the numerous other red lights further back in the harbor. I turned the boat around and did a loop to get my bearings and turned on the radar before we entered. We dropped anchor around 5 AM and went to sleep after setting the anchor and turning on the anchor alarm. We were rather chilled, but sliding under our new 12 volt electric blankets was very nice and we were quickly asleep.

Around 8:00am we get a knocking on the hull and I quickly run up to the cockpit. Our nervous Canadian neighbor tells us we are too close to his boat. We could have been further away, but had plenty of space since we all swing in the same direction. Not worth arguing with him, he was here first, so we move a little ways, reset the anchor and go back to bed. We get up at 10 AM and have breakfast. I still can’t get the autopilot to function correctly. We leave around noontime hoping to get a favorable current up the Delaware later in the afternoon. Turned out we had a rough afternoon of motoring. The wind was more on the nose than I though it would be, so we could only motor sail for a couple hours before having to furl the sail. It was not a pleasant afternoon pounding through the waves.

We anchored after dark in the Cohansey River around 7:40 PM. We have anchored here before in daylight, so were familiar enough to come in, in the dark. There were already a couple boats anchored that we could see via AIS before we arrive. Very good holding. Quickly anchored, made dinner and were in bead by 9:00PM