There are many challenges facing us and some more difficult than others. One which we had thought about and discussed a lot was our overnight passage along the New Jersey coast. We had never done an overnight trip before so this was new territory for us. While anchored in Atlantic Highlands we met Christian and Mary from ‘I Wanda’. They have been cruising since 1993 including three years in the Mediterranean. They are a wealth of knowledge and they advised staying only about 1 – 2 miles off the coast. We adjusted our planned course to be two miles off. We waited until 1:30 pm to depart so we could be sure to have a daylight arrival at Cape May. We stood two hours watches right from the start and powered under sail until sunset. We shortened sail at sunset and motored sailed through the night. It was an uneventful night and we had two other sailboats within one to two miles as displayed on the radar all night. The skies were clear so millions of stars were
visible. The casinos at Atlantic City are lit all night so the city is in view for miles before and after passing. We dropped anchor in Cape May just off the Coast Guard training facility at 8:00 am. We took showers and had short naps and then shortly after lunch picked up Doug and Sharon on ‘About Time’ to go into the town of Cape May. We had seen their boat at all of our anchorages beginning in Port Jefferson and they were one of the two other boats traveling through the night with us. They are from Toronto, Ontario and just spent the summer in Maine. After a visit to town we compared plans for the next day over cocktails on their boat and agreed at a 4:30 am anchors up to get out to the mouth of Delaware Bay at the right time to catch a favorable current all the way up the bay and through the Chesapeake and Delaware canal (C&D). We are too tall to use the Cape May canal so we had to go around the outside. There are shoals so picking the right course is very important. We decided on the Cape May Channel which is a middle course. Adding to the challenge was doing this in the night but with the chart plotter we easily picked our way through. Our trip up the bay was very fast with both wind and current favorable. We had decided to anchor in the Sassafras River, again based on a recommendation from both ‘I Wanda’ and About Time’. We anchored in a beautiful spot for a very peaceful night for some much needed rest.
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| Darkness arriving on our trip down the coast |
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| Sharing space with the big boys on Delaware Bay |
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| Entering the C&D canal |
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