Certainly I’ve been a little remiss in catching up my my blog posts, but we’ve been busy since we hit the Chesapeake. The trip down here was surprisingly uneventful. Fun, pretty fast, and really almost two separate trips tacked together.
Leaving Block Island behind was in some ways more nostalgic and sad than leaving our hometown of Warwick a couple of days before. Since we started sailing and gained the confidence to leave Narragansett Bay with our boat some dozen years or more ago, Block Island has been a staple of our summer cruising itineraries. It’s a relatively short trip from where we used to keep the boat. June or July weekends with long days if we had our act together we could leave our mooring and make it to the anchorage there while it was still light (or…not too dark at least), or we could head out part way and be anchored out in time for lunch on shore. While it’s a small island, there are some nice restaurants, nature trails, bike rides and beaches. Saying goodbye to where we worked and lived didn’t seem awful, but letting go of one of our favorite playgrounds left me feeling a bit maudlin.
The weather prediction for a departure last Sunday was perfect though, Northwesterly/Westerly winds that were strong without being excessive. Although our wild ride back from Maine was fast, we’d still rather get there with a lot less excitement and queasiness. The forecasts promised a good sail without a lot of maneuvering. And it held. We left Block Island, set our sails and pointed South with the wind over our starboard side. And it stayed there all day and all night, with one small exception for about 45 minutes in the middle of the night where the wind inexplicably disappeared. We slept, we ate, we talked and laughed and we covered a lot of water quickly. One thing that surprised us about this trip was that we saw a lot less wildlife than we did going North to Maine, other than a few sea birds and a Flicker (yes, a small woodpecker got lost and hitched a ride) that joined us for a bit we really didn’t see much even though the waters were a bit warmer.
One thing we didn’t realize about heading to Annapolis first until we looked at our charts was quite how far up the Chesapeake it was. The Chesapeake is a pretty large body of water, and Annapolis is WAY up North. Doing some research on the trip we discovered that it was some 40-50 miles shorter to head up the Delaware Bay and catch the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal across to the Chesapeake then head back the fifty miles or so South to Annapolis. So that was the plan, head to the Delaware Bay and go up and around. The Delaware Bay didn’t seem to have a lot of comfortable looking places to stop and anchor and is a busy shipping area, so we figured if we needed a rest we could head into Cape May for a bit or we’d have to just keep on going. Part II of what seemed like two distinctly different trips.
After leaving Block Island around 8:45 on Sunday morning, we arrived at Cape May near 12:30 p.m Monday. This, we knew would be the end of our fast, easy sailing as we would no longer be going Southwest, but had to turn Northwest and go right into the wind we’d been riding for the last day. Since the sail down was easy we were well rested and comfortable and decided to press on for the Canal.
The entrance of the Delaware Bay near Cape May was trickier than expected, the shoals in this area seemed to have only a loose connection to what was charted. We passed a survey boat on the way in that appeared to be trying to sort this out, but we had a few alarming incidents but passed unscathed. When the chart says 30 feet of water and the depth sounder is registering four feet under the keel and dropping it does get the adrenalin flowing. But we picked our way through and entered the channels and headed North. Just after sunset we arrived at the Canal. With good luck we caught it when the tides were favorable to go through.
The Canal was an almost otherwordly passage that night. It is well lit with lights every 500 feet or so on either side, but much of it beyond those lights is just dark. The wind was still and the water was like glass. The air temperature had dropped enough to cause the water to start giving off a light mist; scenic but not enough to hamper visibility. We didn’t see a single other vessel the entire length of the canal in either direction, though we did have to pass under five bridges and several sets of overhead wires and pipes. Those are all a little unnerving because although the charted height is 135 feet overhead, when you are going under a bridge it always looks lower than than. Even with more than sixty feet assured clearance between our masthead and the bridges, the angle you are viewing them from the deck makes it look like you are about to hit each bridge right up until you are under it.
As we progressed from Delaware into Maryland the shores of the canal became more interesting. Some houses appeared, and Chesapeake City slid past with shore side restaurants and buildings lit up with a waterfront carnival atmosphere. The mist was building and adding a slightly surreal glow to the waterfront homes and docks as motored past. Sadly, capturing those images from the deck of a moving boat at night is beyond my skill as a photographer but the memory will persist for some time.
By the time we left the canal it was getting late and we were not ready to brave the busy shipping channels in unfamiliar waters on a dark night. We tucked into the first likely spot to anchor and spent the night, catching our rest and thinking about the rest of our journey the next day.
