Sometimes things just go right! We made a last minute decision yesterday, Sunday, to leave Cape May at noon to ride the currents north up Delaware Bay even thought it risked yet another night landing in a strange anchorage. Our mast is too tall to take the short cut through the Cape May Canal so we motored the long way around the Cape well off the shoals, headed north with light winds too close on the nose to sail, but enough to have the main out. Then it all started to come together. The wind shifted east as predicted, but with much more vigor, the currents picked up and we were doing 6.8 knots through the water and up to 8.6 knots over the ground. We covered 40 NM in seven hours, unexpected speed that brought us to anchor at dusk, not dark, in a bend of the Cohansey River. (Jay C., the Rocna anchor grabbed instantly and held. And, yes, Johanna N., the Cohansey is still a bit malodorous, but a natural, swampy kind of smell.)
Peacefully at anchor, the sound of tidal current gurgling on the hull was broken only by whaps of the fly swatter as we killed those evil, nasty, vicious little black flies that take chunks of any exposed flesh and that had plagued us in the cockpit before they headed below decks as it grew dark in order to greet us again. Marlene exhibits characteristics of her personality rarely seen when she brings on the death of one of these creatures.
Yesterdays jaunt positioned us this morning to sail, yes sail, the next flood up the Delaware to the Chesapeake and Delaware ship canal and go with the ebb through the canal. Seems that a branch of the flood up the Delaware nicely decides to take a left at the Canal entrance and become the Canals ebb to the west, Now we find ourselves at anchor in the Bohemia River a few miles south of the western end of the Canal and in the Chesapeake Bay, facing a terrible danger. This blog could take on the inanity of a Sail magazine article describing the swim off the boat in the mild water, the 80 degree sunshine, the steak to come, wine, etc., so I won’t go into any of that. Instead, only note that we now have confirmed our draft is five feet by feeling the four inch gap between the mud and the keel, and reconciling all with the fathometer which was right on when it showed that we had about point-three feet of water under the keel as we came to anchor. Fortunately it was low tide, so there’ll be enough water to avoid all but a squish in the mud in the wee hours of the morning when the tide goes low again.
The Monarch
The monarch butterfly has become a marker. With an amazing regularity one appears, first on Negro Island in Nova Scotia photographed taking nectar from a thistle and since then in the middle of the Gulf of Maine, in fog off of Block Island, in Cape Cod Bay and yesterday and today on Delaware Bay. Journey’s sails are taught driving to windward held together with wire rope shrouds and stays, fiberglass and stainless steel, and this bright orange delicate creature matches our pace with flits and glides, as light and intent as a child skipping, but its destination is not down the block, but Mexico.
Why do we do this? Behold, the monarch butterfly.
