YIKES….(part 2)

So where was I….oh yeah, coming out of New York harbor on a glorious day with perfect weather forecasted for the next two days of travel.

The upcoming leg of the journey was the passage down the New Jersey shore to Cape May. This section is roughly 110 miles and you can do it all at once or break it into two parts. If you choose to go straight through, you’ll have to do an overnight (at least on a sailboat that does about 5 – 6 knots). If you want to know what a knot is in mph, multiply the knots by 1.15 to get MPH…. I’ll wait while you get out your calculator (cue Jeopardy music …). Got it? Still pretty slow, huh? Anyways, it’s roughly 21+ hours.

We had decided early on that if the weather was right, we’d make this my first overnight passage. With 3 of us on board, we decided to follow a 3-hour watch schedule so each of us would have 6 hours to sleep during the passage.

We reviewed the upcoming 36-hour weather and tide window and it started to become really apparent that not only could we make it to Cape May but we could also go through the Cape May canal and head up the Delaware Bay to the preferred anchorage at Cohansey River. It was going to be a motorfest the entire way but you can’t let a good window pass you by, especially in those two places.

So off we went!! We immediately started the watches and those not at the helm relaxed until it was their watch. We ran about a mile or two off the coast the entire way. There wasn’t much traffic except for the occasional big ship and a couple of sailboats off our port side. I wish I had some tales of pirates or 50′ waves but it was not to be (yay!!). The seas had about 4′ rollers at 13 seconds apart with some chop so it was pretty comfortable and Infinity handled it very well.

As luck would have it, I ended up with the 1:30am – 4:30am watch but I was cool with it. I took the helm just as we were approaching Atlantic City and the lights lit up the whole sky!!

The picture of Atlantic City doesn’t do it justice and the closer we got, the brighter the lights got. I stood in the cockpit of Infinity (the autopilot was on) and just stared up at all the stars in the sky (the clouds had cleared up considerably) in amazement. From what I’ve been told though is that those were nothing compared to what I’ll see in the Exumas where they is no light pollution. I can’t wait!!

Dawn was starting to show on the eastern horizon as I finished my watch so I laid down to catch an hour or so of sleep. I wanted to be awake as we approached Cape May as this is another highlight of the trip that I wanted to see. As we approached, fishing boats were heading out for a days work so we had to keep an eye on them as we motored in thru the breakwaters.

Usually, this is a great place to stop after an overnight passage but we wanted to take advantage of the weather so we just kept on going through the canal and out the other side into the Delaware Bay. The bay was flat water with no wind so we continued on our way.

The Delaware Bay is usually the least favorite portion of people heading through it for various reasons, mostly because it’s very shallow and any kind of wind will usually raise a chop that makes you regret the next 8 hours to get through it…if you’re lucky. We came out of the canal straight into a current against us so we knew it was going to be a slog just to get to the Cohansey River. Oh, the flies decided they wanted to fight another war as we motored along so we were back on fly-killing duty…😖.

Well, to make a long story mercifully short, we spent the next 8 or so glorious hours motoring under a hot sun, killing flies, and eating Twizzlers (thanks Gisele) until we reached the Cohansey River, dropped the anchor (another great story), pulled out a bottle of Manhattans (that a really good friend of mine made for me), and celebrated my first overnight passage!!

Up next….the C&D canal and into the Chesapeake Bay!!

❤️❤️❤️