What a day. We began at six in the morning today and were out of the Delaware City Marina and on our way across Delaware Bay toward Cape May, New Jersey. We rolled out on the Bay and were so happy it was almost glass. So we said lets go and turned up the rpms enough to do a steady fifteen knots on the glassy surface of a big bay at dawn. The next thing we began to see some ripples on the water but that’s alright and finally it reached the forcasted level for the day which was one foot waves and ten knots of wind. Well it didn’t quit there which I knew it was not going to and finally we were running in about two feet of more of waves and the wind was at least 15. That was not bad enough to add to the mix we had an adverse tidal current which was trying to take us out of the bay and into the ocean as we were trying to steer a course for the Cape May Canal. We reached the canal about ten something in the morning and entered there and continued up the Intracoastal Waterway along the east coast of New Jersey headed north. After running in the slop we had this was heaven on earth and we kept going north past all of the coastal towns until we reached Atlantic City, NJ and decided that about five we should call it a day, well they were full up because this is a part of the Memorial Day Weekend. They suggested we go further up the coast and maybe we could find a place there. So we ended up in Beach Haven, NJ at the marina there. It was pretty close to seven in the evening when we got fuel and received our dock assignment. We had to go into the slip backward with the wind blowing straight at us on the bow. We are amongst all the sport fishing boats which pass us and leave us bouncing in there wakes all day and think we are just a little ant in their way.
We saw some very diverse land area today. There were the typical marshes that we have seen before but these seemed to have had a butch haircut so that looked almost like a lawn. We saw a great number of birds which were standing on the edge of the waterway at low tide and we could have reached out with a net and caught them. We saw some dolphins today and realized it had been a long time since we had seen them. The we would go through cities and the horizon and the type of housing changed again from sprawling huge houses to very narrow and stuck close together like cages and this is both old and new housing. Some were brand new and others were falling down right next door. From the 1920’s to now the houses were so very different more the row house type but not in the San Francisco way you think of row houses. The houses were built on stilts out over the edge of the waterway and some had boat garages in them. We also crossed some of the big inlets and bays of New Jersey. All in all it was a very interesting day.
The bad news is our sponges were full of water again this evening and our patch is now dry and seems to be holding okay. This means we will have to think of more possibilities that could be leaking. We just have no idea where this can be coming from but it happens whether we are running in perfect stuff or in the sloppy stuff
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