We planned on staying 1 night in Delaware City. The marina has a weather briefing every evening at 5:15, right after the latest NOAA weather predictions are posted. It is probably one of the better weather briefings we have encountered because they apply local knowledge to the computer generated weather model. Well all that said we ended up staying 1 extra night because of the wind on the Delaware River and Delaware Bay.
We had a nice dinner at Crabby Dick’s restaurant with Humbug and Carol Anne. We met up with them when we arrived in Cape May. We will loosely travel with them to New York City to help celebrated the completion of their Loops. Off Leash went ahead to Cape May the day we arrived in Delaware City because the weather was good.
Cape May is about 60 miles down the waterway and the Bay is pretty large. We started out and the water was really calm and we had an outgoing tide that helped. We passed a couple of container ships that were headed up to Philadelphia. There were a lot of fishing boats headed out toward the Atlantic and they set up some good wakes but they were far enough away that we were not bothered to much.
The day was sunny and stayed that way for the whole trip. The approach to Cape May is thru a canal so you do not need to go out on the Atlantic Ocean to enter thru the Cape May inlet. This canal also has a ferry dock where they shuttle cars from the south shore of the Bay to the north shore.
The canal is about 5 miles long and the local boaters go as fast as they can to reach the other end. We had caught Humbug and Carol Anne at the bottom of the Bay. They had left Delaware City about an 1 1/2 hours before us. It had started to get a little lumpy on the Bay so we picked up the speed for the last 45 minutes.
We stayed at a new marina this year, Utsch Marina. Everyone else decide to stay here so we followed suit. Off Leash was on the docks to greet us when we pulled in. There were quite a few Looper Boats in the marina so Humbug organized a docktails party on the dock between Fruitcakes and Off Leash. Fruitcakes is the trawler we met in Delaware City that is from South Carolina and they have been on the Loop 5 weeks.
Great time at docktails talking with the boats from Canada and a variety of US ports. Everybody was swapping stories and looking forward to moving north to New York City.