After nearly a week docked in Hampton, VA, and with the thrill of Busch Garden’s many rides still tingling our spines, we cast off the lines on Sunday. Our destination was a short hop away, across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to Fisherman’s Island. I felt a combination of excitement and trepidation – we were truly underway again, no comfort and safety of docklines and no protected ICW; we had to use our sailing wit once again to get us through. Perhaps, too, it was the small craft advisory being issued and the 170 mile haul we had offshore to get to the next reasonable anchorage at the mouth of the Delaware Bay. I could have easily accepted another night at the docks, but we had miles to cover and Mattapoisett, MA still seemed a long distance away. Still, it was pleasant to have some wind to work with, and we brushed off our sailing skills and made Thalia prove to us that she was more then just a little 50 hp powerboat. At Fisherman’s Island, we were within earshot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, crossing between the tip of Maryland – Cape Charles – and the outskirts of Norfolk at Cape Henry. This 15 mile long bridge is an impressive engineering creation. Owing to the shallow depths of the Chesapeake Bay, they were able to build the bridge low to the water and then drop the roadway into a tunnel under the bay in two locations to accommodate the ship channels. This is the biggest of three such bridge/tunnels in the Norfolk area. I guess the engineers felt like they had a good thing going so that made a couple copies!
Our anchorage at Fisherman’s Island was not the most scenic, but it put us in a good striking position to navigate offshore up to the mouth of the Delaware Bay. There were no safe harbors for a deep draft boat such as ours along this coast that they call Delmarva, named after the state boundaries that quickly change from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. We would attack this 150 mile leg by sailing overnight. Our departure from Fisherman’s Island at first light went very well. While the small craft advisory remained, it was blowing out of the favorable easterly direction. We needed all the help we could get, as neither Karen nor I were looking forward to a night of 3 hour on and off watches. But, we got our excitement early on, as we tried navigating inside a spot called Nautilus Shoal.
This inside route looked like it had enough water, with the shallowest spot at about 14′ and it would get us heading north sooner. Any kind of southerly heading on the compass made me edgy considering that we had still had a ways to go to get back home! Ahh, did I ever pay for this impatience! I started to become uncomfortable when we rounded the southern end of Fisherman’s Island and saw the ocean swells rising up in steepness in the shallow water and breaking into lines of white water while still hundreds of feet from the beach. Growing up in Southern California, I would have deemed this, as I slapped on swim fins, an excellent day for bodysurfing. But viewed from a 7 foot deep, 25,000 lb sailboat with my wife and children aboard, the scene brought on sweaty palms and acute attention to the depthsounder! I knew in my mind that these waters weren’t recently surveyed. It could have been 30 years or more, and the native sandy bottom in these areas was prone to rapid change. Plus, the less that an area gets sailed, the less NOAA gets told about sudden changes to the depths. This route easily fell into ‘the road less traveled’ as most boats either used the main shipping channels out the Chesapeake to our south or went up the Chesapeake Bay and down the Delaware and avoided the Delmarva coast completely. As we moved out of the ‘white’ area on the chart and entered the shallower ‘blue’ area, the depthsounder started to read in the teens and suddenly, immediately ahead of us Zack spotted a streak of brown water. If you’ve been in the surf at a sandy beach, you know that brown means shallow, as the waves kick up sand from the bottom. It was time for a ‘crash tack’ as they say in the racing world – we were out of there and on a reverse heading faster then Harry Potter could say ‘Stupify!’ It was on to plan B and the longer way around the outside of Nautilus Shoal. To my chagrin, we still had a hard time shaking the shallows. I followed the ‘white’ on the chart, which is supposed to be at least 20′ deep, but kept getting low readings on the depthsounder. This was definitely an area that needed resurveying!
With a few hours of delay, we were gradually back on our northerly course and the winds of the residual small craft advisory had died to the point where we were left to motorsail. Geez, I had thought we had left our days of motoring back in the ICW!
By nightfall, the sea state had become glassy, apart from a random undulating 1′ disorganized pattern of waves that let us know that we were still in the ocean and not on a lake. In all, it was a very tame overnight, with all the right characteristics for an easy sleep during your off watch – no big seas, no clanging deck hardware as the sails were worked, and no lighting! By early morning, we were getting a knot or so of favorable current, which brought us around Cape Henlopen and into Breakwater Harbor at the city of Lewes, DE. This is the southern most cape at the mouth of the Delaware Bay and to our bemusement, it was labeled as a ‘Harbor of Refuge’. Our last ‘Harbor of Refuge’ had been at Port Judith, RI, were we suffered from a broken engine water pump. Fortunately, this time we were not in dire need of refuge, but still, this harbor lived up to its named with three distinct massive stone breakwaters protecting it from the ocean swell and northerly winds. We would sleep well here!
Despite being a Harbor of Refuge, there was no reasonable place to land the dinghy – they definitely thought those in need of refuge would not bother to go ashore! The town had a very substantial public pier, but the local police boat was the only craft that had the permission to use it. In their haste to post signs shooing away any private craft, I think they failed to realize how little space a couple 10′ dinghies would take and what business or pleasure the passengers would bring to the town. Instead, we made the longest trip ever to shore, driving the dinghy 2.5 miles down the coast, through the Roosevelt Inlet, and 2 miles back up a canal paralleling the coast to the downtown dock of Lewes. It was less then a mile by foot from the public pier, but took us nearly an hour in the dinghy!
Oh well, we had good reason to look beyond these inconveniences; we had come to Lewes to rendezvous with our good friends from Bedford, the Heaps family. Each summer, they come to the Delaware shore for a week’s vacation, and they were kind enough to let us barge in on their beach house, eat their food, frolic at their private beach, run their hot water heater empty while basking in their real showers, and revel in the joys of catching up with friends not seen in over a year! It was great to get caught up on all of the happenings back home and to have a chance to recall together the exciting highlights of our trip.
It was a long, quiet ride back in the dinghy that night, as our day with the Heaps made us recall the void of friendship we had suffered on this trip and the longing for our return home. We had made good friends with Asseance, Arctic Tern, and others in the Caribbean, and had been blessed by great visits from family and friends, but the times in between have been tough, especially for the kids. It made perfect sense now why open-ended cruisers fly home regularly, if they have the means, to see family and friends – it can be lonely in paradise at times!
After leaving the Heaps, we sailed the next morning a short distance across the mouth of the Delaware to Cape May. We needed to re-fuel and we took the opportunity to stroll into this quaint seaside town and see the sights; we had been rushed in the fall to get up to Philadelphia to meet my Dad. This time, we could take it all in – the beachside pizza (way to greasy!), the ice cream shops (can’t miss them – one every other storefront!), and the Victorian architecture (just like in the Bay Area).
After an abbreviated night’s sleep, we weighed anchor at 3am with the hope that this would get us in before nightfall in New York Harbor, 130 miles to the north. What a surprise we had as Karen and I huddled in the cockpit trying to find the harbor buoys on the radar and we were overtaken by fishing boat after fishing boat, racing out through the jetty. Was there some kind of insane fishing derby going on?! From small runabouts to big sport fishing boats, they were all rushing out to sea, but I suppose they thought us crazy too, heading out in the pitch black of night going a measly 6 knots and not even bothering to troll some lines!
Our jaunt up the New Jersey coast, though, went extremely well. There was no wind, as we have come to find out is the case nearly every day in these dog days of summer, but the motor served us well and we passed the hours by reading the latest Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, together. We had started it a couple days previous, and, as if we had planned it this way, we finished the book just as we nosed Thalia’s bow into the New York Harbor entrance! It was just as well, because the sky started to darken to the west and the NOAA weather stations were issuing a special weather statement about thunderstorms moving east across the New Jersey interior, bringing 60 mph winds, large hail and lighting. Yikes! It was time to run for cover! We found a designated anchorage spot right in the lee of Coney Island and by 9:30pm, all aboard Thalia were quiet in their bunks; we had successively made it into NY harbor and our long coastal hops were now a thing of the past.
To catch a favorable current up the Hudson River, we left early the next morning, motoring under the impressive Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Here was a bridge that had a vertical clearance of 198 feet for a width of 2000 feet; we’d have no probably navigating under that! Yet, surprisingly, we had to work our way around a supertanker anchored just below the main span. This ship, the Centennial Jewel, had a gaggle of barges tended by their partnering tugboats, and more tug/barge combinations waiting at anchor above the bridge. The best guess I could make was that they were offloading the fuel into these barges to transport further up the Hudson. Regardless, we were surprised at the lack of security around the supertanker, particularly in our post 9/11 world and especially in New York. Why was there no patrol boat anywhere in sight?
We snaked our way through the awaiting, anchored barges, did a quick flyby the Statue of Liberty, and had a horn blasted at us from astern as the large and fast moving Staten Island Ferry overtook us on its way to the Battery. Heck, everything in this town moves fast, way too fast! We were monitoring VHF channel 13, the ‘bridge-to-bridge’ frequency that all of the commercial captains use, as well as channel 12, ‘New York vessel control’, and it was like listening to a bunch of air traffic controllers! There was someone talking on the frequency nearly all of the time, and often in short-handed slang that only a seasoned NY freighter or tug captain would understand! I took some preventative medicine, in the form of two Advils, and we pushed on for the 6 miles up the Hudson to our destination at the city-run 79th Street Boat Basin. We had very much enjoyable our NY visit last Fall and the whole family was ready for more of the same, so we will settled in for another round of NY excitement. This will likely be our last major tourist stop before we haul out in 10 days. Stay tuned, and thanks for ‘listening’!