Currents, currents, currents! What a difference the current makes. In order to catch the current going in the direction we wanted to sail we had to get up at 3:30 and leave at 4 am. That's because the current going in and out of Delaware Bay changes every 6 hours - alternating directions. So the current going up the bay was scheduled for ~4 am and 4 pm. The scary thing wasn't the lack of sleep but leaving at night with no visibility. Knowing this we created something on our chart plotter called a track so that when we went into the cape may inlet during the day it laid "breadcrumbs" for us to follow exactly on our way out the next morning. That way we knew we would be in deep enough water and not run over anything. It was really freaky. I don't know how men in submarines do it for long periods of time. It is so contra our instincts. What a beautiful site the dawn was that day. And what a payoff we had for the Delaware Bay that fought us yesterday carried us along at 11.5 knots today.
It was a much prettier day - the high winds lower and the sun out. We flew up the Bay and into the River to the canal which we motored through. This was likewise pleasant for we had no commercial traffic to contend with. There are frequently big road-hog barges here but not today. It dumped us out at the top of the Chesapeake and we got all the way to Annapolis. 5 bodies of water/3 states and 15 hours.
One cool thing is that if we didn't go through the canal and went straight on the Delaware River we would have been where Washington crossed it near Trenton and then further would have been Philadelphia.