Day 56 - August 25th 2011 - Delaware and Chesapeake Canal - 39 32.777N:75 42.469W
Should not have woken up today, we knew that we had to get inland to ride out Irene, so decided to depart as soon as possible. Doug started pulling up the anchor and I could see that he was having a lot of trouble, eventually he saw that we had hooked a cable, got it off with the boat hook and I started to motor forward, we were not going anywhere, we were on the bottom. Doug took the wheel and put us into reverse only to catch our painter, note, even if your painter is floating when you reverse with power it will be sucked under. Once again thank goodness we put on the rope cutter as it cut us free. Doug was not happy that the rope had actually come off so we motored over to a dock and poked around with the boat hook and pulled off the exact amount of painter that was missing so we were happy and set off. Due to our bad start we decided not to try the canal and motored out of the bay and round Cape May. The canal is a short cut but has a bridge of 55ft, we thought going through at low tide would be fine but decided not today. Once out into the channel the chop of waves and current were huge, it took a least an hour to get out to a more comfortable sea. Another three hours to get round the end of the shallow cape. Weather OK but wind on our nose and we could see storms ahead. Our destination today was going to be Cohansey River, we turned into the river about 3pm but as the sea was quite calm at this time and we had missed at least three storms, we changed our mind and decided to carry on to the canal hoping to arrive about 17.00. As we turned away from the river we were hit by a monster downpour, glad we were not trying to negotiate that windy river. Carrying on up the Delaware Bay we saw a few other storms pass us by, another huge downpour, thunder and lightning all around us and as quickly as it came it went, fortunately there was no wind so the waves were minimal, then clear again. Listening to the radio we could hear that the New Jersey coast was being evacuated as was the NJ Delaware bay area another good reason we did not go into Cohansey. Approaching the canal we noticed a sailboat heading into the canal with both sails up. I thought silly guy as I looked up and saw a huge black sky on top of us. Yes, this was the storm of the day. I could not help thinking that canals are not good for us remembering that awful ride into the Cape Cod canal. Fortunately we still had no wind but the downpour was so strong and the radar so littered with storm pattern it was hard to see if we were going to run up the back of the boat in front that was still motor sailing with his sails up. Poking our heads out we could see that was far enough ahead so we were fine. Then out popped the sun to a beautiful sunset and we arrived at Summitt North Marina just as it got dark. This marina is right in the middle of the canal and is known as a hurricane hole, I was really glad to be here, we were shown to our slip and this will be our home for four nights. I slept really well that night.