Our trip from Barnegat, New Jersey to Annapolis was great. We left Barnegat early on Monday morning and headed south within sight of the Jersey shore. That is, when it wasn’t too foggy to see anything. We actually had to use our automatic fog horn in New Jersey! We had hoped our family could watch us go by from the beach next to their house but it was too foggy for that. We motored part of the way and sailed part of the way down the coast. We got around Cape May and into the Delaware Bay right as the sun was setting. We used our three hours on and three hours off watch schedule the whole way and this time we slept whenever we were not on watch.

The Delaware Bay was relatively calm. We stayed close to the lit channel so it wasn’t too hard to negotiate in the dark. A large ship was coming up behind me at one point and I knew I was out of the channel so I wasn’t worried. I was very careful to find every navigational aid on the chart plotter so I always knew where we were. That was why I was so shocked to see an unlit mark just a few feet from the side of our boat as we went by. As it turned out the zoom level on the chart plotter wasn’t showing all the marks. I quickly changed that, we don’t need to hit anything out there!

We went through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in the dark too. The sun was just coming up as we were almost through it. The Chesapeake Bay gave us a wonderful welcome though. The wind was blowing strong enough and in the right direction for us to be able to sail. We sailed from the end of the C&D Canal until we got under the Bay Bridge. We were sailing so well that I am sure we were going faster by sail than we would have if we had motored down the bay. It was a great day! We probably would have been able to sail the whole way but for some reason we took the sails down after we went under the bridge.

It was great to be in the Chesapeake again. The best view of all though was Thomas Point Lighthouse, shown in the picture above. This is where we turn off the bay and into the South River, the river that our marina is off of. We got into the marina about 5:30pm, about 36 hours straight from New Jersey. It would have taken us four or five days if we had done it “the slow way”.

We’ve been home two days now. The first night we managed to buy a used car. Unfortunately we got a flat tire the next day, and now our check engine light is on. We bought it from a dealer so we could avoid these issues but apparently they happen anyhow. We are going back to the dealer for the third time tomorrow morning.

We don’t have any major issues to fix on the boat but we managed to make a list of one hundred and two items anyhow. We won’t get them all done. We are going to try and spend a lot of time with family while we are home. We hope to only be home through the end of September but we’ll have to see how it really goes. The blog may not be as frequent while we are home, but I’ll try to update it occasionally.