Post #11: The Delaware Bay

Friday, September 25, 2020

Today was a day of timing current, tides, and navigating the Delaware Bay. We left Utsch’s Marina at 8:45 AM to catch the last of the ebb tide from Cape May Harbor. The ebb tide gives us extra current (hence speed) to more quickly leave the harbor. 

We also factored in the currents in the Delaware Bay, as they run about 2 knots. That might not sound like much, but when Onward is sailing at 5-7 knots, those extra 2 knots make a BIG difference. Today’s 40 miles could take 5 hours or 8 hours! So we timed the passage to have “fair” currents rather than “foul” currents.

The Delaware is way wider at the mouth than we ever realized - as we couldn’t see land on either side of us for quite some time after we entered it. We stayed slightly outside of the shipping channel, as there was a lot of LARGE traffic plying goods up to Philly.

This is the view of the chart plotter at the helm station.  Relevant info:

• The POS is Onward, sailing up the Bay
• The gray arrows are other ships, and the small line heading up the middle and to the left is the commercial shipping channel.
• The depths are shown in feet, and as you can see, many areas are rather shallow.
• At the top of the screen, you can see our course over ground (COG) as 326 (which is Northwest) and our speed over ground (SOG) of 6.3 knots. (This was before the currents kicked in at our favor about 10:15 AM.)

So the navigable part of a very large body of water is rather small really.

We thought long and hard about going another 30 miles, but we might have arrived after dark. For harbors we’ve never entered previously, we prefer to arrive during daylight. So we stopped at Cohansey at about 3:15 PM. Great dinner, glass of wine, early to bed:-)

(The 2 other boats at the anchorage - one from Boston - of course we talked about “home”.....)