Delaware and New Jersey

We are now making great headway in a northerly direction.  We started out from Baltimore and as we left the harbor I took this picture as a lasting memory of the city.  It is the famous Domino Sugar sign that is larger than life and right at the plant in the harbor.  When we arrived at the harbor they were unloading the big ships with the sugar to the plant.

We started our trip by traveling the Chesapeake and Delaware canal which connects the Chesapeake Bay with the Delaware Bay.  It was an interesting canal.  This is two of the bridges that are very close to each other over the canal.

We are now traveling again with some of the big ships, not just the smaller boats.  We had a nice trip on Delaware Bay which we were very grateful that the seas were kind to us.

It always is very interesting to see how much cargo is shipped by boat.  At one point we could see over half a dozen of these large ships moving goods across the waters.


This is one of the interesting lighthouses in the middle section of the Delaware Bay.  

We traveled on toward Cape May, New Jersey and as the weather was not predicted to be good, we choose to take the "inside route" up the coast.  The "outside route" would have been in the Atlantic Ocean.  Even though we new that the water depths would be a challenge for us, the inside route proved to be a good choice mainly because there were several days of high winds, rain, and crappy weather.


We did well, but not to say that we did not touch the bottom of the New Jersey inland waterway.  We did not require assistance, but did get hung up a couple of times.  Those times that we did get hung up by scraping the bottom the able captain Erwin and the wind plus the rising tide allowed us to make it.  We anchored in a town called Ventnor City, followed by Albany Ave, and then Atlantic City.  I never knew that all of those properties you could purchase on a monopoly board were actually in New Jersey!  Here is Ventnor City:

We did not take a lot of pictures as it was yucky and rainy.  This picture is worth a thousand words though. This is a bad day.  Maybe this boater was distracted by his cell phone?  You would have been traveling at a high rate of speed to get it that far up in the grass.  I am sure the tow boat captain had a laugh at dinner that night.

We were looking forward to walking the board walk at Atlantic City, but the basin we were going to anchor in was almost entirely blocked by dredging equipment.  It did not look friendly at all and we did not want to pay the high price of a marina which can be over $2 per foot per day.  So here are a couple of pictures of Atlantic City as we went by.

So we did finally finish the inside route as far as we could, here is a picture of one of the bridges as we finished that section.

We anchored at Metedeconk River close to the Manasquan Inlet and left on the outside, yes the wide open Atlantic Ocean.  We had a sunny, but cool day with 5 ft seas, but they were just big rolling waves.  It was not as pleasant as some of our passages, but it was not as bad as some of the rough ones.  We are now at anchor in Sandy Hook, New Jersey.  As soon as we have a sunny bright morning or afternoon we will go to Liberty State Park and anchor to take pictures of the Statue of Liberty.  This will be a highlight of our trip.  Then we will begin passage up the Hudson River.  Stay tuned..........