You know the saying, that bad things happen in threes? Well, I hope it’s true, because we’re up to three bad things in three days and we’re not looking for any more. Maybe I shouldn’t call them bad things…”lessons” is probably more appropriate, particularly because each of the three bad things incidents happened because we were too lazy or rushed (or oblivious) to do the work that would have helped us to avoid it.

Our streak of bad started on September 20th.

Cape May Harbour, New Jersey to Reedy Island, Delaware (20-Sep-2012)

Lesson #1 – Don’t Do Cape May the Hard Way:

Built during WWII to create a protected route from the inland water way along the Jersey coast into Delaware Bay, the canal today provides modern pleasure craft, ferries and fishing vessels quick and easy access to the Delaware Bay so that they may avoid the many shoals (rather than the U-Boats at the time of construction) off Cape May. If the draft of your vessel is not too deep and 55ft clearance under a few bridges is enough for your mast, you need only motor through the Cape May Canal to Delaware Bay in three easy miles or so.

This is embarrassing, but we didn’t even know about the Cape May Canal! Or remember, in my case – I’ve actually done this before! We just made our way out the inlet, do-tee-do-tee-do, the same way we came in, and went around the cape – the hard way. There are a lot of shoals off Cape May, so going around means taking it pretty wide. Well, we took it wide – there is evidently some deeper water about a quarter mile from the beach, but to be on the safe side, we took it wide – like add a couple of hours to our trip, wide.

There is no excuse for this kind of oversight (so I won’t go on about how our chart was inadequate, or there was a gap in our cruising guides, blah blah blah). We can only file today’s lesson under “Bad Route Planning” and know better for next time. I will remember it more fondly as “Don’t do Cape May the hard way“.

We had a nice tour of the historic town the day before we – oblivious to the beautiful short-cut – rounded the cape for which it is named.

Here are some pictures.

Cape May is a very pretty town. There were so many houses and buildings worthy of photos, we would have gotten nowhere had we taken pictures of them all, so this is a small sampling.

So the day after all these pictures, after rounding the cape, we were finally in Delaware Bay. Not too much to say, other than LOTS of commercial traffic.

Maybe we need to get a wide-angled lens or something. In real life this ship was HUGE, but if I, like you, was looking at it for the first time through this photo, I wouldn’t be that impressed.

Here’s a picture of a tall ship we passed on the bay…

We anchored behind Reedy Island for the night, just a couple of miles south of the entrance to the C & D Canal (Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, our next destination). It was nice and quiet, picturesque if you could mentally erase the nuke plant in the distance, and we had the whole place to ourselves (well, there was another boat almost a mile away).

We had a nice night, recovered from being oblivious to the Cape May Canal, and called it a day.

I’m going to continue with Lesson #2 in a separate post. These things seem to be getting too long…