My only pic from the passage – Ship John Shoal

We left Lewes just after sunrise (7 AM at this time a year, not an unreasonable time) to head up the Delaware Bay and through the C&D (Chesapeake and Delaware) canal. It was a sunny day with light winds from the north so we put up the main and motor sailed. Quite a difference from the run down the coast of New Jersey – no seas to speak of and a nice easy ride.

It’s 50 miles up the bay to the canal and another 19 through the canal. We were undecided as to whether to try to split it up or do both (remember my thing about not anchoring in the dark somewhere new?) so we picked out an anchorage just before the canal as a potential stopping point.

You really want to time the tides of both the bay and the C&D canal as it can mean 2 knots of current in your favor or against you. Power boats don’t care about this but when you have a max speed of 6 knots it makes a difference. By noon we were doing 7 knots consistently so we were making great time. Such great time in fact that we easily passed by the possible anchorage and got into the canal just after 3pm.

The C&D canal is considered to be one of the busiest canals in the world. It shaves 275 miles that would be required to go around Delaware and gets a lot of commercial traffic. We sailed through one of the commercial anchorages where boats wait for pilots (small local boats required for transiting) and it reminded me of New York City Harbor – big boys sitting and waiting to move.

Ironically we saw no major traffic once in the canal. I read somewhere that most of the commercial traffic moves through at night, which made me feel a bit more comfortable. The canal is only 450 feet wide and the thought of sharing it with a container ship was intimidating. Instead all we saw were a few power boats and some sailboats coming back north from the Annapolis boat show.

We exited the canal and ran a bit further down the river, then dropped anchor just before sunset at Fort Landing, near the mouth of the Bohemia River. Nice anchorage for resting after the canal – easy in, easy out. The only odd thing was noting the effects of the current vs the winds. Even with 10 knot winds, the current at times had us spun so that the winds were hitting us beam side or even from the stern. Nothing to be concerned about as we were resting comfortably, but odd to watch from the water’s edge.

The next day we upped anchor and continued sailing down the river. I knew there were some high winds and storms coming, so we aimed for Worton Creek. Much too shallow to get inside (the Chesapeake was really made for 4 foot or shallower draft boats) but plenty of room to anchor outside with protection from both winds and seas.

It was slow going at first. With the jib out, we were doing a steady 0.6 knots (a toddler could walk faster). Of course it didn’t help that we had a hair of current against us. But I knew Trip was jonesing to sail and we only had to make 17 miles in 6 hours. After an hour we finally picked up some wind and had a lovely ride down the river. My favorite kind of day – sun and clouds out, winds at 10 knots, us cruising along at 4 knots, no seas. There were dark skies in the distance but that all held off. We anchored comfortably and settled in for the night. I made one of Trip’s favorite meals, Pesto Tortellini with Kielbasa.