39:22.756 N
075:21.307 W
25/05/10
Having spent an extremely quiet night we sipped of into
the windless gloom at 08:30.
We traversed the 14 mile
Chesapeake and
Delaware
Canal which was uneventful. We saw very little traffic having been
primed to see a lot of big shipping. The one railway draw bridge which was meant to
be too low for us seemed to be stuck in a raised position. Maybe the rail line has been
abandoned. The original canal was
built over a 7 year period commencing in 1822 and was 10 feet deep and 66 feet
wide, in 1919 it was enlarged to 12 feet x 90 feet and is currently 35 feet
deep x 400 feet wide. Ho hum.
By midday day
it cleared and even the sun put in an appearance in time to highlight the industrial waste of a
New Jersey power
station.
As soon as we hit the Delaware
River we were greeted with a 2-3 knot current going in our direction, so
as I type this we are motoring at 9.9 knots over the ground.
We woke up in
Maryland, had lunch in
Delaware and are moored up in
New Jersey, 3 ½ miles up
the Cohansey
River, in very flat country as it was a convenient distance to
travel. I rang ahead to be sure we
could get up the river as we don’t have a detailed chart and was assured that
there was 25’ all the way up, “Just stay in the middle and you’ll be fine.” We arrived at low water on a
making tide, and had a very hard time finding the channel in as there was only
one marker, and it turns out you have to nearly scrape it to get in, once in, we
thought we had plenty of water
until the second bend when we ran aground gently in the mud, we got off
and it took several other goes to find the unmarked channel. Eventually we made it to the marina. We were looking forward to their
restaurant only to discover it is only open weekends in May. The nearest Restaurant is over 10 miles
away, so we are defrosting some chicken.
In Hampton we
saw Blue Martin Bird Houses and were told that always had to be 12 room
units. It seems the same is true
here but in New Jersey the birds
have much more modern condos. There
is also a UFO parked in the yard.
Tomorrow we’ll leave early as we don’t want to go down
river on a falling tide.