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.