Rough Day

6/22/07 – Kenny and I ate a breakfast of oatmeal this morning and weighed anchor at about 8:00am to get on the ocean. We went out the Cape May inlet and had a 20 knot wind that was from the northeast, exactly the direction that we wanted to go. We tacked several times but made five hard-fought miles toward our destination in four hours. We finally decided that enough was enough and turned around back towards Cape May. We flew there with the wind at our backs and took the New Jersey Intracoastal Waterway north. My charts say, “Vessels that draw more than five feet and have a bridge clearance of more than 34 feet can not pass through this section. I draw four feet (no problem) but my bridge clearance is about 32 feet, something to worry about at high tide, which it was. The reason I decided to avoid this section of the ICW in the first place was the long, winding path and numerous bridges that I either barely fit under or had to have opened for me. I had about six inches of clearance from the top of my mast (my flexible antenna hit but that’s why it’s flexible) going under the first bridge and the tide was still rising with two other bridges to go. I slipped under the second bridge with about four inches to spare. The third bridge was the closest with what we estimated to be about two inches…we really hoped that no wakes would come while we were passing through. We tried to motor into a creek to anchor but the entrance ha shoaled since my chart was published so we ran aground. We backed out and found another place to drop the hook and had a great pasta dinner while we watched what both of us agreed was one of the best sunsets either of us had ever seen.