Adventures of Boreas: Day 339 – Delaware City to Canyon Club Marina, Cape May, NJ

The alarm rang at 4:45am today. The goal was to be off the dock just after 5:00am to take full advantage of the tide/current in Delaware Bay. The current in Delaware Bay can run over three knots, so we definitely want to go with the current as opposed to against it. The winds were in the 5-10 knot range for most of our trip which made for very few waves. We indeed got an excellent push from the current and saw a few hours of speed readings 3+ knots faster than our usual speed. An hour or so before we reached the Cape May Canal we began to have current against us; fortunately we were into the canal and tied up at our slip before it was a problem.

When we ran hard (to clean out the carbon build-up) near the end of our trip today we noticed what seemed like a bit of vibration in one engine. With some testing we determined it was the starboard engine and that it wasn’t necessarily a vibration, but that the engine “sounded” different than normal. When Fred did his engine checks in the afternoon he found that the fuel filters are more plugged than he would like so we may have gotten a bit of algae in the fuel we got in Delaware City (Fred had changed the filters while we were in Delaware City, so they should not have been plugged up that quickly). It is possible that the “sound” that seems off to us may be a clogged injector. Fred will change filters tomorrow and we’ll do a bit of testing to see if we can figure out if that solved our issue. We may need to have a mechanic visit the boat and check the injectors.

When we arrived at Canyon Club Marina, we discovered that John and Mary from Passport and John and Marry from Mary Francis IV were already here and of course this is the home marina for Rich and Carol from Salt ‘n Sand. It was great to see everyone. Rick and Carol made dinner reservations for us at one of their favorite restaurants in Cape May and they provided transportation to get there. We had a wonderful dinner with our Looper friends followed by a trip to the boardwalk in Wildwood. The boardwalk there is over two miles long and a great place to walk and people watch.

Fred is now in serious “weather watch” mode as we try to plan our trip up the New Jersey coast. We won’t be leaving tomorrow, but any good day after that is fair game.

Miles: 52.9 Bridges: 3 Locks: 0

this was the first of many commercial vessels we saw today (some of them
just on our AIS) who were headed up Delaware Bay, most going into
the C&D Canal