Four days. Four states.

If there were a title for Leg 2 of our migration, it might be “Weather’s good. Let’s just keep going.” 

We must have paid sufficient dues to the weather gods because in the days to follow we were blessed with clear skies, sunshine, calm seas and temperatures trending in the right direction.  Having made the decision to head inshore to New Jersey, leg 2 of our journey would bring us south along the Jersey Shore to Cape May.  With light winds on our nose, we spent the day motor sailing about 2-3 miles from shore, close enough for a nice tour of the various beach communities along our route.  The cockpit on Andante can be fully-enclosed in canvas to protect us from the wind and weather which means that under bright sunshine we also stay toasty warm in our own mobile greenhouse.

Having had a good night’s sleep and with continued good weather in the forecast, we pushed south through the night guided by a near-full moon off our stern and by the very bright lights of Atlantic City off our bow.  I passed the time on my night watch more comfortably this time, listening to a podcast while keeping an eye on the radar and AIS for traffic and other hazards.  Sometime in the middle of my watch, I was surprised to discover a large bird peering at me over the gunwales of our dinghy hoisted in its davits on Andante’s stern.  I’m not sure how long he had been resting there before I noticed him, but we would later discover that it was long enough to make a rather large mess!

We reached the southern-most tip of the Jersey Shore at Cape May just before dawn and, with light southeast winds forecast for the next few days, we pointed our bow north up the Delaware Bay. We were headed for the canal that provides passage to the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay.  This route is extremely busy with very large commercial traffic delivering vehicles, goods and fuel to inland ports like Philadelphia and Baltimore.  It took us all day to transit Delaware Bay and the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal.  At twilight we entered the Chesapeake Bay and, without finding an anchorage to our liking and with the wind and weather holding, we made the decision to continue pushing south. 

I started my night watch appreciating the navigational advantage gained through modern radar, charts, AIS and radio.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to navigate these waters by paper chart, sight and stars alone. It is extremely difficult to determine distances over water at night and it is almost impossible to “see” your way through a meandering channel marked by lighted red and green blinking channel markers.  I thanked all the technology at my disposal as a car carrier passed safely to port, only visible as a massive sky-scraper-sized absence of light and deep steady rumbling of engines.  This included the AIS transponders that allow us to “see” each other in the dark, the radio that allowed us to communicate our intentions, the charts and radar that assured me that Andante was safely outside the channel and the radar that confirmed my larger friend was safely past. 

The wind and currents gave us a bit of a rolling ride as we passed under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge north of Annapolis, MD around midnight, but things calmed down nicely again as the bay widened to the south and the winds dropped.  We made steady progress down the length of the bay, stopping near dawn for fuel in the Patuxent River before continuing south.  At this point, our goal was to reach Norfolk, VA where we would transition to daytime travel only as we entered the Intracoastal Waterway.  Since Norfolk would mark the end of night watches it was perhaps fitting that we arrived around 1 am.  Dave spent the night with Andante hove-to in a quiet corner of Hampton Roads while we waited for the sun to rise.  Andante enjoyed the peaceful respite from transiting and was joined by a pod of playful dolphins who visited her repeatedly throughout the night.