FL to CT Day 37
Cape May, NJ to Cape May, NJ
We were optimistic this morning and pulled anchor at 0730 and headed out the Cape May Inlet... a 40 foot sailboat was about 1/2 ahead of us. We had a large 3 to 4 foot swell coming in the inlet... I watched the sailboat as they approached the end of the inlet and moved out into the Atlantic. The sailboat was really thrashing around and then it started disappearing from sight... I could only see about half the mast... the hull disappeared entirely as it dipped in the waves... it was ROUGH... VERY ROUGH SEAS! The sailboat turned around headed back in the inlet... that was enough signal for us to do the same thing... we turned around and headed back to the anchorage... looks like we are stuck in Cape May until the Atlantic settles down some....
We dropped the hook back in the same anchorage area we had left earlier at approximately 0800... slightly different position at N38°57.014', W074°53.080'. We traveled today for 30 minutes covering 1.5 nautical miles averaging 3 knots.
Going to investigate doing the NJICW from Cape May to Atlantic City... see if it is doable for us with our draft... we did it once back in 2008 but there have been a lot of shoaling reports since then.