Nancy's View

Hello everyone.
Darrell has been donig most of this posting and has become very frustrated with trying to do pictures. I am just giving up on that and if I have a picture I wish to send, I will do it via e-mail as that seems to work. This has been an interesting two weeks and yet it has also seemed as if we are just moving along to get somewhere. We have had to pace our trip so far to account for weather, currents to get through Manhattan, timing to get to the few places along the New Jersey shore where one can go in at night with a sail boat, and with currents to get up the Delaware Bay andthrough the Chesapeake/Delaware canal. We have managed all of that especially yesterday when by leaving at 8 a.m. we were able to ride with the current all of the way from Cape May into the Chesapeake. We even had a beautiful day for most of it, abel to sail for a while and then motor sail often doing over 8 knots over land--the dark storm clouds that gthered in the afternoon seemed to pass around us until we came into the Chesapeake and headed for our anchorage and then it poured rain all the time that I was out setting the anchor. This took a while as we usually really pull back on the anchor in reverse to make sure that our boat will hold even in a good blow and each time we held until Darrell revved it up and then we would let go. We finnally put out a different anchor and decided that weather was quite calm and it would be ok. We were also surprised that the charts say area here was 6-7 feet deep at low tide and our depth was reading about 4.5. We draw about 4 feet. As we talked to some folks today who have been at this for a while, they let us know that it really is deeper and we should adjust our depth sounder AND that with looser soil on top of harder soil, one may need to let the anchor sit for a while (have a cocktail) giving the anchor time to settle through the softer stuff and then pull back to get her set. This is different from our expereince so it was good to get this advice. It is beautiful today and after yesterdays 12 hour travel in sun, rain, and rain it feels good to just hang out and relax.