NJICW

        A lot of cruiser forums do their best to dissuade people from traveling inside NJ.  It’s true your boat can’t be too tall and it can’t be too deep and you do have to pay attention as the markers for the channel may not agree with your chart.  It twists and turns, and you can’t (or shouldn’t) go very fast.  Here the tide is only four or five feet, but it matters, especially if it’s windy, as the wind coming from the right direction might blow the water two feet lower.  Many cruisers find it too nerve-wracking.  It’s the kind of excitement we prefer, though, and we’d rather spend six hours paying close attention to our surroundings than six hours pounding and rolling through four foot waves and six second swells.  

We made our way from Tom’s River down to Atlantic City and decided to keep going rather than anchor in Brigantine.  It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the first bascule bridge we came to didn’t look operational and wasn’t answering our hails for an opening.  As we sat deliberating what to do, the barge that was directly in the channel under the bridge moved off to the side.  Whether to get out of our way or because they were done for the day, we don’t know, but emboldened by their move and the fact that the tide was pretty low, we decided to see if we could get under it.  The clearance was 25 feet.  We’re about 23 feet tall.  It looked very close, but we did it, to the applause of fisherman watching from the other side.  

That was the only bridge issue we had.  The others either had plenty of clearance or immediately answered our hail and opened for us.  That night we anchored in Ventnor City, a great little basin in which we were the only transient boat.  

We were advised to take the next leg to Cape May at mid-tide rising, and as luck would have it, that was the tide waiting for us the next morning.  We had a very nice cruise to Sunset Lake.  Sunset Lake is in the Wildwood/Wildwood Crest suburbs of Cape May, and we arrived to find it all but closed down for the season.  Block after block of hotels, shops, restaurants, and amusements were all shuttered and the beach was virtually empty save for a group of men kite-riding back and forth.  (Think kite-surfing, only the kite pulls a three-wheeled vehicle on land instead.)  We spent two and a half days anchored there as a storm blew through and we went ashore every day.  We walked the beach.  We walked the town. We found an open restaurant for dinner.  We found the grocery store.  Often we were the only people on the sidewalk or the road.  I can’t imagine what it must be like in the summer with all those hotels booked.  

Friday afternoon we raised anchor and went the last four miles down to Cape May, to anchor in front of the Coast Guard base alone with about twenty other boats who were all preparing to go up Delaware Bay on Saturday.  The USCG’s rallying cries as recruits and cadets marched brought back a lot of memories of the USCG Academy for Dan.  We heard them well into the evening and they were up and at it well before dawn the next morning.