July 5 - Cape May, NJ

Coast Guard Station - Anchorage

“It’s about the journey as much as the outcome.” –Author Unknown

One of our favorites stops when we travel through the C&D Canal is Chesapeake City. It has a pretty little waterfront with a free town dock and small protected anchorage. The downtown area has several nice restaurants, a bakery, old homes that are now bed and breakfasts, gift shops and a local historical museum. It’s a popular place with weekenders on ski boats, jet skies, pontoon boats and fishing boats…and now that’s all that can navigate the harbor. It has gotten silted in and boats that draw more than three feet will be left grounded at low tide, so this time we had to move on. I hope they dredge the harbor soon…we miss this wonderful stop. 

We had a great push from the current all day, so we decided to go all the way to Cape May. What a beautiful evening we had cruising down the Delaware River. We cruised a total of 124 miles today. Tomorrow we play in Cape May. 

C&D Canal History:

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal (C&D Canal) is a 14-mile long, 450-foot wide and 35-foot deep ship canal that cuts across the states of Maryland and Delaware. It connects the waters of the Delaware River with those of the Chesapeake Bay. The Canal provides a shortcut of about 300 miles for ship traffic between the Port of Baltimore, and the northeastern U.S. cities and Europe. The C & D Canal is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering landmark. It’s the only major commercial canal in the U.S. that is still in use, among those, which were built during the heyday of canal building in the early 1800s. 

The original C & D Canal was built privately in the 1820s. It opened for business in 1829, it was 10 feet deep, had four locks and carried barges and sailing vessels that were towed by teams of mules and horses. In the 1920s, the canal was excavated and deepened to create a sea-level facility with a channel 12 feet deep and 90 feet wide, with no locks. Through the years there have been many other expansions, the latest was completed in the mid-1970s. Today's canal is a modern sea level, electronically controlled commercial waterway, carrying 40 percent of all ship traffic in and out of the Port of Baltimore.