Officially out on the open seas (...of the Delaware Bay)!

And we're off! At 1:45pm Tuesday (June 2nd) we left Delaware City Marina to kick off our new liveaboard life. After careful current and tide analysis (and learning from the local marina that it's extra wonky in the Delaware bay anyway) it turned out to be a seamless and calm departure from the dock. Needless to say it feels a bit surreal to be fully untethered from shore but here we go 😎!

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For the past month and half Harvest Moon has been hauled out in Delaware City Marina (an excellent shop!) getting ready for the journey. While this was convenient given it is near my hometown, it was less than ideal for starting our cruise up the east coast. The main body of water adjacent to the town is the Delaware Bay, an area mostly traversed by shipping boats. As compared to its sister bay, the Chesapeake, very few recreational boaters choose to travel in this bay as it's pretty boring and the currents can be quite strong. This is a snapshot of the the two bays at 9:15 Wednesday morning (time I started writing) and you can see how much more dense the recreational boats are in the Chesapeake (purple arrows) .

From Delaware City to the mouth of the bay is about ~50 nm. The currents and tide are only favorable for small chunks of the day so we decided to break the trip into two pieces.

Our first stop was Cohansey Cove at the mouth of the Cohansey River on the New Jersey side of the bay. We were there with just one other sailboat anchored in the cove and another just a bit up the river itself.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/209b61_94052ec0215543c59f8919e10e667fa6/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

The next morning we woke up at 5 am 😅 in order to catch the best window down the rest of the way to Lewes, DE. We even managed to get in some proper sailing (don't worry we have autopilot 😉)!

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Now anchored in the Harbor of Refuge just outside of Lewes, we're planning to hang out here until Sunday after the cold front passes and we get a good window to head up to Block Island & Boston.

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Stay tuned!

(While we were hoping to go ashore and explore town we're having some trouble with the motor on the dinghy so that will be my continued project for today...)

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