Lewes, Delaware: A Port in the Storm

Greetings from Lewes, Delaware, an adorable sea-side town at the southern point of the Delaware Bay entrance. We arrived late yesterday afternoon after a very dramatic voyage down the Delaware Bay. Unfourtunately, picture-taking was impossible due to the heavy winds and seas but other photos will follow soon.

We departed Chesapeake City at 5 AM yesterday with a basic weather forecast for our region (thanks to cell phone calls home to people adept in navigating the NOAA website - thanks Dad!). Exiting the C&D Canal we were surprised at how tame the Delaware River was at that point and our spirits were high.

Over the following 10 hours the wind, rain and seas only continued to increase. We made the decision to duck into the Maurice River, home of a familiar schoolship, AJ Meerwald, out of Bivalve, NJ. A dock was secured after a few phone calls but alas, upon rounding the final buoy to get up into the bay we discovered the impossibility of beating against the building swells. We turned on our heels, making a 180 degree course change and ran downwind toward Lewes, our original goal for the day. At this point, visibility had decreased to approximately 1 mile, wind was gusting over 40 knots (more than gale-force) and the waves were combining with incoming sea swells to reach heights as high as 15 feet. Rich and I were soaked through and shivering and it took all of our strength to keep the boat in control.

Some technical info for some of you: The Delaware Bay behaves just like Lake Erie. It's shallow depth means that a sustained wind will cause large waves to stack up, creating high, choppy seas. A sustained NE wind, such as what we experienced, is particularly nasty as there is little land to break the wind but lots of surface area in the Bay for waves to stack over. On the ocean, a NE wind will travel over hundreds of miles of water, creating huge swells that, when combined with conditions in the Bay, make for a bad day at sea. Further, the way our vessel is constructed makes her prefer to always round into the wind, keeping wind and seas to our beam. This is an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous angle to maintain in such weather, which made our trip that much more ... "interesting" :)

Finally, we could make out the faint outline of the Lewes Harbor of Refuge breakwall and carefully surfed and corkscrewed the boat around the wall. Two miles later the harbor entrance emerged from the rainy fog and we surfed on through that, too. 20 minutes later we were tied up alongside the Lewes Town Dock and set to putting ourselves and the boat back together.

Three cheers to our brave crew who, as sick and miserable as they were, never complained and simply picked up the boat and themselves with nothing but a laugh and some forward momentum. Today brought nothing but sunshine, affording great weather for drying clothes and gear and throwing some more oil on the hatches.

And the funny thing is that Lewes was this vessel's original homeport from back 15 years ago. It wasn't just us that got her here. She definitely helped.

Tomorrow morning we head north to NYC. Weather reports call for light southerly winds and calmer seas. Check back for more info soon!