Cape May to Atlantic City to Manasquan (Hoffman's Marina)

Day # 596; Loop Miles to Date = 6,846

This is going to be just the cliff notes - to fill in the gaps for our journey up the New Jersey Coast...

We left Cape May on Friday, traveling 44 miles to Atlantic City, and then on Saturday we drove 60 miles to get to the Manasquan Inlet. All of this transit was outside in the Atlantic Ocean, as the NJICW is quite shallow, and is prone to constant shoaling. Plus, there is heavy boat traffic and many bridges to get past. Our trip on Friday took us a little less than 5 hours...had we taken the NJICW, it would have taken us 8!

Friday was an OK day to be on the ocean...we had some pretty good sized swells (5'-6' most of the day, with some larger ones every so often) but they were spread out with a period of about 10 seconds. There was a steady breeze from the west, but staying just about a mile offshore protected us from most of the winds effect. Saturday was a much better day...only a light breeze, and the swells were much smaller and still spread out. It was a great travel day for the ocean. Tomorrow, we will head back out there again (very early) and plan to make Staten Island by about noon. Between the Delaware Bay, and this NJ coast travel, it will be nice to get to some more protected waters in about a weeks time.

Wildwood

Ocean City

Atlantic City

Surf City

The only real "drama" that we had was entering the inlet at Manasquan. This inlet is large and accommodates a tremendous amount of recreational boat traffic...an awful lot of sport fishing boats come in and out of here. But, it is known for its fierce currents, and it lived up to it's reputation. We had to power up to 2400 rpm against this stiff current just to make headway at 7mph. Usually at this rpm level we would be doing 13 mph or so...that's a LOT of current. And, in that it was Memorial Day weekend, there was substantial traffic. Add to this that there was a very narrow bridge that all of this traffic had to go through, and...well let's just say that we got our share of adrenaline rush for the day in this last 10 minutes! Tomorrow, we will be able to time our departure so that we are leaving in more slack conditions...it should be much less exciting.

All for now...tomorrow we say good bye to Jersey, and hello to New York!