Our weather window still looked good in the morning, so off we went. Raised sails and raised anchor and we were on our way. Pretty heavy winds to start out for a short upwind until we rounded the hook and started our long downwind sail along the New Jersey coast. Once we made it around we setup for downwind, and settled in. We had good winds to start, then they began to die off a bit. We ended up putting up spinnaker which both gave us a bit more speed, and better pointing further downwind and sailed along on that for many hours.

Eventually the wind started piping back up so it was time to take the spinnaker down and go back to white sails. That went pretty smoothly and we sailed on through sunset and into the night. Somewhere late in the night the winds finally died right out and we had to put away the genoa and motor on for a while. Then the winds came back in, then back off, for a few cycles. I ended up sailing/motoring through most of the night until around 3am and then handed things over to Theone who was well rested and I crashed and slept like a baby through the morning.

When I woke back up in the late morning we were nearing Cape May, and we decided to keep going and make the jump down Delaware Bay as well. We had planned this as an option if we were doing alright, and since things were going smoothly that is what we choose to do.

Lots of other boats making the same run up the Delaware Bay and it was funny to see so many AIS targets all pointed the same way. It was dead calm as we came around Cape May, and we motored about half way down Delaware Bay before winds started filling in behind us, and we were able to sail the last leg of the trip. As usual the winds came in light, then built and built and built until we were running on just the mainsail downwind at full speed. We rode that until we got down to where we had planned to anchor at Reedy Island.

We knew the anchorage wasn't well protected from south winds (which is what we had at that point), but we had assumed they would be light as per the prediction when we had left. Of course, they weren't light when we got down there, which should have been a clue, but we again assumed they were just the afternoon winds, often stronger than at night.

That turned out to be a bit of a miss calculation. We anchored at the north end of the Reedy Island, and for the first time in many years dragged anchor while backing down on it. Unusual, we pulled up anchor and tried again, and it didn't set very well either. It was a complicated anchoring because we had 2 knots of current, and the winds were very strong in the opposite direction. I though maybe it had something to do with the direction we were trying to set the anchor so we tried a third time, and again not great, but it did seem to set after dragging a bit, so tired as we were we called it, and hoped for the wind to lighten up a bit.

We got to making dinner, and just as we were about to sit down to eat, the anchor alarm started going off, and sure enough we were dragging. The wind was up even more and it was getting kind of silly out there. So we got out there and pulled up anchor yet again, my arms killing me at this point, 2 days of sailing and now 3 hauls of the anchor+chain. Decided to just move out and drop the hook in some deeper water since we obviously weren't getting any good holding in close to the island. This was again, better but not great. Not a instant set like we usually get, and the chop from the waves was considerably more out further. At this point it was getting to dark to head off to another anchorage and so we decided to ride it out.

What had gone from a very peaceful and enjoyable 2 day passage, ended in a super rolly not very safe anchorage with tons of wind. It was a mostly sleepless night, we set an hourly alarm to check the anchor, and were pretty much ready to give up on this whole thing by morning. Ironically we slept better on the passage than we had at anchor. Ugh.

But minus the anchoring, the passage was great. 190 NM, 09:00 Oct 5th until 17:50 Oct 6th. Very calm sea state, mostly light winds but enough to sail the better part of it.