All of this is preperation for doing the Great Amarican Loop in 2027.
Man, you wouldn’t believe the rollercoaster of a week Candy and I just had on Sea Kelp. You know how much planning we put into gearing up for the full Delmarva Loop, but honestly, the real story starts way before we ever threw off our dock lines.
For us, the whole purpose of tackling the Delmarva loop wasn’t just to check a destination off the list. It was the ultimate shakedown cruise. We wanted to see what actively works for us on the boat, what gear we actually use, what we completely ignored, what we should have brought, and—most importantly—to get our crew coordination down to a science. When it comes to coordination, our absolute baseline rule is this: docking and undocking should be so boring that people stop watching. An old captain once told me, “If the boat is moving in the right direction, don’t touch anything.” He was spot on. If slow is pro, then boring is definitely better.
Before we ever touch a cleat or shift into gear, Candy and I sit down and discuss exactly what is going to happen and in what precise order. We break down everything from what the wind and current are doing to identifying which lines will be “working” and which ones will be “not working.” Over time, we’ve dialed in a rock-solid system. Before undocking, for example, we look closely at the lines to see which ones have slack and which ones are tight. The tight ones come off last because those are the ones actually working to hold the boat. It’s the exact same logic for docking: we anticipate which lines need to go on first because they will immediately become the working lines, and which ones can wait until last. The entire process is slow, deliberate, and methodical. No shouting, no scrambling—just a heavy vessel cleanly sliding into place.
That year of local jaunts and a longer run down to Deltaville really gave us the foundation to build that trust. The previous owner basically treated her as a floating condo. He lived aboard, but I’m honestly not sure he ever actually took her out of the slip. Because of that, we inherited years of unaddressed, ignored mechanical issues from the pre-purchase survey that we had to systematically hunt down and fix ourselves.
With a solid year of heavy wrenching under our belts, we finally cast off from our home slip at Podickory Point on Saturday morning under a completely blue sky. The upper bay was absolute glass—less than a foot of ripple. We officially spun the keys and had the engines on at 0900, getting everything warmed up before throwing the lines off at 0910. We settled into our 1500 RPM displacement cruise with a beautiful, cool breeze keeping things comfortable up on the flybridge.
If you look at the default routing on the Navionics app, it wanted to put us on an initial heading of 090° right out of the gate to kick us all the way over to the east side of the bay before turning north. The app does that to play it safe and keep you completely clear of the Baltimore Shoals. But standard algorithms don’t account for real local familiarity. Instead great little shortcut I learned from some local knowledge, allowing us to cleanly skirt right past the eastern edge of the shoals without wasting time or fuel on a massive dogleg.
What most people don’t realize about the Chesapeake Bay is how shallow it really is. Over 24% of the bay is less than six feet deep, so it’s absolutely vital to stay in the channel whenever you can. To pull that off safely, a good chartplotter and updated paper charts are highly recommended. And alongside those, you need a quality pair of binoculars for those moments when you are squinting through the glare trying to spot the next physical navaid.
As we pushed further up, the bay’s shallow dynamics showed up right on the electronics. When we hit Tolchester, I noticed an immediate 0.6-knot drop in our GPS speed over ground—a clear indicator of the local current patterns putting up a bit of resistance against our hull. By the time we trended past Mitchell Bluff, the breeze completely died down. The sun was out, but temperatures held at a really comfortable 75 to 80 degrees.
The coolest part of the run up was the approach to Chesapeake City. As we neared the back channel intersection, I pulled the throttles all the way down to a quiet 900 RPM to honor the no-wake zone, creeping along for a mile before the town and another half-mile past it. It was incredibly peaceful. We tied up at the Chesapeake Inn Marina right on time, plugged into shore power, let Jean-Luc stretch his legs, and watched the radar as the evening storms stayed well inland.
On Monday morning, we threw off the lines at 7:30 AM to beat an afternoon wind shift, and man, did we score on the canal current. Pushing just 1300 RPM, the eastbound flood current grabbed our stern and absolutely launched us. We were seeing an incredible 10.7 knots on the GPS!
We were instructed to call Delaware City Marina as soon as we reached the Reedy Point Bridge. When we rang them up, they gave us highly specific directions on exiting the C&D Canal and told us exactly when to flip over and contact the marina office on VHF Channel 9. Following their timeline, we contacted them on Channel 9 right as we cleared the canal and hit marker 6A on the Delaware River. The dockmaster advised us to make our turn in and gave us a very specific pilotage instruction: keep day beacon #1 between 25 and 40 feet directly off our port side to safely clear the shoaling.
We lined it up perfectly and slid right into the basin by 9:00 AM, and I have to tell you, the crew on the docks blew me away. Here we are, bringing a heavy, 22-ton vessel into the slips, and down on the docks are these two early-twenty-something girls waiting to catch our lines. I’m telling you, they handled our lines like absolute pros. When it came time to flip the boat around in the tight basin, Charley from the marina stood right there on the boards, completely cool and patient. He was simultaneously directing the girls with gentle instructions while giving me clear, calm directions over the VHF radio. I honestly cannot say enough good things about Delaware City Marina—their service and hospitality are unmatched. They are truly one of the best-run marinas I’ve seen in a very long time.
We were safe and dry long before the bay turned into a messy, square 25-knot chop. But look, you know how boating goes—especially when you’re pushing a platform to its limits to see what handles the stress. While we were tied up, the boat decided it was time to show us exactly what was next on the project list. We ran into a mechanical issue that required immediate, focused attention. It wasn’t something that put us in danger, but it was enough of a question mark that a good captain knows when a shakedown cruise has done its job. As much as we wanted to push south down the coast to Indian River and Cape Charles, turning back to handle it safely at our home port was the right call.
We officially threw the lines off to begin Leg 3 at 0720 on Saturday morning, June 20th. Before doing anything else, I pinned the throttles right up to 2500 RPM for a solid 10-minute stretch. When you spend that much time idling and displacement cruising, you have to aggressively blow out the carbon and give those turbos a chance to clear. Once that was finished, we turned back into the C&D Canal, dropping our turns down to a steady 1400 RPM cruise. We maintained that pace all the way through the morning until exactly 0930, when I throttled back a bit more and reduced our speed down to 1300 RPM.
Right around there, we saw our first very loud go-fast boat pass us on the C&D Canal—and boy, there were a lot more to come once we reached the Elk River. Honestly, it’d be nice if someone would introduce those guys to the concept of a muffler! Maybe when I was 20 years old I’d drool over a boat like that, but nowadays, I much prefer a quieter, slower pace on the water.
Jean-Luc, our standard poodle, was definitely not a fan of the high-decibel intrusion either. He clearly thought those loud go-fast boats were hostile pirate vessels and started barking up a storm, doing his absolute best to protect Sea Kelp from what he was convinced were shady buccaneers. We had to assure our furry first mate that the ship was safe before he finally stood down from battle stations.
We started taking on light, one-foot rollers coming in steadily from the east at 1045 AM. At that height, it was just enough to give Sea Kelp an easy, rhythmic lift—nothing she couldn’t glide through with ease, but a clear sign that we were leaving the protection of the river. Of course, it wouldn’t be a true weekend run on the water without a local center console fisherman out looking for his next catch. Somewhere right near the mouth of the Elk River, a 30-foot center console decided to aggressively cut right in front of us, crossing from our port to our starboard. Now, there is a very specific reason why a boat’s port navigation light is bright red: it means stop and give way. But this guy clearly missed that day of captain’s school.
Instead of yielding, he stood there waving his arms, frantically giving us hand gestures to indicate he had lines in the water. He was aggressively insisting that I turn my 22-ton cruiser to port just to protect his precious lures! Well, I wasn’t about to play chicken or risk a collision, so I immediately chopped the throttle down to idle to let him clear. Once our adventurous friend passed us by, I bumped the throttles back up to 1300 RPM and maintained our original course. Judging by the look on his face and his frantic final hand gestures as we watched him fade into our wake, I’m fairly certain he ended up losing a couple of very expensive lures to our running gear.
Right about the middle of the Elk River, we spotted a massive tug pushing a barge ahead of us. Talk about a lesson in scale—at our slower pace, it took a good two-plus hours from the time I first laid eyes on him until we finally crept past his beam. The encounter really hammered home one major upgrade I need to tackle next: installing an AIS (Automatic Identification System). By the time we got close enough for me to manually read the name on his hull to give him a shout on VHF Channel 13 for a standard bridge-to-bridge passing arrangement, I’m dead certain his radar was already sounding a proximity alarm. Getting AIS integrated on the flybridge is officially moving to the top of the winter project list.
Once we finally cleared his massive wake and found some open blue water ahead of us at exactly 11:25 AM, I bumped the throttles back up to 1400 RPM. This brought us right back to our efficient, steady displacement sweet spot, letting the twin Cats stretch their legs as we lined up our heading down the main spine of the bay.
This shakedown cruise also gave us the perfect opportunity to evaluate our gear list: what we used, what we didn’t use, and what we were glad we had. I keep a pretty comprehensive tool set onboard, including a wide array of battery-operated Ryobi power tools. But after this run, I realized there are some things I can safely take off the boat to save space—starting with my impact driver. I really don’t see a routine need for it out here. Honestly, I’ve only used it once to break loose some stubborn bolts when I was changing the belts and impellers on the Cats.
Instead, the real MVPs of the trip were the simpler tools. We ended up constantly relying on a small battery-operated air pump just to keep a bumper reinflated, and my trusty battery-operated clip-on fan was an absolute lifesaver when the wind completely died down and the cabin temperatures spiked into the mid-80s. As for the rest of the toolkit? It’s all staying right where it is. Because we’re running a mixed mechanical platform, we have to split our gear down the middle—the Caterpillar main engines require a full set of ASA standard bolts and nuts, while the Yanmar diesel engine on our generator is strictly metric. You can’t afford to be missing the right wrench when a mystery repair calls.
By exactly 12:54 PM, the bay showed us its true, nasty teeth. The logbook reads: 3-foot, 1-second seas with whitecaps. Now, if you aren’t a boater, a 3-foot wave might not sound like a crisis, but that 1-second wave period changes everything. It means those waves aren’t long, lazy ocean swells—they are steep, square, aggressive walls of water stacked right on top of each other, constantly punching the hull without giving the boat a chance to recover. Whitecaps were breaking everywhere, and it turned the bay into an absolute washboard.
Sea Kelp took the pounding like an absolute champ, her 22-ton displacement tracking straight through the mess while we held our 1400 RPM cruise speed down the channel centerline. Poor Jean-Luc actually got a bit seasick tossing around in those steep, square waves. He was looking pretty miserable for that stretch, but the second our home port of Podickory Point finally came into view, he perked right up like he knew the hard work was over.
When we reached our channel, we backed into our slip nice, slow, and easy, tying up exactly according to the methodical pre-docking plan Candy and I had mapped out. Once the lines were secured and the twin Cats went quiet, we took Jean-Luc straight down for a well-deserved walk on the grass.
We didn’t run the generator once this entire trip because the weather was great underway and we were plugged into shore power at each marina, keeping our fuel logging incredibly clean. We’re back home now, tied up safe, and the real fun begins—getting right back dirty in the engine room to resolve the mystery. At the end of the day, we learned a ton about the boat, completely dialed in our crew coordination, and we’re that much closer to having her bulletproof for the next launch. Stay tuned, because page 5 of the ships log is far from over.
Adventures of Sea Kelp 