DELAWARE -A handful of military and tall ships that recently participated in Sail250 events in Baltimore are expected to pass through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal before sailing down the Delaware River and into the Delaware Bay, giving people in Lewes a chance to watch them pass between Cape Henlopen and Cape May.
Only four or five vessels in the international fleet are small enough to fit beneath all of the bridges spanning the C&D Canal, according to Sail250 MD Director Chris Rowsom.
One of those is expected to be Canada's HMCS William Hall, a ship primarily designed to patrol and support Canada's Artic regions.
The 14-mile Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, a 450-foot-wide, 35-foot-deep man-made waterway, provides a shortcut of roughly 300 miles for commercial cargo and container ships that would otherwise have to sail around the Delmarva Peninsula.
As of the morning of June 30, the Polish tall ship Dar Mlodziezy was approximately 17 nautical miles off the Fenwick Island coast. It is a 354-foot three-masted full-rigged ship.
The Dar Mlodziezy from Poland has a sail area of 32,000 square feet (Sail4th 250).
People interested in tracking the ships' progress can use online vessel tracking services to monitor their locations in real time as they make their way toward the Delaware Bay.
