I decided I wanted to experience as much as I could of what the Prettyman family felt as they sailed up the Atlantic Ocean and into the Delaware Bay. All of my previous attempts to walk the cape were thwarted by a tiny bird known as the piping plover.

Plovers are small Nova Scotia shore birds that were declared an endangered species in 1985. This summer (2003), four nests were spotted at Cape Henlopen State Park where 10 chicks were produced. October is not a nesting month so I took advantage of a free "Walk The Cape" opportunity sponsored by the Delaware State Park system. Six of us made the walk with a park guide who was a Lewes native. We began on the ocean side at 10 a.m. with partly cloudy skies and fairly mild temperatures.

As the sign in the photo below indicates, for almost all of the year, Cape Henlopen is closed to visitors. Only on rare occasions are humans allowed to walk this route. Our guide said the tours are offered only two or three times a year. The combination of a high tide plus a full moon gave all of us wet feet. There simply wasn't enough sand to escape the tidal water covering the beach on the ocean and bay side.

We were urged not to trample the beach grass anchoring the dunes on the cape which appear undisturbed and beautiful in this photo. You are looking toward the Breakwater which separates the Atlantic Ocean from Lewes Beach and the Delaware Bay. I kept thinking of the navigational challenges presented to our ancestors who, as far as I know, made their way around the cape without the benefit of a lighthouse. The Cape Henlopen Lighthouse, the second oldest in the United States, was built in 1765, sixty-eight years after the Prettymans sailed into Lewes. The Cape Henlopen Lighthouse crashed into the sea in 1926. It was one of my mother's favorite places and she was saddened when it fell into the ocean. Many photographs and drawings exist of the structure. Another memory I have, thanks to my mother, is the existence of the "Great Dune" which is somewhere in Cape Henlopen State Park. I'd like to find it because she recalled with joy rolling Easter eggs down the dune.

At one point, while we were following a curve around a small inlet on the bay side, someone discovered a number of dead horseshoe crabs. One had been tagged by the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife with instructions to call a toll free number and report the finding. Four of the walkers in the group lived in Lewes and knew what to do. They gave me the tag and told me to make the call reporting the location and date the crab was found.

I remember spending summer vacations visiting with my grandmother Ida Prettyman who lived in the town of Lewes on Mulberry Street. Grandmother did not know how to drive a car and was definitely conservative in her lifestyle but she was an adventurous sort who appreciated local milestones. When Virginia opened its famous Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the state sold its ferries to Delaware's River and Bay Authority. In 1964, the authority began running those boats between Lewes and Cape May, New Jersey, and Grandmom and I were on the first one to leave Lewes. By 1992, 20 million passengers had used the ferry. In this photo, you can see one of the ferries making its way out of the breakwater on the way to Cape May for the 17-mile journey across to New Jersey.

Our guide walks barefoot on a small sand bar with the breakwater and a lighthouse in the background as we approach the end of our journey. Slogging through water and wet sand wasn't easy but the views made it worthwhile. I'm pretty sure this is the Delaware Breakwater Light in the background. There is another one on the breakwater named the Harbor of Refuge Light. Both were built to help guide ships into and out of the harbor. Ship traffic is steady into the Delaware Bay. I've watched container ships and tankers sitting outside the breakwater waiting for a pilot boat to guide them through the channels leading to the Delaware River. Their destinations include Wilmington and Philadelphia.

We completed the walk in just over an hour and I enjoyed every minute of it, even the wet shoes and socks which I wore for most of the rest of the day.

To visit the Prettymans of Lewes home page, click here.