On the 5th of July, Inglis and Bruce lay off chasing and boarding. They took Sultana ‘up the river to lie her on shore and attempt to stop her leaks.’ It was eight days shy of four years since Inglis had first come aboard her at Deptford to take command and raise a crew. Since then, she had seen only hard service. Only the Navy's funds and infrastructure for repair and maintenance had kept her in serviceable condition. She was tired enough to need a major overhaul, perhaps going beyond re-caulking to include some re-fastening, but for now, some repairs on the fly would have to do. The next day, the crew hauled her ashore at Billingsport, on the New Jersey side of the river, across from Philadelphia. They scrubbed her bottom, then scraped and payed her sides with turpentine. The schooner's last coat of paint would have worn off by now, or at least most of it, and the men used whatever they could get, usually pine varnish, to coat the sides. Sultana would have looked about as tired as she was, though she would have been kept clean and as tight as the men could make her. Two of those men, however, John Bloom and Charles Anderson, decided they no longer wished to toil on Sultana; Bloom deserted from the boat, and Anderson swam ashore in the night. They were two of the three men Inglis had pressed not even two months earlier.

Conventional wisdom has it that most early modern sailors, at least those from the European world, could not swim. Swimming was not considered wholesome recreation in the British Atlantic world; it was a needless exposure to danger, both drowning and the risk of contracting illness from being wet and cold. While it might seem absurd to us that sailors, of all people, did not generally possess this ability, the labor culture of these sailors did not work against the wider society's general disapprobation of the activity. Sailors accepted the risks of the sea, and there was a certain amount of fatalism in their subculture; the sea and its hazards were beyond the control of men, and a sailor worthy of respect went about his work not only accepting that, but regarding it with a certain degree of insouciance.