Annapolis and beyond

We took a town mooring in Annapolis, just north of the bascule bridge on Spa Creek. Annapolis is Maryland’s state capital, home of the United States Naval Academy, a well preserved historic district and a place that’s crazy about boats. The Harbor Master efficiently guides you to a city mooring, and one of the city’s boats is soon by to collect a modest fee. The city also has a roving pump out boat to empty holding tanks, so you don’t have to leave your mooring. It’s not that marinas aren’t available. There are at least 25 on Spa Creek and Back Creek containing thousands of boats and most of them are sail boats.

“Creeks” in Chesapeake Bay parlance are not streams with noticeable current, rather more like inlets off of “rivers,” which are inlets off of “sounds” which are bodies of water off of the Bay proper. All are characterized by shallow water. We’re becoming quite accustomed to tooling along at 6 knots with 7 or 8 feet of water under our keel, and not blanching at the prospect of crossing a bar showing 8 feet of depth. It’s a far cry from Maine where white knuckles appear if the fathometer drops below 15. Little wonder, it’s rock not mud!

We missed the in-water sail boat show by a week. The power boat show was on, so the harbor was packed with people. We chose not to go, took a trolley tour to get an overview and did a good deal of walking. Several homes were pointed out to us that have been in the same families since the 1700’s.

We made contact with two great people. Turns out that on the mooring next to ours was a Canadian boat that is captained by a former commodore of the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron in Halifax. We joined the Squadron when we visited Halifax in August and left Journey on a Squadron mooring for almost two weeks while we headed north in Jay and Janet’s boat. Bill R. and his wife Leona (she was away for a few days) are heading south and we had two great visits with Bill and look forward to reconnecting.

We also saw Ian, the son of one of our neighbors in Maine, is an Annapolis resident, sailor and owner of a motor boat. Ian gave us a first-rate tour of the Creeks and marinas in his runabout. It’s always great fun to see people in their places, where they work, play and love to be.

On Sunday we left Annapolis for Oxford Maryland, across the Bay below the Chesapeake Bridge to the Eastern Shore, a peninsula that includes Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. We covered thirty miles in light air with the reaching spinnaker up and pulling beautifully almost to Oxford. We arrived late and left early as we have a mission to get another 60 miles down the Bay by Thursday for our rendezvous with old friends from Baltimore.

Monday we motored thirty miles further down the bay to Solomon Island, another dense boating complex, but enough room to anchor. Enough of docking fees for awhile.

Bucking the pace and the wind

There is a tension in sailing that has nothing to do with wind, waves, shoals and the soundness of the boat. It is a tension that derives from the fact if one truly sails a sail boat to get somewhere, it is a project alien from a lifetime of getting from A to B as fast and efficiently as possible. We are like Mennonites, shunning modernity in an archaic mode of transportation. The challenge is to quit doing that simple calculation that precedes every road trip, dividing the distance by speed to yield the time it will take to get there. It is to wean ourselves from straight line thinking, from that life long habit of trying to better the average mile per hour of the last time you made the trip. We’re gradually learning not to travel A to B, but to plan to go from A to options B, C, or D, whichever the wind allows and to not worry about how fast we will get there. I don’t feel that I do justice to what a shift in thinking this is for all of us and its implications for a more contemplative life.

Solomon Island to Crisfield

The wind wasn’t right on the nose so we made better progress on our course on one tack than the other, but we tacked all day in five to ten knots in warm air, understanding more deeply why this Bay is a sailing Mecca. We anchored off the Marina in Crisfield, MD, the “Crab Capital” of the world. Thirty-five years ago we visited this isolated eastern shore community and saw skipjacks, the last sail boats to be used for commercial fishing, on weighs and docks at a salty, working waterfront. Crab and oyster fishing have so dramatically declined, that there are few working fishing boats of any kind, and now the town has succumbed to multi-story condominiums on the water front, that look more like a 70’s model cities revitalization effort; new construction abutting abandoned store fronts and eateries with a smattering of antique stores. A sun bleached architects rendering occupies the window of one such store front envisions markets, pedestrian malls and marinas.

We were told by the marina operator that Crisfield sees few transients as the western shore offers anchorages and marinas much closer off the southern route down the bay. For us, it was a perfect stop before another 27 trip south to Deep Creek, VA, to visit old friends from Baltimore days.

Getting to the Bottom of Deep Creek

Yesterday, October 18, the wind was straight out of the south, directly on our nose as we headed down Tangier Sound to Pocomoke Sound to Deep Creek. We needed to be at the Creek at high tide. When we turned east into Pocomoke Sound the wind freshened and we were dong 7 knots, reefed and still moved us faster than we wanted so we entered the creek about an hour and a half before high. It is a buoyed, zigzagging ,dredged channel that the chart claims is 75 feet wide with four feet depth at low tide that was negotiated splendidly to the point immediately in front of our friends house on the creek at green marker number 17. In front of us were pilings, the channel was to say the least ambiguous. It is now clear that we should have gone to starboard instead of port. Squish! We have now experienced our first grounding, an almost pleasant mush of an experience compared to the jarring kiss of hitting ledges in Maine.

Our seamanship was witnessed by our friends, Dave and Jeanette, who were of course watching for us. Dave reported that he was on the phone with one of their sons and told him that “I’d better get off as I’m about to get another call.” We couldn’t reach Karl Wendly at Deep Creek Marina and Boatyard, and Dave went to track him down and soon enough both arrived in Karl’s power boat. Efforts to Kedge journey off with her anchor were not succeeding, and to our great pleasure with great ease Karl pulled Journey free and to his dock, with no harm done only embarrassment. It had been raining off and on, and Jeanette reported that as she watched us stuck in the mud, a rainbow arched over Journey. A good omen.