Month: May 2018

Day 70: Sneaking into St. Michaels

karenstark

5/21/18:  Up and atum and we get to go!  Time to go northeast, across the Chesapeake Bay again, to St. Michaels.  We asked several people about St Michaels, Oxford, or Cambridge.  We found that it is like asking people chocolate, vanilla, or coffee ice cream.  Everybody has their favorite.  We are ready for a small town that actually has restaurants and a nice walkable town.  So St Michaels won.  It is generally the most popular among cruisers.  I had also read and been told that we can approach it from the south, and anchor in a nice bay, and take the dinghy to a town dock.  This is known as sneaking in the “back door” and is an option instead of going all the way around to the north side and dropping into the marina in town (which I think is a little spendy).  The red line and arrow show that route.  We took the green route.  It was a little choppity with a north breeze out on the bay today.  Not really rough; barely whitecaps.  It was just choppity for awhile.  Once we got tucked in south of land, it settled down nicely.

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Days 65,66: The Potomac and the Patuxent

karenstark

5/16/18:  Today we found ourselves coasting down the Potomac River and then cruising up the Patuxent River.  When we looked at the hourly forecast for Wednesday, it showed Zeus’s lightening bolts on every hour of the day.  Great, just great.  We don’t like boating with Zeus – the Greek god of lightening.  At final check before going to sleep, we might have a 4 hour window in the morning without Zeus.  Alarm set for 5:30.  😳😴  With eyeballs barely open, get up and check the latest forecast.  Not that we can actually stay here another night anyway because they’re booked (we asked) but what will our plan be?  It looks like there may be less Zeus activity than previously predicted. OK then – let’s get going! I bailed out poor Stuart.  The way he sits on his cradle, a lot of water lays in the V bottom before it will get high enough to drain out the hole in the back.   We untied about 6:30 and cruised out of DC, and past Alexandria.  With all of the rain that we’ve had the last two nights, there was a LOT of debris in the river!!  So far, so good.  A little bit of rain, but no thunder or lightening.  Our plan B was to go up Breton Bay to Occaquan if we needed to get off the river after about four hours.  We’ve heard it is a neat town.  But the weather was mild and cooperating, so we kept going with plan A to go back to Colonial Beach.   With the next 5 days showing lightening storms every day all day long, we decided to go as far as we can, when we can, to make progress to the next place that we planned to visit.  Unfortunately, once that decision is made, it turns into about a 70 mile trip, because there are very few places to stay in between on this River Potomac.  So I called Mr. Bill at the Boathouse Marina in Colonial Beach, and he said our same slip was open and waiting for us.  He is such a nice man!  Plan A it is! Read more →

Day 64: Another hot adventure day in DC

karenstark

5/15/18:  We had a bunch of rain overnight.. which always wakes us up since we sleep in the bow of the boat.  There isn’t anything to soften the sound of rain pounding on the fiberglass above us.  When I went to bed last night, my pillow was wet.  Darn – the leak is back.  And then, sometime in the middle of the night, the wind shifted to be coming right at our starboard bow, so we had a steady flow of little waves bouncing us up and down all night (and all day).  It wasn’t awful, just constant motion and sound.

I was pretty sure Kenny wasn’t going to tag along with me today.  He wasn’t into another 6.6 miles of walking.  So I got up and got all my stuff ready to go.  The weather was already in the upper 60’s, with a high forecasted in the 90’s.  He said he’d stay at the boat and do some mechanic stuff.  I gave him my basic itinerary, and off I went.  I summoned an Uber ride to take me to the Washington National Cathedral, which is about 4.5 miles away.  OH MY!  What a magnificent place!  This is the front view.  Notice how small the people at the base near the door are.

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Day 63: How hot is it?! Toasty in DC!

karenstark

5/14/18:  Sunday night along the wharf was MUCH quieter than Saturday night!  Sunday evening was pretty cool temperature wise – not as much fun at the wharf if you have to wear a fuzzy, compared to the summer hottie clothes all those young ladies were wearing on Saturday. 😉  We enjoyed a beverage up in the Yacht Club.  Everyone is so nice here – not hoytie-toytie at all!  And it is a beautiful club.  It was all rebuilt in the last year when the entire wharf was rejuvenated.  This yacht club is actually over 100 years old, and it has always been here in this location on Washington Channel.

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Day 62: Rainy and cool in WA DC

karenstark

5/13/18:  It is Sunday!  I really REALLY wanted to go to worship at the Washington National Cathedral.  I don’t know anything about Episcopalian worship style, but I just really wanted to feel the place during worship.  It is such an iconic place of worship in our nation.  To do this would require an Uber ride to get there, and I had that figured out.  But I didn’t have the weather under my control.  It poured down rain for a few hours this morning, right when we needed to be getting ready and going.  I decided we didn’t want to get soaked, and that we’ll go see the cathedral later.  Bummer.😞  So how are we going to see WA DC?  We’ve had luck with hop-on-hop-off trolleys before, so we booked 2 day tickets for that.  We could walk from the marina over to the Jefferson Memorial and hop on at that stop.  The rain stopped, so we got ready and headed out.  And…. the rain started again.  It was like Seattle rain – not hard, but enough to get you wet.  It didn’t last long, thank goodness!  What a difference from yesterday’s mid 90’s.  Today was in the low 60’s! Read more →

Day 61: Washington’s Mount Vernon

karenstark

5/12/18:  I woke up at 5:00am to the combined sound of 5 dozen bass boats, all running and ready to go!  Sure enough, at 6:00, they started scooting past us like they each had a license to fly.  I have always thought it funny that a bass boat needs to be able to go 80 mph so that it can zoom to it’s favorite spot, then putt along with an electric motor at 1/4 mph, then zoom 80 mph to the next spot, and repeat.  But when there is a tournament involved, it makes sense – get there, get the fish, get back for the WIN!

We pulled up anchor and headed out of our beautiful anchor spot, although not nearly as quickly as we expected.  It sure is a good thing that Plumber Kenny made the wiener dog hose work as an anchor wash down.  Oh my grubby goodness the anchor chain was caked with mud!  It took anchor goddess Karen about 15 minutes to bring up the anchor…about 4 feet at a time, while spraying a steady stream of water on it.  What a mucky mess!  But the anchor held great, and the wash down worked great too! Read more →

Day 60: First swim at Mattawoman Creek

karenstark

5/11/18:  The other day, just as we were approaching the channel for Colonial Beach, we heard a fisherman hail a “range boat” for permission to come out and go fishing.  The range boat responded that the river would be open at 5:00.  We asked the folks at the marina about the procedures for clearance on the river.  The gal told us that the Navy has a “live range” here, and they will see us and contact us with navigation instructions if need be.  Or we can call them on the VHF and ask them for instructions.  We weren’t in a big hurry to go this morning.  It was so very calm- how nice – and we only had about 4.5 hours of travel.  As we left the Boathouse Marina behind us, we set out on the glassy sea.

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Day 59: A rest day in Colonial Beach

karenstark

5/10/18:  A very lazy day.  We woke up in the middle of the night to a lot of water noise smacking on the hull.  We are docked bow-in toward the northeast.  Wind and waves are hitting us smack in the butt from the southwest.  Thankfully they are not big waves;  just enough to make a lot of water noise and wibblewobble and shake the boat around while we’re tied to the dock.  So the small craft advisory begins.  I’m glad we already planned to stay a second night.  Curl up and go back to sleep. Read more →

Day 58: Up the Potomac River we go!

karenstark

5/9/18:  As we left Crisfield, there were several large 🦀 crab sheds.   Even though I still have not tried soft shell crab, I have an appreciation for the diligence that is involved in getting them to market!  This was one of the huge sheds.

Crossing the Chesapeake Bay was about 15 miles of big water at this point in the bay.  Lo and behold, right out in the middle, we went past this!  The navigation charts said “bombing area”.  This must be for target practice!  The water conditions were pretty good today – we had a bit of a breeze hitting us in the starboard aft corner, so every once in awhile we’d be a little rolly.  There were two large container ships that passed a couple of miles in front of us, and they left some rollers in the water.  It is amazing to this Puget Sound girl that the average depth of the Chesapeake Bay is only about 20 feet.  It is huge open water – much farther from shore to shore than most places in Puget Sound – but it just is not very deep.  I remember in many places of Puget Sound where the depth finder just gives up giving readings because it is so deep.

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