Day 64,65,&66- Cambridge

Saturday May 22, 2021.
Temp: 79/54, Humidity: 37/86%, Top Wind: w7 mph, Precip-none, Miles Traveled: maybe 4 on bikes

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Today was a really nice day. Sunshine, perfect temperature, not too humid. Ahhh! We slept in after a very quiet and peaceful night. Check out that calm water! So this is how Island Girl is in her slip. We have just a short finger pier that reaches far enough out that we can step out from the side where we usually get off. Oh! And let me tell you, that I nailed it on the lasso of the forward pilings to tie the bow to. 😁 I have 35’ lines up there, so I just need to get them around the piling and back to the boat to tie off. I use a technique that I learned on Loop #1 from my sweet friend Sherry on SeaJamm. Gather up a couple of loops of line in each hand, and just push/throw the rope straight out from my chest over the top of the piling. It works great! (Just make sure you are standing on, or have the bitter end tied down.). It works way better for me than trying to actually throw a lasso circle of line around the pole, which never works well for me. I can’t get the right umph or angle or something.

I told you that I’d get the scoop on the lighthouse for you. I walked over there but unfortunately it is closed. (Still a remnant of Covid symptoms.). But, here is the story, as promised. This is actually a replica that was built in 2012. The original lighthouse was established in 1871 and sat in the Choptank River near the mouth of the Tred Avon River. An ice floe in 1918 demolished this first structure. Instead of building a new structure, the Lighthouse Service elected to move the spare Cherrystone lighthouse, then in storage at Cape Charles, Virginia, to the Choptank River Station. The Cherrystone lighthouse was put in place in 1921 at the Choptank River site, and stood at the site until 1964, until it was removed under the Coast Guard’s modernization program. The Choptank River lighthouse that stands today in the Cambridge marina is a replica of this last lighthouse, utilizing original plans made available by the National Archives. 
So there is your Cambridge/Choptank Lighthouse history lesson for today. You’re welcome.

Oh – here is s0me more history! I went for a short walkabout and found some more stuff for us to learn. This is the Caile-Bayly house, built in the mid 1700’s in Annapolis, and MOVED to Cambridge (across the Chesapeake Bay!) and reassembled. In 1857, Lizzie Ambly, a woman enslaved by Dr. Alexander Bayly, and her husband ran off with 13 others from Cambridge. They used safe houses and made their way along the Underground Railroad to escape to freedom. Harriet Tubman, the “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, was born near Cambridge. There is a museum here, but it wasn’t open when we were nearby. Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad

This is currently a funeral home, but was originally built as a private home, known as the Fletcher mansion built in 1888. It is Queen Anne style. 🤷‍♀️. We’re learning about different architectural styles, right?

The Goldsborough House is a Federal Style house (I understand and recognize this style). It was built about 1790. Mr. Goldsborough was Maryland’s last Federalist Governor in 1819. Right now it is missing it’s dark green shutters at all of the windows, and the porch pillars are being painted.

OOhhh – then I found this sign…. a Tiki bar, and a seafood store. Of course I went this way!

I found the J.M.Clayton Co. seafood operation. It is the world’s oldest crab factory and has been run by the same family since 1890!! They still use hand pickers, but they also automated crab picking. Responding to a shortage of skilled crab pickers in the 1960’s, J. Clayton Brooks, along with business associates, invented the world’s first automatic crab picking machine. Named the “Quik Pik”, it was patented in 1973. Although the choice, high-prized lump or backfin meat must still be picked by hand, the Quik Pik is still employed at Clayton’s to efficiently remove crabmeat from the shell. This remarkable machine picks at a speed of 100 pounds of crabmeat per hour. It would take 25 workers to hand pick at the same rate. All this history made me want to get some fresh crab, so I found the ordering window (see the yellow arrow?) to get some.

Here was the price sheet. A pound of jumbo lump crab was $48. EEK! Regular lump (and the least expensive) was $38/lb. So I bought a pound. It comes in a tub, packed full and tight. I’d figure out how to make us some crab cakes and maybe come crab dip with it.

Also down this road was Snappers Restaurant and Tiki Bar. Ooooh – good idea! I’ll bring the Captain here!

I headed back home, and Captain had ordered a prescription to pick up at Walgreens, which is a couple of miles away. So we got out the bikes and went for a ride. Here’s Speedy and Speedo. They are awesome bikes! After we got them down back in Solomons, we just left them down in the cockpit so that we can get them on and off easily for the next few towns. 😉

On the way back to the boat, we tootled in to the Tiki bar for some refreshment. It was a little bit warm outside, so we were sweaty Bettys, and could use some refreshing. Dang. We each had two refreshing drinks, I had a crab appetizer, and Kenny had some kind of sandwich, and it was $80! YIKES! I have to say, the fresh orange crush and pineapple crush drinks that I had were really tasty.

This was a cute place, and sitting outside in a tropically designed environment was fun.

I had to capture this on the fence behind me. Our youngest son loves reggae style music, so this was for him.
Evry’ting be Irie, Mon!

So this was another one of those days where we ate something mid afternoon, and we weren’t really hungry for dinner, so no dinner prep tonight. We just relaxed and enjoyed the evening.

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Sunday May 23, 2021.
Temp: 91/71, Humidity: 40/66%, Top Wind: NW12 mph, Precip-none, Miles Traveled: ZERO! Too hot!! 🥵☀️

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It was HOT today. At least the humidity wasn’t bad, and there was a breeze. But we stayed inside most of the day and did some house cleaning. The weather forecast was kind of strange. Winds in the 10-15mph range, but small craft advisory, I guess for gusts up to 20mph. After the crazy wind thing that happened out of nowhere at Solomons, we tend to want to believe the warnings. But today, we didn’t feel any gusts… but maybe that’s because we’re here in the marina and not out on the big water? Oh well. Tomorrow is supposed to bring a cold front, with a high of only 70 degrees. More than a 20 degree drop from today. And there is a chance of rain. We haven’t had much rain at all in the 2 months that we’ve been traveling. We will be having an “open house” on Island Girl in a few days, so we want to get her all spic and span for company. I’ve been cleaning and de-cluttering the inside. Captain wants to do some cleaning outside, and tomorrow’s temperatures are much better for that than today. So we decided to stay here for two more nights. It’s a nice town and a reasonable price at this marina. (Note: we got a 20% discount on dockage by being Marinalife members. An annual subscription cost me $42, and we saved $62 just at this marina.)
It was toasty, but we opened up the windows upstairs so Kenny could work on a project that he’s been ciphering on for awhile. We hate rolling up the front windows, because they get scratched, and we can’t roll them when it’s cold temperatures, or they’ll crack. So he fashioned a way to lift them up and fasten them to the bimini frame.

He did both windows, and I think this will be good. Time will tell! We can still roll them up, but we’ll try this new way for awhile and see how it works.

Yep – it really got hot today. 98 degrees?! Maybe that was in the sun, but it certainly was around 90 even in the shade. It was nearly sunset at 7:16, and still 86 out there. We do like our air conditioning in the boat. That’s the 73 degrees part. 😉

So tonight was crab cakes ooh-ha-ha for dinner. Here is my tub of crab. I only used a 1/2 pound to make 4 crab cakes. I found a recipe on-line, and then discovered there is actually a recipe right on the tub that was very similar.

I forgot to take a picture until they were almost all gone, so I’m not going to share my messy plate with you. Anyway – just believe me that they were really tasty!

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Monday May 24, 2021.
Temp: 78 degrees @ 3:00am/58, Humidity: 59/80%, Top Wind: NE14 mph, Precip-some rain!, Miles Traveled: zero-we barely got off of the boat!

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAPTAIN!
So remember that small craft advisory? It finally found us at about 3:00 this morning. We both woke up to bouncing and bobbing and pulling tight on the lines, and lots of wave slap on the hull. Kenny got up and checked our little weather center, and it said 25mph. 🌬. It was cloudy, breezy, and cool today, with several periods of light rain. Hmmm… Swab was hoping to do a little cleanup and wax on the hull today. Hopefully the sprinkles of rain wouldn’t last long. We needed to take advantage of low tide at 9:30 to get Mr. Stuart Peezee launched. You see, we cannot launch him and get him around Island Girl between the pilings, so he has to duck under the dock right there. Low tide gave us enough room to get him out. Then we’d need low tide again this evening to get him back on board.

We got him launched and tied up to Island Girl so that we could enjoy our coffee and wait for the sprinkles of rain to stop.

So here is the plan…. Swab gets in Stuart with all the hull cleaning and waxing stuff. First mate stays on Island Girl and moves Stuart around with ropes and keeps a tight reign while Swab does all the wax on/wax off activity.

First he had to squirt goop and scrub with the brush to get the brown ICW moostache off. Then rinse with the hose. Thankfully there was a breeze that helped the hull dry. Then he applied some hard paste wax that was recommended by other ICW travelers to help repel discoloration…maybe? Then buff it off with a soft cloth. WHEW! My noodle arms got a work out just trying to keep a tight reign on him. His arms, legs, and core got a whole body workout trying to wash, wax, and buff while in a moving object. But the Girl does look better! What a way to spend your birthday!

While we were working on this project, which took several hours, I saw one of the American Cruise Line ships come in! Everywhere we go, they eventually show up!

Birthday boy isn’t into cake, and I don’t have all the right stuff on board to make a pie, so I got these ingredients out. He says “Do I look like a grama?”. HA! That made me laugh. When our kids were young, we’d make rice krispie treats. If my mom came over and saw them, she’d say “Oooooh!, Grama food”, because she loved these tasty goodies. So they’ve always been known as ‘grama food’ in our house. Anyway – Kenny got some grama food for his birthday treat. I figure if he doens’t want it, there IS a grama in the house. 😁😋

Just before sunset, the tide was low enough that we could get Stuart back under the dock and pulled back up into his cradle on the back of Island Girl. He did good work today. 😉

We had purchased a couple of rib-eye steaks at the last grocery store we were in a couple of days ago. Since several of the restaurants in town were closed today (Monday), Kenny got to grill his own steak for dinner. I fixed taters, salad, and a couple of painkillers, and we had a nice relaxing dinner on board…. while it sprinkled a little more rain outside.

Here’s a look at what our weather was like today. It kept getting cooler as the day progressed. Our highest temperature was at 3:00am. And look at where the weather channel thinks we are…. Lovers Lane, Maryland. HA!

The Small Craft Advisory has finally lifted, and tomorrow looks to be a much better weather day than today. It is forecasted to be in the mid 70’s, with a south wind less than 10mph. We are heading to St. Michaels which as the crow flies, it’s 16 miles away. By car it is 26 miles, but by boat… it will be 46 miles. We have to go out and do a big loop around to get there. And guess where the cruise ship is going tomorrow? Yep. St. Michaels. At least it only has a maximum capacity of 100 passengers. But that is a lot of visitors in these little bitty towns. We don’t know what time it pulls out of here, and we don’t really want to play cat and mouse with it. 🤔. We’ll probably try to leave around 7:00. So, we’ll see you tomorrow with some more adventures.