Tuesday May 25, 2021.
Temp: 71/57, Humidity: 66/95%, Top Wind: SE15 mph, Precip-none, Miles Traveled: 47
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Today was going to be about a five-six hour day, and we wanted to get to St. Michaels by 1:00… so we were up and atum and left the dock around 7:00. It was a tad chilly out, so we had to break out the fuzzies, and motor along with the windows closed. 🥶
We enjoyed our stay in Cambridge. We probably could have done more and seen more, and rode our bikes around, but for some reason, we just didn’t.
It was an uneventful 47 miles, and I didn’t find anything to take pictures of until we were approaching St. Michaels. It was cloudy dreary all day, and it really reminded me of boating in the San Juan Islands. Weaving around islands on a cloudy day to get to where you want to go. As we got closer to the marina in St. Michaels, we spotted our buddy cruise ship!
Docking in the marina was interesting, and Captain did amazing. Check out time is noon, and we were supposed to get there at 1:00. We got there at 12:30, and there were still some big yachts taking up space. They assigned us to our slip, which was across a narrowing fairway from this yacht. Our approach was parallel to the yacht, then had to turn our stern more than 90 degrees to get it tucked into our slip at this angle. The finger pier was only about eight feet long, so we had to go stern in. First try didn’t work, so captain backed out a bit and tried again. He had to pull our bow in to the dock in front of the yacht bow, then ever so carefully pivot our stern around until he could start nudging her back. Once clear of the yacht, he could pivot and back up just a bit to get our port aft corner onto a piling. Once we were on the piling in our slip, he nudged and pivoted inch by inch get our stern inside the piling on the starboard side without crunching Stuart’s prop or the swim step. It was really tight, but he did fantastic. We are really thankful for our wireless two-way headsets, because I can stand in the stern and just talk in a normal volume voice to “pivot more, back, stop, pivot, back, we’re inside the piling, back, pivot, eight feet, six, dockhand has the springline, back, four feet, two feet, stop that’s good”….. we’re getting pretty good at it.
This is what the docks look like, and how our row is at an angle to the fairway. And another giant yacht! It’s name was Usher, and I think there’s a musician by that name? And why all the Union Jack British flags, you ask? Well, way back in the war of 1812, the clever townspeople hung lanterns in the trees beyond the town causing the British Navy to overshoot the town. HA! So the British did not take the town, and St Michaels is known as the town that outsmarted the British.
Right behind us was the marina pool. The sunshine finally came out, so if it warmed up, it sounded like a good idea. But we had a bunch of cleaning to do to get Island Girl ready for guests tomorrow. We got busy inside and out, getting her all spiffed up and everything possible put away and out of the way.
Then we took a walk to a nearby restaurant for an early dinner, and it was a nice stroll.
We got to the Crab Claw Restaurant around 5:00, and we thought maybe they were closed because there weren’t any guests.
We were seated, then more and more people came, and by the time we were done with our dinner, the place was packed. I had a crabby open face sandwich on an english muffin with Canadian bacon, tomato, a creamy crab “imperial” filling and melted cheese kind of thing. Wow it was delicious! Kenny had a creamy crab soup and a crab salad roll, kind of like a lobster roll. We watched the staff set up tables with wooden mallets for parties with reservations for crab. You could buy one or two crab, a half or full dozen, at market price.
There’s Island Girl keeping an eye on us.
There is a maritime museum here, and this house, known as the Eagle House is part of it. It was built in 1877, and has a big eagle statue on the top.
There were these nice flower boxes along the bridge walkway, so I thought they’d work as today’s flower portrait.
This was a neat old house, in beautiful condition, and the oldest residence in St Michaels. It may date back to 1665? Info that I found said that the structure incorporates the remains of a log home that was originally built on the beach and later moved to its present location. This house was built in 1798 and remodeled in 1870, and is the only original log structure remaining in St. Michaels. A log house over 200 years old?! With logs that are over 350 years old??? WOW! How cool is that?!
It is now a Bed & Breakfast. It recently sold in December 2020 for $1,062,500 with four ensuite bedrooms, just under 2100 square feet.
I was intrigued, so I looked it up on the Google, and found a couple of interior pictures. So it’s not solid round log walls like you might think, but the logs had been sawed flat (at least on the inside), and have been retained among all of the renovations, remodeling, and repurposing of the home. Notice how the log wall is not flat, but is quite curvey?
And the plumbing is on the exterior of the wall, of course. Cool.
I found an unusual pretty purple bell viney flower plant, and next to it was some wonderfully fragrant jasmine. Mmmmm, my nose was happy!
This is another cool house, built in 1750. I didn’t find much info on it, but it just looks cool.
Here is what our route looked like today. We had to go way out and around to get to the St Michaels marina.
We were here in 2018 and remember that it is a really neat place, but we didn’t venture in to town at all today. And it won’t be likely tomorrow either, because we’ll be busy with a bunch of Looper fun.
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Wednesday May 26, 2021.
Temp: 88/67, HOT!, Humidity: 54/95%, Top Wind: S12mph, Precip-YES-Thunder, lightning, rain, Miles Traveled: ZERO
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It was hot and humid today, Whew! 🥵. But it was a really fun day. We watched lots of boats come into the marina this morning. Most were coming to participate in an AGLCA (America’s Great Loop Cruisers Association) “Looper Crawl”. We had 16 boats participate, including Island Girl, that welcomed members of the AGLCA to come aboard. Like a marina open house boat show. It was a great opportunity for members who are still in the Great Loop planning stages to see a variety of boats. Not that any of these boats are for sale….. well, everything is for sale for the right price, right? But it gave people a chance to see lots of kinds of boats, see what kinds of features they like or don’t like in a boat, ask the owners questions, and see boats and people who are currently doing the loop. In this age of the pandemic and so on, it’s been really hard for people to see boats in person, so this was a great event opportunity for the planners. It was fun for us because we got to share about our experience and meet some really fun people. I don’t know how many people came to “crawl” the boats, but at the happy hour in the evening, there were LOTS of people – like maybe 80-100?! It was really a lot of fun. A big thunderstorm helped to break up the fun, but at least the rain waited until the end of the event to scare everyone inside. Anyway – what this all means is that we were busy little social butterflies today, so there aren’t many pictures to share. 🤷♀️. We had a red sign on our door indicating that we were part of the “crawl”. Not all boats in the marina were part of the event, so we had to display which boats were OK to board. 😉And it was HOT…. like nearly 90 degrees hot outside, so we tried to keep the door closed with the A/C on, so that made it less inviting, which was kind of weird, but it worked out ok. I hung out outside in the cockpit for awhile just to invite people in. It was fun sharing our Bayliner since there aren’t a lot of them on the East Coast. There was also a Bayliner 4788 and a 4587 in the marina, but neither of them were open.
This is kind of funny. Our little Nebo app that tracks our location is used by a lot, but not all loopers. Look at this gaggle of icons in the marina!
Just a few fun signs to make you feel like you’re in the tropics. The marina actually had some palm trees too, but I didn’t get any pics.
We saw this guy glide by. Ewww. I really don’t like reptiles. I know God created them for a purpose, but I learned from my girl Eve – don’t trust a snake.
So we spent the morning walking around the docks and meeting people. Then from 3-5:30, our boats were open, so we were on Island Girl talking with people. Then from 5:30-7 we had happy hour, where we chatted with more people! At 7:00 the sky opened up and said loudly and brightly with thunder, lightning, and rain, that the party was over. It was a really fun day. Unfortunately, we didn’t get into town at all. It really is a fun albeit touristy town, so that’s kind of disappointing that we didn’t get to enjoy it. But at least we’ve been here before, so it isn’t a total mystery what we missed. Most of the looper boats are leaving tomorrow, heading in a variety of directions. We can’t stay here because the marina is completely sold out for the Memorial Day weekend. We’ll head to Annapolis for a couple of nights. There is more yucky weather coming on the weekend, so we’re hoping we can maybe stay longer. We spaced and forgot that this is a holiday weekend, so we don’t have reservations anywhere except for Thursday & Friday nights in Annapolis. Uh oh. 😬