October 26 and 27 -- Elizabeth City to Deep Point to Slade Creek -- 43.5 and 33 NM, Respectively

From Eliz. City we got a late, 11 A.M. start, due to marketing.  It was mostly motoring but we put up the genoa three times for about half of the passage, once even turning off the motor. We arrived at the anchorage after the sun had set, but before it got dark. Our route was to continue down the Pasquotank River, traverse Albemarle Sound and go south (up) the Alligator River to a place off Deep Point which is deep enough to anchor, moderately protected from potential winds, outside the ICW channel and reachable before dark. The little white space to the left of the word "River" in the upper right quadrant of this chart segment hit the spot. It is 2/3 of a mile long and about 700 feet wide at its widest spot.

There are about 8 boats here. We are in 11 feet of water with 60 feet of chain out. We have a potential problem because when we tried to use reverse gear to set the anchor, we heard only strange sounds. So we laid out sixty feet of chain, which, with the weight of the anchor, held us in place all night in very gentle air. If we had dragged, there was a lot of room behind us toward the channel in which the anchor, hopefully would have caught. No internet access here. Dinner, card games (Lene almost always wins), reading and in the morning we emptied the aft compartment so I could take a look at the "no reverse gear" problem. I saw how, by disconnecting the end of the cable from the shift lever at the helm, one could manually shift the boat at the engine itself. And while we had access, I added distilled water to those of the cells of the batteries that looked like they could use a few sips.
Among the boats here were "Whisper," who we met in Elizabeth City, and their buddy boat "Piper."

In fact, two of the three adorable kids who played with Witty belong to Piper, not Whisper. We accompanied them most of the next day, toward Slade Creek through the Alligator-Pungo Canal and somewhat down the Pungo River, but they had elected to go elsewhere the second day.
The AP canal is quite a bit wider and almost twice as deep as the Great Dismal Swamp Canal.

Our only scary moment was crossing under the Wilkerson Bridge, near its southern end; unlike all the other fixed bridges over the ICW, which are 65 feet high, this one got short changed and is only 64 feet high -- and we are 63.5 feet high!

Slade Creek is wide and over a mile long. We got here first, at about 2:30 after a totally motoring day, and anchored in the first bend after entry, where the wind protection was good, in eight feet of water and were later joined by two other boats. There is lots of room here.

Then chores: I dove into the brownish, tannin dyed water and cut several lengths of line from around our propeller, but the boat still makes a chattering noise in reverse. We will get this checked out in Oriental, our next stop. (Also the harvesting of leaves in the Great Dismal Swamp Canal whacked our wind speed and direction instruments making them even more in need of calibration.)  I went up the mast to reattach the halyard for the Harlem Yacht Club burgee because the halyard had worn through in the strong winds in Yorktown, completed the wiring of our two million candlepower flashlight for finding buoys at night, hung a picture, fixed a cabinet and organized our cabinets. This last in the course of looking for the two white LED interior lights that we replaced with red ones to preserve night vision. Lene does not like living in a red light district. But we have not found the white ones yet.
The problem here is flies, lots of them. Lene killed about a hundred that had invaded ILENE. She is fully screened but they got in while we were underway and the companionway was open.
Also Alphie gave Lene a scare. She was missing, Lene was crying. I looked in both the aft end and the forward end of the stack pack tube that holds our mainsail when it is not in use. No Alphie. Finally I unzipped the top of the tube to raise this sail and there she was, in the middle, perturbed that her nap disturbed.

October 25 -- Portsmouth VA to Elizabeth City NC -- 43.8 Nautical Miles

Today we traversed the Great Dismal Swamp, one of three inland routes between Norfolk and North Carolina. This is the westernmost route and most of it is a very straight and narrow (about 50 feetwide) canal

that is not very deep (about eight to ten feet).A new route to a new port.
One thing about it is easier. Normally I piece together many legs of a day's journey, measure the length of each lag and add them together. But in the ditch, the charts show the mileposts from mile zero in Norfolk to over a thousand miles later in Florida. But these are in statute (land) miles and so one must take only 85 percent of them to get the nautical miles. Today we started half mile north of mile zero and Elizabeth City is at mile 51, leading to 43.8 nautical miles. And describing "legs" would have been difficult after we exited the canal proper into the Pasquatank River, which is nothing if not sinuous. Oops, upside down. Eliz. City is the black boxes (streets) toward the upper right, the old down town.

But this path is more challenging because there is no sailing allowed, and the road is so narrow, requiring constant attention as when driving a car. Also there are hazards above and below. Below are "deadheads" -- water soaked tree stumps that lay on the bottom and give us a thump when we hit them. We know they are there and that we will take a few hits (four today) but unlike coral heads in the Bahamas, they do not sink your boat. The peril above is tree branches that overhang the canal and get whacked by our mast (about three times today).

Here is some of the flora we harvested with our mast and shrouds, showing also the straightness of the canal, the diagonal to the lower left corner.

It was a long day, but warm at last and sunny, and windless. Normally we don't like windless days but no sailing is possible in the canals so no big loss. We got underway at seven in morning mist, and headed up the Elizabeth River to make it to the first lock, at the northern end of the swamp, at its 8:30 scheduled opening.


Here we are, all five boats, locked up together.

The lock business and the associated bridge took an hour and we timed the next 22 miles at five knots to arrive at the second and last lock for its 1:30 opening, and arrived in Elizabeth City at about 5 pm. A long, slow, ten hour day.
Yesterday we crossed paths with a mammoth container ship; today a more modest craft.

Eliz. City calls itself "The Harbor of Hospitality" and this billboard

is 50 feet from our slip. It proves this true by providing seventeen free guest docks, and we took one. In the morning, a man and his daughter offered us a ride, three miles, to the supermarket and Judy and Rich, who work for the Coast Guard, gave us a lift back. Yep, a friendly town. We are bow in. On the way in we looped our starboard stern line over a piling and  then ran forward to hand a bow line to one of the friendly volunteers who secured it to a piling near land on the port side. Easy, in the absence of wind. The other two lines loop around pilings off the other two corners and I added a spring line to keep us from crashing into the street ahead of us if there was a surge (but no surge tonight) and we were totally secure. Black line is starboard aft line and white is spring line.

The last step was loosening the starboard forward tether and tightening the port one to bring our bow above the short stubby dock so that we could climb down from the bowsprit onto it.

On arrival we took free shoreside showers

and had dinner ashore before returning for the evening. There was a very easy camraderie among the crews of the boats here, all enthusiastic about their similar but individual adventures. Next to us, separated only by our biggest fender, is a beautiful Shannon, "Whisper", whose three very young, very blond children came aboard to play with our crew. Witty was not really a happy camper in this, but he played along well enough. I missed the photo op.

October 24 -- Yorktown to Portsmouth - 43 Miles

We were underway from 9:15 to 4 pm, and under sail except for the first ten minutes and the last hour after the wind died. This was quite a contrast from when we made the reciprocal passage in late may or early June 2012 when we had no wind at all. We went from a deep broad starboard reach to a more beamy port reach after the jibe, out in the Bay.
But first we were approached, fast, by an orange machine gun toting RIB. The Coasties aboard told us, politely,  that we must keep 500 yards distant from a vessel they were escorting. We barely saw it at first,  but it came up on our starboard beam with another orange dinghy escort.

Other VHF announcements to the world from the Coast Guard said that they would use force, including the possibility of deadly force, on  any vessel that got too close.

It was a clear cold brisk day out on the Bay. Lene resorted to MANY layers; me, a few less of them. we crossed a lot of water on banks that had depth in the teens before entering the deep water of Hampton Roads and later, the Elizabeth River, which divides Portsmouth from Norfolk. The Roads was the site of the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac.  This big guy passed us,

going slowly out. We were properly outside the channel, but not far enough outside to make Lene happy.





The water is deep here virtually wall to wall. And this area remains a center of Naval activity. We expected to see these guys,

but not the Battleship Wisconsin, which I had thought had been retired long ago. Note the nine huge 16 " diameter guns, each capable of hurling a one ton projectile 20 miles.

Once out of the Bay -- yes we are now south of Chesapeake Bay -- despite shaking out the reef and switching to the Genoa, we did not have enough wind and hence resorted to motoring.  We took the free dock by the Renaissance Hotel. No water, no electricity, no hands to help us with our lines -- you just get what it says, a free dock for the night - the same spot in which we spent two nights in 2012. It is across a little basin from the ferry that will run you over to Norfolk for $4 round trip. Luckily that noise and the resulting wakes stop at night.

Lene made a perfect landing and I rigged up the fender board to keep us off the pilings. We took a short stroll through town on Lene's successful search for coffee and met up with folks from four boats that are traveling together, and, since the canal is narrow here, with fixed times for lock openings they will be with us as well.  Back to our boat for a good home cooked meal. Here is Norfolk, across the river from our boat.

October 21-23 Cape Henry to Yorktown and Two Laydays There - 23 miles

The crossing was done by motor, all the way, without raising any sails, less than five hours. The wind was in our face but only five knots true, not enough to raise any waves. The only obstacle was this guy,

last seen in the sunset on the horizon from Cape Charles, who lay on anchor right on our course across the Bay. I caused another problem by accidentally turning off autopilot while trying to turn on the cockpit radio, which gave Lene a scare. The York River is wide and deep almost to its shores. We entered against the tide slowing us somewhat.

Yorktown County government runs the modern efficient Riverwalk Landing Marina here, which we visited in 2006 and 2012. We asked about staying on the outward side of the marina's floating dock (so easy to get on and off) but the friendly dock master said: "No way am I putting you there!" He was right. Both days we were here the wind howled, the river was filled with large whitecaps and the large excursion schooner, "Alliance", tied up on the opposite side of the dock from us, pitched up and down like crazy.

In fact I had planned to move to our next port on our second day here, and with the strong wind at our back and then at our side, we could have made it. But Lene and the kitties have had enough rough rides for a while and there is much here to amuse us.

The reasons we keep coming back to Yorktown is that our friends, Stan and Carol, live in nearby Williamsburg. I met Stan up at Cornell 52 years ago; he has been teaching at William and Mary for the last 36 years. They are such wonderful hosts and lend us their car, though which we provisioned and visited barbers and the drug store as well. They also shared with us two delicious home cooked meals, we took them to a French restaurant and we had mango-blueberry pancakes aboard with them and also did some sight seeing. Their home is decorated with the Carnival glass that Stan collects and the imaginative quilts that Carol makes.

I visited the Waterman's Museum, located immediately adjacent to the marina, which is at the river side immediately below the cliffs where General Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington, ending our Revolutionary War. Cornwallis surrendered after the French fleet under DeGrasse defeated the fleet of British ships containing the reinforcements that Cornwallis needed. The museum is housed in a large plantation house that was donated and transported to this site from the other side of the river on a large barge. Watermen are defined as anyone who makes his or her living on the water. As amateurs, Lene and I are not watermen. The battle of the Capes, which led to the end of our revolution is portrayed, as are piracy, fishing and shell fishing and wooden boat manufacture and repair. Here is the museum's model of a fish trap,

also called a pole net. These run for considerable distances in an east-west orientation in the Bay. About half the fish that are brought up against it by the flowing tides will swim toward the trap and can be harvested periodically from the pen at the right. These traps are one reason to not sail in the Chesapeake at night. We came too close to one of them a few days ago, before turning away.  Running into this would likely damage both trap and boat.

I learned that a certain local Pirate, when captured and convicted in England, was fined 1000 pounds by the crown to be used to create a new school in Virginia, William and Mary. Thus unlike Harvard and Yale, which were funded largely on the basis of the profits of the slave trade, William and Mary's founding moneys were the profits of piracy. I had only 90 minutes there and two docents latched onto me. Phil (wearing a "Tin Can Navy" hat) took care of me inside, followed by Bubba who filled my head with knowledge once I proceeded outside to the wooden boat sheds. Clearly, these knowledgeable gentlemen would have talked my ears off for several hours more if I had more time, which I would have enjoyed.

The next day, Carol took me to DeWitt Wallace and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museums of Art in Colonial Williamsburg, where I saw a lot of beautiful old quilts and wooden furniture, but found nothing  nautical to report to you.

October 20 Solomons to Cape Henry - 41 Miles

It was cold in Mill Creek last night, in the low 40s -- a two cat night. We have no heat except when plugged into shore power so we closed off the doors to the forward head and the salon, making the pullman cabin small, and with all three blankets, two cats and two humans, had a comfortable night.

The morning was warmer and calm in Mill Creek and we set out for Deltaville, which we had somehow bypassed on all of our prior trips.  On the way out, Lene got us onto the sand at the right side of the channel but we dropped the sail and were able to back off in reverse.

Out in the Bay, we were close hauled on a starboard tack but true wind was only ten knots and we were able to make our way close to the turn west for Deltaville using full sails.  It was early so we decided to continue on to Yorktown. But then the wind came up and we had to use the smaller head sail and the chop came up so we needed to use an assist from the engine, and the wind veered a bit forcing us further east than we wanted.  I saw that we would have to tack near Virginia's Eastern Shore and would have another twenty miles on a port beat, westward across the Bay and up the York River to Yorktown. We ended sailing almost seven hours, I was getting tired and the idea formed: Why not stay the night on the Eastern Shore?

Lene checked the cruising guide and the town of Cape Charles, with its Harbor of Refuge, a man-made basin cut into the coast line, containing its municipal marina, was close. It was approached by a well marked 2.7 mile long channel heading east and then NE. I love well run municipal marinas; they are a reply to those who think that government is the source of our problems rather than the solution to many of them. The town is about nine miles north of the actual Cape for which it is named -- the southern tip of the Delmarva peninsula. It is a quiet town especially when we explored it, late on a Monday afternoon, after giving ILENE her bath. We strolled the main drag and saw signs indicating new businesses were opening. The port is still largely for commercial fishing and barges for the cement factory across from us. But the sunset, looking across the Bay isn't shabby. Note the tanker on the horizon at the left; more on this later.

We had dinner at The Shanty, the restaurant located in the marina and I won't describe each dish (this ain't no food blog) but the cooking was imaginative, well executed, delicious and inexpensive. We bought this PVC and driftwood egret there, to add to our aviary sculpture collection.

Speaking of sculptures, here are two mermaids, seen during out stroll through town.

Two sad things happened out there today. We saw several boats, close together, off our port bow, one giving off a plume of white smoke. We heard some incoherent VHF radio chatter about a fire. Normally, such chatter is about nautical events tens of miles away. We saw a helicopter overhead. We called to offer further assistance but got no response. Then, after we had passed, the flames ranged 30 feet high and great clouds of black smoke emanated.

Someone's dreamboat is no more. News reports state that the boater was rescued by a good samaritan who got there before us; no one was injured.

The other sad event was the probable death of my Ipad. It fell out onto the swim platform and there was bathed in salt water. A smaller loss than of an entire boat, but more personal. It put a crimp in Lene's relationship with me for a while. "I told you not to leave it up here!" she said. She was in a foul mood; stewing in her anger. A few hours later I reminded her that after I had told her not to carry her cell phone in the dink unless contained in a zip lock, or stronger, plastic bag, she fell in the surf at Grand Turk Island. On that occasion I simply let her use my cell phone. Memory of that earlier comparable sad event of 2012 cooled out her anger.

October 19 -- Mill Creek of Solomon's Island to Mill Creek near Reedville - 43 miles

From one quiet anchorage to another. We had planned to go to Reedville, a nice small town, formerly capital of the menhaden fishery. These small fish are used in fertilizer and cosmetics; in NY we call them bunker. A millionaires row of Victorian houses of the captains of the fishing boats is well maintained. On our first visit, in 2006, we dinked in, toured the town and were invited to the weekly Friday night pot luck gathering in progress at the Public Library, even though we had no "pot" (nor bottle) with us. But in checking "Skipper Bob's" we learned of another Mill Creek, on the opposite (southern) side of the entrance to the Great Wicomico River from Reedville. The chart said that the water in the marked channel was deep enough and many folks in Active Captain had praised it so we changed our plan and added another new port (Cambridge was the first this cruise) to our Chesapeake destinations.
For all except the out and in portions of the day's trip the wind was about 160 degrees off our starboard bow plus or minus 20, and strong. The direction gave us the first chance to use the new preventer lines - the first time on this cruise that the wind was nearly behind us. The preventer prevents us from damaging ourselves and the boat in the event of an accidental jibe.  We did not have such a jibe today, only one very controlled jibe near the start, but it's like carrying an umbrella to prevent rain.

We saw a lot of 20 knots, some 25 and a gust of 30!  And that is apparent wind so the true wind was five to ten miles stronger. The boat got to 10.5 knots during one long memorable surf down a wave. Our chart plotter has a logging feature which records our position every half hour and computes our course made good from one such fix to the next and the distance between them. Of course this is worthless if you make big loop and end up in the same place half an hour later, in which case it shows you went zero knots and zero distance. But today we were going relatively straight, with only a  few detours to avoid hazards. During the four hour period from  10:30 to 2:30, the computer says we covered 31.7 nautical miles, for an average speed of 7.925 knots. Not bad. One half hour period shows 4.5 knots! We'll take it. I have a video of the knotmeter display, showing the speed shooting up and then back as we surfed down a wave, but not the 10.5 knot wave, and I'll have to add that video when I learn how to, because my computer says I can't due to no "previewer" installed. And another video shows a wave rushing up behind us and passing under us. If I was really good at this we could see the two on split screen, but I'm not going for an advanced degree.

This was with small jib and reefed main.
The day was clear and bright but cold, as shown by the outer layer of Lene's attire.

She can handle the boat. During the beginning of the "going in" part, when we turned west and brought the wind forward of the beam, we discovered that we were overpowered and the boat tried to round up into shallow waters. Lene steered while I furled the headsail. She also made excellent suggestions as to a good location to turn directly into the wind to drop the main, and monitored iNavix on the Ipad while we went from buoy to buoy, in to the anchorage. We had a beep at seven feet when we got too close to the shallows that line the channel and I turned to safety.
Another delicious home cooked dinner.

October 18 -- Cambridge to Solomons Island - 34 miles

Underway from 8:45 to 3:15 today.   Would have left a bit earlier but I left my cell phone at John's house and he had to deliver it to us.  Thanks again John!

After motoring out of the inner harbor the still was supplanted by breeze which built during our passage. It soon became apparent that single reefed main and small jib were enough. The Choptank River has several ninety degree bends which permitted us to beat our way out of the river, but slowly. Once out in the Bay we turned increasingly to port, onto more southerly courses which put the wind closer to the beam and eventually, slightly aft of the beam. With those two small sails we hit speeds of 8 knots and averaged about 7.5  for several hours until we had to turn increasingly to the west again, to enter the Patuxent River, which features Solomons Island (no longer an island due to landfill at the upstream end) close to its mouth, on its northern shore.

We put in here twice before -- in 2006 and 2012. The first time we stayed at a marina and explored the town and its restaurants, supermarket, and museum. Solomons is very popular with boaters and has more than ten Marinas on Back Creek (it  runs in BACK of the town?). This time we motored about a mile up Mill Creek, slightly to the east. which is one of the several creeks that branch out from the harbor. We anchored in Old House Cove, off of Mill Creek, in 9 feet of water with 40 feet of snubbed chain out. NOAA predicted a continuation of today's NW winds at 15 knots tonight so we anchored in the lee of relatively high ground. Our newly found friend, Active Captain, sort of like a "Yelp" for boaters, reports this is a nice sheltered place with good holding and we agree. It is inaccessible to the hotels, restaurants, shops and other tourist attractions of this area but that is alright by us. We did not even lower the dink. We have each other, food, books and work to do. We were about 50 yards closer to the boathouse on our bow, this view upstream in the cove. No company tonight.

The Cove is bucolic; foliage just starting to turn here

Looking out from the Cove to the Mill River. Lots of room here.

Rhode River to Cambridge and Three Lay Days in Cambridge -- October 13 - 17 -- 38.7 Miles

First the passage: The wind was predicted at 5 knots, building to 15, in our face. Not pleasant, but manageable. It came from the predicted direction, a bit east of south, but at  20 to 25 knots and one has to add five to that to account for our boat's speed into it!  And with Chesapeake Bay running generally north-south, the wind had time to work up large stiff waves of up to five feet. ILENE was pitching in these waves, some of them breaking over her bow, throwing spray back onto us. And with both these waves and the wind pushing us backwards, we were making only about four knots over the ground -- making for a long day to cover the 34 miles involved.

What to do. We changed course by 35 degrees, with the engine still working at its high speed for continuous use, 2500 rpms, and put out the small jib. Now less pitching, speed up to over six knots and a whole lot of heeling. The Saga owners network is having a discussion of the merits of adding  a ton of extra lead at the bottom of the keel (a sole under the keel's foot as it were) and with Lene reporting this was on her "ten worst passages" list, I think the time has finally come to bite the financial bullet and do this -- next winter, when the boat is hauled. I thought of taking photos for you, or video, which could have shown the excitement, but decided to keep the salt water off the iPad, which was in a ziplock bag.

Turning a bit east, into the Choptank River, the wind was 60 to 80 degrees off the starboard bow and our speed was over seven knots with the throttle turned way down.  But this wide but shallow river twists and turns and when we came to a point where tacking in the channel would have been required we elected to furl the small sail and motor the rest of the way.  The trip took seven hours, from 11 to 6.

The landing at a dock in the Cambridge YC was very poor due to Captain Roger forgetting an important rule: always check the wind direction when attempting a landing at a dock. Maybe I was tired -- a reason but not an excuse. Anyway, the wind blew us onto the dock. We should have aimed further away from the dock, stopped and let the wind blow us to the Tee dock. Instead, with some way still on, we crashed our starboard quarter with the dinghy, hanging from its davits athwart the stern and protruding a few inches out past the side of the boat on each side, catching the dink's bow on one of the pilings that support the fixed height dock.  The painter, which is one of three lines used to snug the dinghy to the boat, parted (here reattached and a foot shorter),

and one of the welded aluminum





 padeyes holding up the bow ripped open.

But we landed and enjoyed three days at the YC, though the first of them was rainy.



On the sunny days that followed we enjoyed this view from ILENE of a replica of a screwpile lighthouse at the adjacent marina. I visited our friend, John's meticulously maintained 28 foot S2, "Hearts Content" there.

 John, a former New Yorker and Harlemite was the best host one could find and our reason for staying in Cambridge. He has many talents in boating and as a mechanic, and he has a whole lot of power tools and the knowledge of how to use them. He rebuilt the interiors of the Plaza hotel and Columbia University's Butler Library as well as working for 15 years in NY theater, both on the stage and behind it. A gentleman and a pleasure to be with who put himself at our service. 

He drove us all around the town (population 12,250) showing us where everything was, took us to the post office to mail time sensitive mail, to the hardware store where we got a stainless steel padeye, bolts split washers, to the supermarket, several times, for provisions, to his home where we hacked off the extra length of the 1/2" bolts of the padeye and chamfered the edges, did our laundry and printed out a letter that was on our computer. He lent us one of his cars. He came to the boat and "helped" (let's just say he did the jobs with me as helper/learner/doer of the easy parts). He ground off the remnants of the old aluminum padeye, drilled the 1/2 inch holes for the new bolts

and we attached the new stainless padeye -- stronger than before!

We also replaced the old carburetor with the new one which had been fedexed to his house and he showed me how to adjust the idle and it works again!








We spent our days here with John and actually stayed the fourth night, when it was much calmer, at the wall of the town basin, rent free.

For our stay in the basin, he suggested the creation of the fender board, shown here, which uses two fenders and a hanging board to keep the pilings from harming the boat.

We watched John's TV. He took us to his favorite restaurants and bar, Leaky Pete's, where we had Natty Bo's (National Bohemian beer). We tried scrapple, and crab, oyster and fish.









Cambridge is a very sleepy town, which has seen better times, especially its downtown district, which was devastated by suburban stores, fires, the recession and greed. We toured its Arts Center, and visited its Maritime Museum

and the Harriet Tubman Museum, but  the last two were closed.

Here are the kitties exploring a neighboring boat at the YC; maybe they smelled fish.

And I just loved this one, which I call "Still Life with Boat".

On our last day John took us on a long car ride to the southernmost of the three Hoopers Islands, connected by road and only a few feet above sea level, and populated mostly by watermen (crab and oyster harvesters) and their families. These islands were reached after driving through the Blackwater Wildlife Preserve, a huge swampy expanse.  We had lunch at Old Salty's

which has this wonderful view of mainland Maryland, the thin line at the horizon, across the Bay,

where we will be going next. John and I are planning the next leg of the cruise, I wish we could have persuaded him to come along for a few days.

Annapolis and the Rhode River -- October 11 - 13 -- 11.3 Miles

A study in contrast: Annapolis is a hub of bustling high powered big money sailing activity, especially during the sailboat show, which this year coincided with a big Navy football game and the Columbus Day weekend: the busiest weekend of the year. The Rhode River, where this is being written, is the antithesis of this: no hustle, no bustle, we are on our anchor in complete solitude far from any other boats, after a twelve mile motor passage in light winds on a cold day in varying heavy to light rain. No wind ruffled the waters here last night or this morning..

The Rhode River was also the destination of the first voyage we ever made aboard ILENE -- at the beginning of our first season with her, also from Annapolis to here. But that night, in late April 2006, was a rough one. The wind turned from south to north, putting us close to the lee shore instead of sheltered in its lee and big wind caused waves that clanged our unsnubbed anchor chain against its roller, sounding like someone was taking a sledge hammer to the boat's metal bowsprit. Last night, with better weather forecasting, all was calm, and the same lee protected us from the gentle southern winds.

In Annapolis we had breakfast both days at Grumps, discussed in the prior post, with Manu and Michelle, the sailing duo who we met in St. Martin, on several other Caribbean Islands, up the Hudson and in NYC where they have stayed in our apartment and sat our cats. They were staying on a catamaran with Vince but moved to our boat’s aft cabin for our last night in Annapolis before driving their car south to rejoin their boat, “Teepee,” which is on the hard in Florida. Saturday was rainy and drizzly so we stayed aboard for the most part, did a lot of paperwork that we brought from home and took in a movie in the evening.

Sunday we went to the boat show and it is far too big to see in only one day, much less in the five hours I spent there.  I had planned to dink across Back Bay to its north side and then walk for 20 minutes or so to the show. But the dinghy engine was still not fixed and I recalled the mechanic’s voice: "it might still have a problem in its fuel pump". So I hitch hiked and Lene got a ride from Manu and Michelle after they helped her drop off the one-way rental car from NY.  The water taxi brought us back for only $6 per person.

At the show, I boarded only two of the hundred or so boats present: One was the Jeanneau 44 RDS (raised deck salon), similar, I would have thought, to the Jeanneau 43 RDS we saw -- and thought of buying -- when we were at this show in 2005. But not really, because the concept of a RDS has apparently changed in the last nine years. Then, the boat’s cabin’s salon sole was a step or two up, permitting the persons seated at its dining table to look out of wraparound windows on both sides and forward.  The new concept RDS does not raise the sole and the windows, though large, are only on the two sides, not forward. Persons seated at the salon dining table have to stand up to see out. I’m glad we got the Saga.

 The other boat I toured was the Moorings 48, a catamaran: These are immensely popular in the islands but I had never been on one and Lene met a guy who talked up catamarans so I had to take a look. The big advantage is that the tremendous width of the boat means it does not heel much. Each of its two hulls is divided into two cabins, one forward and one aft,  each suitable for two persons and each with its own identical head and shower. The second deck is the living space which is huge -- I’m guessing about 800 square feet. It has a different feel when sailing. And we don’t know enough people to run a four bedroom hotel. I’m so glad we have ILENE!

The bulk of the time was used visiting a few of the hundreds of vendors of things nautical or tangentially nautical. Lene fell in love with extra absorbent thin cotton towels and they will call to see if they have one left in her color. We bought red LED bulbs, a good paring knife, a waterproof pouch for a cellphone and a scrap of navy blue tape to patch up scratches in out boats name lettering as well as polarized UV protectant inexpensive sun glasses. I met Paul, of our Club, a sailmaker at the booth of Doyle, one of perhaps a dozen sailmakers and sales reps for Pantaenius, our insurer.  I met the manager of North Summit Marina, where we went aground. He told me we could pay half price if we stop there on the way back.

The manager of River Dunes Marina, where we stayed on our way back in the spring of 2012, offered us his card with a two nights for the price of one offer.  A south island New Zealand winemaker gave me samples of her Sauvignon Blanc: first her regular fruity and second the premium dryer wine, while another booth offered a sweetened creamed rum.   We got the name and number of customer service for the manufacturer of our side ports to obtain a replacement for a dog for one of them that broke about four years ago. Numerous publishers of magazines, books, charts were present, as well as manufacturers of specialized hardware, clothing fashions and shoes.
But the potentially biggest purchase for us could be a new Rocna anchor, like the one on Pandora. We have been offered the boat show price, about ten percent off, with free shipping. Lene really went for this item which means greater peace of mind when at anchor because of the way it grabs the bottom fast and holds. We have a call in to Pandora’s Bob, to determine the proper size and hence weight and to find out if the pattern for the specially made brackets is available. No trade in because the Rocna has become so popular and highly recommended by impartial sources that no one wants the old ones.

Jim and Ann invited us to a delicious dinner at their apartment and also invited Manu and Michelle as well as Ann’s friend Carolyn. A lovely land base evening spiced with talk of the sea.

Michelle, Manu, Ann and Jim

With help from the mechanic at A&B Yachtsmen, we have ordered a new carburetor to be delivered to us by Fedex, care of John, a former Harlemite who was part of the group that took Nick out of the Hebrew Home for the Aged for a sail during the summer (See Blog).  John lives in Cambridge Maryland, on the eastern Shore, and that town is our next stop, about 34 miles from the Rhode River.