May 19-22 -- Solomon's to St Michael's and Three Lay Day There -- 50.7 Miles

Underway 9:30 to 5:45.  Winds "light and variable" said NOAA. And they were directly from the north until noon when we put up the rags as our course came to 020 and we were on a starboard close hauled reach which broadened. We passed some interesting sights. Cove Point Light disproved my prior assertion that there are no pretty lights in the Chesapeake.

Night passages require you to keep in the center to avoid unlighted fish weirs like this one, quite a ways off shore.

  This is part of a dock for the off loading of liquid natural gas into tanks ashore.

A voice on VHF told a boat passing closer than a quarter mile to keep off - security zone.

For about an hour we sailed without the engine, at about four knots; light and variable. Back to engine when our speed got down to two knots. Lene heard something funny and reported that no water was coming out of the salt water cooling exhaust, so we quickly turned the engine off and continued slowly under sail. I checked the intake of seawater into the boat and it was not clogged. So we tried again and either we had not had a problem in the first place or it went away spontaneously. Warm seawater spurted out of the exhaust, again.
Our friends, Mike and Janet, ex Harlemites whose lovely home we visited in Ft. Pierce, FL, have their summer home here. Janet scouted out the anchorages, which get crowded on beautiful summer weekends. In 2006 we came here twice and docked once at the marina and once in the Maritime Museum. But it was Tuesday and before Memorial Day, and there were no other boats on anchor so we came into the small inner harbor, in eleven feet of water on 65 feet of snubbed chain. This was preferable to the large but exposed anchorage out in the river where it is about 18 feet deep. Our private cove.

Lene looks happy after the passage, her last of this winter, and her smile makes her look great, but then again she always looks great.

During the night the wind came up and either we dragged a bit or our rode got stretched out straight in a different direction. Either way, we appeared closer to the land behind us so we picked up and reanchored.
We dinked in to the public dock and bought groceries at Acme. I got both a postcard and an outfit for my granddaughter when we toured some of the local shops. Returning to land after lunch, we were picked up by Mike, driven around town and to their great home where we hung and talked about old times.

Later we enjoyed dinner with them at the Miles River YC. Yum. A very nice club with an active racing program including Star class boats that are stored ashore and winched down into the water for races. They also race dugouts which are very old fashioned wooden boats with three sails. Their interesting quality is that in lieu of a keel, they use people, as many as four per board, as many as four boards, tucked under the lee gunnel and extending about ten feet out the other side. There crew members are human ballast, leveraged to keep the boats upright. In the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum they show a video of these races. Wild! The same sort of idea are raced in Geogetown in the Exumas, Bahamas.
It was the next day, after we had sweet potato mango pancakes at Mike and Janet's house, that I visited the museum, seen here from the dink tied to ILENE, with its screwpile lighthouse.

First thing a saw was this T-shirt, which I did not buy.

It further gives the lie to my prior assertion that none of the Chesapeake lighthouses are pretty. It was raining all day.

Another boat came in while Lene was aboard and I was in the museum, and anchored near us. Pretty close but not two close, seen here at sunrise the next day. During our last night, three others crowded in as well.

I spent some time talking with the volunteers who build and repair wooden small craft in the museum's boathouse. I learned how they make round masts and spars: they start with a square log and plane off its four corners resulting in an octagonal one. Next step makes it a sixteen sided and then 32 sided, which appears round, but it is sanded with paper stretched across a frame so it has a rounded surface. Neat tricks.

The center of the museum is an exhibit on the myriad ways that folks have used the water of the Bay: as a livelihood, for pleasure as housing and the myriad variations of boat racing, yacht clubs, camps, fishing, etc.

 One three-tree "canoe" exhibited in the boat shed was placarded as having a beam of 6'2''. No way was it that wide; I told the museum people.
Mike and Janet lent us their car on our last day and we drove for sightseeing in nearby Easton and visited its art museum. There we met John and did some provisioning.  John drove back with us in his car in preparation for his voyages for the rest of this cruise, from here back to NYC. This gave Lene the opportunity to drive his car to NY and park it at the Club so John and I will be able to offload perishables and necessaries back to our apartment and he will have wheels to get home to Cambridge MD. This also means that Lene avoided the NYC - Chesapeake passages on both ends of this cruise.
We had planned only one lay day in St. Michaels, two in the Wye River, which we loved in 2006, and two in Annapolis, before the start of the passages home. An all day rain killed off the Wye River and John's schedule made it better for all us to leave from St. Michaels for home. It seems that plan B usually wins out over plan A.