May 4-5 -- Yorktown to Anchorage Behind Sandy Point and to Herring Creek on the Maryland Side of the Potomac-- 49.7 and 36.0 Miles

In the last post I mentioned battens and ratchet straps. But a picture is worth a thousand words.

Battens are the dark horizontal stripes, probably originally made of whalebone like corset stays.

Big new ratchet top and wimpy
  old one, bottom, snug the dink
to the boat once it is raised

A leisurely morning with a 9:00 start from Yorktown. This was our fifth visit there by boat.
Wind was from the south and light as we went SE down the York. We put up the main and went a bit too far around York Spit in the sense that I had intended to turn north sooner but was mislead by the poor display of the Raytheon chart plotter. No harm done, just an extra mile or two. I had also contemplated saving another few miles by going through the "Swash Channel" across York Spit, but it was near low tide and I decided to avoid that narrow spot. We took that channel in 2006 when southbound and I still remember the agita.
We had good tide all day and with the wind and waves from the south helping the engine we were making very good speeds. At times the wind died down but then it came back. We shut down the engine and sailed the last two hours and it was a pleasure. We went wing on wing for about 45 minutes and, after jibing to the west, we sailed all the way into the anchorage with main and small jib.
I had plotted the way to Deltaville, which was nearer, and to Reedville, which was further. We were making such good time on this warm and sunny day that we decided to go long.  We dropped the hook at 5, with 70 feet of chain in 16 feet of water. It was a 9 to 5 day. The lighthouses of the Chesapeake are functional but not really pretty.

Both Reedville and Deltaville are popular spots which we have visited, but the same waters that contain them also contain several other creeks and places where one can anchor. With winds from the south, the shallow bay created on the north side of  Sandy Point, about a mile and a half upstream from Reedville, looked ideal and we were the second and last boat to arrive.

At dawn we could hear that the wind had picked up, a lot more than the 5 to 10 knots predicted. We saw that we had dragged, perhaps 100 yards, and were still dragging at about a tenth of a knot, i.e., 600 feet an hour. So we had several hours before we would run out of water. But no one likes to feel that they are unstable and moving unpredictably. So we pulled up anchor at 6:45, raised the main in the harbor and sailed off for the Potomac.

I had plotted courses for sets on anchorages on both the northern, Maryland (Smith Creek) and the southern, Virginia (Wicomico River) sides of the Potomac, each only a few miles up the river, but we got such an early start that we decided to go further, to Herring Creek, on the Maryland side. Further today means less far tomorrow. To gain speed, we headed further east than the lay line, to bring the wind off our tail, before jibing past Smith Point Light.
But then things got really boring due to lack of wind and it was a boring motor passage to Herring Cove. We worried about the depth in the channel, with rock jetties on both sides, so we called the marina. "No problems with your depth, Captain, but there is a bump about ten feet inside the jetties so stay towards the side at that point."
After anchoring I lowered the dink to gain access to the swim platform and dove to look at our noisy propeller and at times heavy rudder. The diagnosis:  There are no lines being dragged by out rudder or prop. the top of the rudder is a spot that our professional diver at Jekyll Island missed.  I took the scraper and got rid of barnacles growing there. ILENE came equipped with a system named "Spurs". One set of knife blades is fixed to the boat and does not turn when the propeller does. Another, with a very close tolerance to the first, is fixed on the propeller shaft and turns with the propeller. As the one rotates against the other they should catch and clip off any line, such as from a float on a crab pot, that could otherwise get wrapped around the propeller. In October and recently again, it seems we did hit some lines, and cut them. But in the process, a part of the system was jerked backward from its proper place and rotates too freely, making a noise. I think that's the problem, again, and while annoying, it it not harmful to the boat. At least that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. We need to find a way to fasten it more tightly because we are going to hit pots, careful as one would like to be.

Thus the rattle may be due to a recurrence of the original problem that arose just before Oriental NC on our way south. Will be cured in the fal.
Just after dinner a strong storm came rolling through and we sat in the cockpit waiting to spring into action if needed. We saw lightning but did not hear the thunder. We saw gusts up to 35 knots. Before it hit I added 20 feet of chain, making it 90 feet in 10 feet of water, a hurricane scope. But after half an hour of wind, we got a moderately strong rain and the wind died as the front came through. During the night the Creek was calm.