Solomons Island to Solomons Island – Chesapeake Bay Part II

Sunday September 21st, 2008

With Tropical Storm Hanna behind us, we were closely watching Ike’s path and staying low until we knew Ike was headed for the Golf. We are certainly glad we were not in Ike’s path. We managed a trip up to Annapolis for 6 days. At our cruising speed it was about a 5 hour run up the bay. I know I say this about all the towns but, Annapolis was truly special. A little bigger than most of the places we have been visiting but quaint none the less. Another city filled with lots of historic buildings, museums and landmarks. We visited the Naval Academy. Wow what a great campus. Beautiful historic buildings and state of the art facilities. The 4400 students all receive a Bachelor of Science degree which takes 4 years and then they need to spend 5 years serving in the military. At noon each day they all congregate in front of the residence where they all live and they do formations (picture). Directly afterwards they go for lunch which is served to all 4400 off them in 4 minutes. Their diet is 4000 calories per day yet none of them are overweight. They are in full uniform always. Very disciplined and from what we gathered their curriculum is quite in tense. Anyways it was an interesting tour. We also just hung around the town eating in historic restaurants and shopping on little narrow streets. Annapolis is said to be where Kunta Kinte (Roots) was sold when he was first brought to America. This weekend here in Solomons there are tall ships and a War of 1812 reenactment. The tall ships (see picture) are wonderful to see and watch. We had to pass on the war reenactment. Enough history for now. We came back to Solomons and have been here another week and a half. We have found some nice beaches that we can dingy too and take long walks. The people we continue to meet are great. We are getting to know more and more experienced cruisers who have graciously shared their experiences. We plan to leave here tomorrow and spend the next week in the lower part of the bay before starting to head south in early October. The gang here had a going away party for us last night. Margaritas set the theme for a Mexican Pot Luck Dinner. We hope to see everyone again along our travels but only time will tell. I hope everyone back home is having a great day. My mom is celebrating her 70th birthday and my brother his 50th today. I’m sure it is a great party. Save me some cake.

Cape May to Solomon’s Island – Chesapeake Bay Part I

Saturday September 6th, 2008

Wow time is just flying by now. We have been in Chesapeake Bay for almost three weeks already. We started in Chesapeake City which is a small gem of a town on the Chesapeake Delaware Canal (C&D Canal). The town is filled with small bed & breakfasts all circa 1850. There are many tiny unique shops. If only we could store more stuff on the boat, I would have lots of neat things to bring home. We had our first local crab dinner. What a fun experience. It’s not something I would want to do regularly but cracking open the crabs and digging for the meat was a fun experience and the morsels of delicious crab were well worth the work. The picture is from two weeks later when we had another crab dinner with friends from Solomon Island. Our teachers, the second time around, were Mike and Mary. We managed to extract a lot more out of the crab with their direction. As you can see eating hard shell crab can be quite barbaric.

From Chesapeake City, we made our way to Rock Hall where we met Captain Bob Ziegler, a wonderful man from St. Augustine Florida, sailing single handed while his wife visits with grandchildren. Bob has traveled the eastern seaboard many times and was very helpful going through our charts and pointing out anchorages for us. From there our journey took us to St. Michaels, again, a great little town. Here we met Judy and Bert who, along with the waitress Leslie, kept us entertained all afternoon. We went on to Oxford next and found more great people to hang around with. We met 4 couples from Herrington Harbor who were moored together in the Oxford creek. They made us feel like long time friends. An inside joke for them, "kerfuffle" a variant of "curfuffle." Other forms include "carfuffle," "cafuffle," "kafuffle," "kufuffle" and "gefuffle." However you may spell it, "curfuffle" means a "disorder, flurry, or agitation, a fuss, a ruckus, or a state of disorder."

We headed from Oxford to Solomon Island to rendezvous with our friends, Tim and Jan from Fenelon Falls. Here we are, almost two weeks later. We are staying at a marina working on some needed boat maintenance and now waiting for Hurricane Hanna to pass by. We will use Solomons as a base until the end of September when the peak of the hurricane season is over. The people here are great as well. The area is a fisherman’s dream. We had about 9 bluefish given to us by a local fisherman one afternoon. The picture is John, Vic, and Al cleaning them out. I’ve noticed that Tim enjoys the fruit of the labour but has a supervisory role only when it comes to cleaning. Soon after we had the bluefish, we met Ed, his wife Randi and their son Garrett. Ed graciously invited Al to go fishing for a day on their boat “Just Peachy”. They caught 17 Mackerel and 2 Rockfish. While Al got hooked on fishing I spent a relaxing day hanging out with Randi here at the Marina. It is so nice to get off the boat occasionally. One of our new friends here, Pat has a car and she has generously taken us shopping several times. What a pleasure it is not to have to haul our supplies in a backpack for a change. I’m finding it is the littlest things that give great pleasure when you are living on board for so long.

Tropical Storm Hanna was due to hit us today. We spent most of yesterday preparing but it really was anti-climatic. The winds only got up to about 25 knots. Even boats that were not well secured weathered the storm without incident. For us, we were happy to be safe rather than sorry.