Goodbye Chesapeake Bay

Our stay at Solomons Island was indeed at least 3 days, in fact 4 days, due to wind.  Solomons Island is a thriving small boat harbor a few miles up the Patuxent river. A very nice marina to be at though, with lots of social activity.  

And although this picture belies it, we did have sustained strong winds most of the time we were there.  

Of note, Judy picked up a copy of James Michener's epic novel, Chesapeake, in Oxford and we have been reading it from there.  It has really helped bring to life the history of the Bay. 

The marina is host to the  longest-running ocean crossing rally in North America, the 'Caribbean 1500', which is considered a must-do for many cruisers. The fleet sails from the Chesapeake Bay to Nanny Cay on Tortola, British Virgin Islands. The rally website indicates that the most difficult part is timing the weather window before departure. Fall on the East Coast is squeezed between late summer hurricane season and early winter gale season.  Well we certainly know that!

We visited the nearby Calvert maritime museum which focuses on regional paleontology, estuarine life of the Patuxent River and Chesapeake Bay, and maritime history.  Judy is standing beside hogsheads of tobacco, which the economy of this region was so dependent on in the 18th and 19th centuries, based on slave labor of course.  

The area also is home to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, which is where the carriers inbound to Norfolk discharge their aircraft before docking. So there is a bit of aircraft flight activity in the area, but fortunately not too much while we were there. 

As I have indicated before, "weather days" are also known as maintenance days, and I tackled the generator service including oil and filter change and zincs.  The worst part of that job is accessing the unit as it is enclosed in a sound shield that you need to be very lithe to access for disassembly and reassembly. 

We rode our bikes to the south end of the island to see the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science which is a large campus.  

The wind did blow to Gale force Tuesday with sustained 30 knots late in the day and near 50 gusts.  Wednesday was lighter but still not good for travel. We departed Thursday morning at 0645 for the run down the Patuxent and watched the sunrise in Chesapeake Bay at 0730.  

Our objective was to get to Norfolk while the going was good, as this was forecast to be the only good day in about a 10 day window.  We spent some of the time running at 16 knots (9 knots is our usual) to shorten the day as the wind was forecast to pick up later in the day at the mouth of the bay.  The 100 mile run, which took us past the Potomac, Rappahannock, York and James rivers was the longest of our trip so far, done in 10 hours and we were docked at Marinaside in Norfolk before 5 pm.  The last 1.5 hours is full of interesting sights entering the largest naval base in the world.  

At the southern end of the bay, we were greeted by a number of dolphins, welcoming us back to the more pleasurable waters of the ICW. 

We have enjoyed another 3 days in Norfolk.  We visited the Douglas MacArthur museum and memorial, which is nearby.  He of course was the Commander of Allied forces in the Pacific in WWII and accepted the surrender on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  Why a Navy town to honour an Army guy?  His mother was from here. The memorial is very well done with a chronology of his career. 

We also took the ferry across the river to Portsmouth to walk the historic district, and visit the Norfolk naval shipyard museum.  

The lightship below is an example of a lighthouse used where building a conventional lighthouse was deemed impossible.  Another version seen at both the St Michael's museum, and the  Calvert museum, is a screw pile lighthouse, whereby the light was built atop of piles literally screwed into the soft bottom, as the shoals would extend miles from the land and a lighthouse built on the land would not be a good indicator of safe navigation. 

Our tour of Chesapeake Bay has to be classified as a limited success.  We did get to the places we wanted to visit on the eastern shore, and we saw a number of interesting sights. At the outset, we had 3 reasons for spending a month in the Chesapeake.  First is that our limited time spend here two years ago made us realize there was lots more to see, and we wanted to see more of the Eastern shore.  Second, was that we had to kill a month before the official end of hurricane season and our insurance allowing us to head south.  Third, and maybe most important, is that after 18 months layup I expected some unexpected "issue" to arise and I wanted to be close to service.  Indeed, we did have an issue arise, the seacock / strainer failure, and we were fortunate to be well served by the equipment supplier.  

Of the 30 days that we spent in the Bay though, 15 were spent awaiting weather (wind).  And although we certainly believe in the old maxim that the last thing you want on a boat is a schedule, those delays certainly put us a bit behind where we thought we might be by now.  

We will spend a couple of days at our "home port" of Atlantic Yacht Basin in Chesapeake, for provisioning, fuel and waiting a parts delivery for a minor maintenance issue, then re-start our travels south.  We plan to take a different route this time for the first few days, and will report on that in the next post.