Rick has been telling me for years what a difficult thing it is to sail a boat to Maine. So far, I’d have to conclude that he’s been lying. At least at this stage of the trip, our days have been filled with sleeping late, bird watching, swimming, napping, reading, eating and drinking. Pretty tough to take….
The most efficient route to Maine from Baltimore is to go through the Chesapeake/Delaware canal, then down the Delaware Bay to Cape May. The only alternative would be to go down the Chesapeake, south to Norfolk, but then you would add an extra 350 miles or so because you would have to go around the Delmarva Peninsula. Apparently, you have to time your trip through the canal to take advantage of the tides. Ideally, you should use the tide to pull you through the canal, but at the very least, you don’t want the tides working against you. Then on top of that, you need to have just the right wind conditions for the second and much longer leg of the trip to Cape May, the slog down Delaware Bay. Rick has been doing a lot of figuring, and it looks like Monday (July 4th) is the best day to try to get to Cape May through the canal. Even then, we’ll probably have to motor because the wind will be too weak for sailing. And all this calculation three days in advance.
So… what to do until then?
We spent our first real night away from the dock in Still Pond which is the farthest North I had ever been. I remember a few years ago making a trip in my husband’s boat (at that time he had a Bristol 29) over to Rock Hall and being violently ill the entire time. We spent the night near there and returned the next day, so it was a memorably long bout of seasickness. Making it to Still Pond (and enjoying the trip) is in my mind an enormous accomplishment.
Still Pond is a lovely little spot, true to its name, and we took full advantage. The water this far north in the Chesapeake has very little salt in it, unlike the brackish water closer to the ocean. Swimming was great there, and not too buggy. We even took the dinghy to shore and did some exploring. There was a farmer’s field hidden away behind all the trees, and we happened in on a number of scattered groups of deer who were making dinner of the crop. There must have been at least a dozen, and we watched them, unnoticed, for quite a while.
Rick rigged up a sunshade to provide his pale-skinned wife with some shade in the cockpit. He's had this thing for some time - it came with the boat when he bought it second hand - but I think he saw it as a bogus item for wimps and non-sailors. In these 90plus degree days it has been a life-saver, and now Rick has been completely won over to it.
At this point we have decided that we can take our sweet time getting to the canal. We spent the following day lazing around, and left late in the day for the Sassafras River – getting close to Elk Neck State Park. Yet another idyllic spot, except for the gnats. And I mean GNATS! The boat was covered in them after dark. Thank God for mosquito netting. The other problem with our spot here was that everybody and his brother were out on their boats, this being the big 4th of July weekend and all. There were fast and noisy cigarette boats, little motor boats, cabin cruisers, police and fireboats, jet skis, etc.. All those boats make for quite a rocky sea, and the Tortue did a lot of rockin and rollin.
Yesterday we ventured just a little farther north to the Bohemia River. On the way, we stopped at a little public beach in Betterton, anchored the boat and took the dinghy in. Betterton is a very quaint little Victorian resort town, and we walked around a bit before heading back to the boat.
There has been no usable wind yet this far into the trip, and we have yet to use the sails at all. If you are really into sailing, I’m sure this would be a big disappointment. For someone like me, who is desperately trying to not get sick, motoring has been a very pleasurable thing. Less heeling over, less of a bumpy ride, less wind, small waves… The part of our routine I have grown to love the most is motoring to the next spot during the cocktail hour. Rick sets the autohelm and we both take drinks and snacks to the front of the boat. You get a panoramic view – if we were actually sailing the jib would be somewhat in the way.
It’s fun to admire all the cottages/mansions along the shore – “Oh I love that one!” “I would never paint my house THAT color”, etc.(as if…). We came across a small bit of land that turned out to be a trailer park; it looks like a Pueblo reservation, or a section of Sao Paolo. The people there get an amazing view across the bay, but the obviously wealthy mansion owners across from them have to look across at this. Small justice.
When we pulled into the Bohemia River there were a number of sailboats already anchored in Rick’s favorite spot. Oh well, so it’s a little crowded. There was just enough light left to have a little musical interlude, so we quickly got out the fiddles. It wasn’t very long before we couldn’t see the music, so we tried to do some improvising. Rick likes to pick out tunes on his viola – usually sappy melodies from old movies, or things like “O Danny Boy”. His current favorite is the theme song from “Foyle’s War”, so I tried to pick out an accompaniment. I am SO classically trained that doing something by ear with no music is really hard for me, but I did my best. I’m afraid we sounded like two cats in heat. At some point, Rick saw another boat coming in to anchor, and was surprised that they didn’t stay. I wasn’t…
Next stop – Chesapeake City!
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