Friday, June 22, 2007

Chesapeake Bay

Harness Creek, Annapolis, Maryland
38 56.1N 76 30.5W


It's now nearly 3 weeks since we left Norfolk. We have cruised slowly north along Chesapeake Bay and for the first time have had the chance to be away from towns and have cruised the rural areas of Virginia and Maryland. It's a beautiful part of the world, the countryside is quite English, very green after Australia, and covered in woodland, fields of cows and beautiful expensive looking water front weekend retreats.

The weather has been very hot and still, so a lot of motoring, the only time the wind appears is during the frequent thunderstorms. We tend to get one every 3 days, and one huge one a week. This means that one minute you are anchored in a beautiful creek sipping a beer the next you have 50-60 knots of wind and dragging boats everywhere. So far we have stayed put each time, but a couple of weeks ago we had a big 53' boat miss us by only a few feet as it careered past dragging the anchor at 1am. Means we get the passage style feel of being woken up in the night even though we are day sailing.

We have had visitors from New York, met Tim's "cousin in law" who is also sailing here, and hopefully have a couple more visitors over the next few weeks, so are managing not to get bored of each other just yet ;-)

We arrived in Annapolis on Wednesday, and spent a great day yesterday exploring the area. There are thousands of boats here, but not Fort Lauderdale style ones, just normal sailing and power boats. The town itself is beautiful, winding streets, 18th century houses and lot's of nice looking restaurants that we must try, not having been to one for 3 weeks. It's an easy walk from the anchorage to the supermarket, bottle shop and West Marine so we may stay here a week or so and do some boat chores in between the tours and eating.
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