By the time the last bit of Tropical Storm Dennis finally got out of Hampton, we were ready to get out of Hampton, too. On Wednesday, September 8th, we slid away from the dock and headed out to the Chesapeake. The James River was much more placid than it had been the last time we'd seen it, for which we were thankful.
We did some sailing and some motoring, and approached Yorktown under sail in late afternoon. The York River is fairly deep and wide, and it narrows quite a bit between Yorktown and Gloucester Point on the opposite bank, so by "conservation of river" it is incredibly deep (as much as 80 feet) just barely offshore. We sailed parallel to the beach, ridiculously close to shore, and got a nice view of the town. Just before the bridge which spans the narrowest part of the York, we gybed and crossed the river to Sarah Creek, where we anchored.
The next morning, we dinghied across the York and pulled up on the beach next to the post office. It was a mile and a half over a somewhat choppy river, but a piece of cake for our big RIB (rigid inflatable) and big outboard. We tied up to a rock and walked to the Yorktown Victory Center.
For those of you who are not American (or English :-), or who slept through history class, the victory at Yorktown was the one that essentially ended the Revolutionary War in 1781. The Victory Center museum has a timeline explaining the events leading up to and through the war. Displays highlight individuals whose letters or diaries provided information on the effect of the war on their lives, including soldiers, loyalists, women, and slaves. There is a soldiers' encampment on the lawn next to the museum, and a reconstructed farm of the era, both staffed with men and women in Colonial garb.
During the siege of Yorktown (the British General, Lord Cornwallis, held the city, and General George Washington retook it with considerable help from the French), the British army sunk a bunch of their ships in the York River, to prevent them from being taken by the enemy. Exploration and excavation of these wrecks were begun in the 1930's, and a more sophisticated excavation of one ship was made in 1975. We were amazed that divers could have found anything in the murky water and strong current of the York -- it turns out that they built a cofferdam around the wreck and then filtered the water with swimming-pool filters so that it would be clear enough to work in!
After lunch we strolled through the city, where many buildings still stand that were built in the 1700's. One, the Nelson House, is open to visitors, so we stopped in for a look (and to get in out of the drizzle which had started around lunchtime). It's amazing how well-built and well-preserved some of these old houses are. The brick walls are all in great shape, other than a few dents where cannonballs hit the house during the battle. By the time we got to the actual battlefields it was raining hard enough that we only gave them a quick look, but we did go into the National Park Service visitor's center for another dose of history.
The historic places we've visited have been a real highlight of our travels. The first museums and monuments we saw made us painfully aware of our relative ignorance of anything other than "history's greatest hits", so in Philadelphia we bought Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People at a used-book store. This has turned out to be an absorbing and consistently interesting book. (So far, that is. I'm only up to the mid-18th century; Britt's in the middle of the War of 1812.) Either high school history texts are deliberately written to make history as boring as possible, or history is like broccoli -- it takes "grown-up tastebuds" to appreciate.
The next day's north winds gave us fine sailing back down the York, but making miles was hard once we got into the main Chesapeake. The waves were choppy and we had to sail very tight to the wind, which made for a rough ride. Since we hadn't gotten a very early start, we opted to pull into East River, on Mobjack Bay, for the night. Once we got behind New Point Comfort the water flattened out, and we had a quiet and still anchorage.
More north winds the following day meant more of the same -- a good downwind sail out of Mobjack Bay followed by a hard beat into winds out of the north. We sailed northeast almost to the shipping channel, then tacked northwest to make the mouth of the Piankatank River in one long tack. We anchored in Jackson Creek, the first tributary of the Piankatank, after negotiating the most devious entrance to any of our anchorages so far. The creek appears to have a wide mouth, and there is an obvious set of markers a little to the right of center. But after going through these marks, the channel swings farther to the right and goes almost up to the beach on the far edge, then makes a hard left (practically a U-turn) and parallels the shore for a couple hundred yards before entering the creek proper. It's all well marked, but unless you're forwarned (or watching the numbers on the marks) you might think that the marks on the right lead into a tributary rather than the main creek, go directly from the first marks to the last marks, and hit bottom in the "wide entrance" that's actually only a foot or two deep. We kept an eye on the numbers, and followed a local sailboat in for good measure, so came to no grief.
We had come to Jackson Creek because it's the closest anchorage to Deltaville, Virginia, and we had come to Deltaville because of a 15-minute conversation in the rain the week before. When we moved to the marina in Hampton to weather Hurricane Dennis, we'd called the marina on VHF channel 16 as we approached. Shortly after we tied up, a couple watching from the dock walked up and introduced themselves. Pam and Pete Wright are hams (the radio kind) and had a portable scanner with them; they'd heard us coming in and decided to check us out. We talked sailboats (they have a 26' trimaran), radios (we want to get our ham licenses, too), and websites (theirs is www.wrightslaw.com). They were visiting Hampton for the weekend (by car), and invited us to stop by their home near Deltaville, which is the town on the peninsula formed by the Piankatank River to the south and the Rappahannock River to the north. Their house is at Stingray Point, the tip of the peninsula, which was given its name by Captain John Smith after a painful (and almost fatal) encounter.
We hadn't been able to get our new friends on the phone, so, going on a vague description of where their house was, we dinghied to shore, hopped on our bikes, and rode out toward Stingray Point. The community out at the point has the air of a summer camp, with modest cottages scattered along dirt roads in a pine forest that's not too dense to hide the views. As luck would have it, the first people we stopped to ask directions from turned out to be the Wrights' next-door neighbors!
We got a gracious welcome (despite having shown up entirely unannounced and unexpected), and had a terrific time gabbing over coffee and pie, watching Hurricane Floyd on the Weather Channel, and touring the neighborhood. We all strolled out onto a fishing pier at the point, where Pam and Pete's friends Henry and Diane were catching spot and croaker. Henry was extremely generous with both his advice and his gear, giving Britt a couple of fistfuls of lures, swivels, and other tackle. Fishing seems to be extremely popular around Deltaville, as evidenced by the vending machine outside the Texaco where Pete directed us to buy bait. Don't expect Coke or Pepsi here: this vending machine sells bloodworms, nightcrawler and squid! (And they were sold out, too.)
After a look at their boat, lunch out, and a stop to see a bald eagle that's nested near Stingray Point, we headed back to town on our bikes to buy a few groceries. Before we went shopping, though, we stopped back at the marina where the Wrights keep their boat, because while we were there earlier we noticed Windom's almost-identical twin. We walked up to it and introduced ourselves to its owners, Betty and Ray White, by saying, "We have a Caliber 40 too!" We had a fun chat aboard Casa Blanca.
We got an early start the next morning in order to catch a favorable tide for the long haul up to Solomons Island. The first part of the 56-mile trip was in good east winds, but they got weaker and weaker until, just after we s-l-o-w-l-y passed the lighthouse at Smith Point at the mouth of the Potomac River, we finally turned on the engine. The winds picked up again as we approached the Patuxent River, so we made the last few miles under sail. We anchored in Mill Creek after just over eleven hours on the water.
The next morning, we hoisted the outboard onto the dinghy and headed to Solomons. Our first stop was the visitor's center of the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, which is operated by the University of Maryland (my alma mater). After lunch, we spent the rest of the day at the Calvert Marine Museum, which was still not enough time to see everything. There is a great display on fossils (nearby Calvert Cliffs is an important fossil site) and several aquarium tanks focusing on the denizens of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. One large tank contains several three-year-old sturgeon, which are the focus of a recovery program on the Bay. Atlantic sturgeon used to be plentiful -- they were an important part of the diet of the Jamestown colony in the early 1600's, and in the nineteeth century attempts were made at a local caviar industry -- but now are very uncommon. They are huge fish at maturity; a model of the largest known sturgeon caught in the Chesapeake hangs above the tank, and it's14 feet long!
Outside the main museum building is a boat basin with a few dozen skiffs and other historic vessels, including the oldest licensed passenger boat on the Bay, a bugeye built in 1899. (I spent some time looking at the display of boat models of the types that originated in the Cheseapeake, but I still can't tell the difference between a bugeye and a skipjack. They are both shallow-draft wide-beamed boats with long-boomed sailing rigs.) The old Drum Point lighthouse is also part of the museum. This lighthouse is one of three "screwpile cottage" style lighthouses on the Chesapeake. The other two are the old Hooper Strait lighthouse, which is now on display as part of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and the Thomas Point lighthouse which is the only one of the three which is still a working lighthouse.
During the day, Pete had called and left a message on our voicemail warning us that Hurricane Floyd was on its way. We listened to NOAA weather radio and decided that if we didn't get up to Annapolis right away, we might not be able to get there in time to make our appointments. We also thought that getting further north and up the bay would lessen the impact of the weather; Solomons is a somewhat exposed point. The forecast promised east winds 10-15 knots, which would be perfect.
The next morning we woke early and headed out into the least pleasant day we've had on our trip. The winds were from the northeast, too much out of the north for us to beat against, the seas were choppy, and it rained on and off all day. (Even with all this, as we headed out the mouth of the Patuxent, a windsurfer zoomed across our path. Some people are just nuts!) We tried to sail for a while, tacking as close to the wind as we could, but we weren't making enough headway to make any sort of reasonable time, so we finally gave up and turned on the engine. Even motoring, our speed was not that great, because of the headwinds. Motorsailing with the main up helped a bit.
We listened to the Coast Guard on the VHF, responding to distress calls. We could only hear the Coast Guard side of the conversations, but it sounded like more boaters than usual were in trouble. We came close to being in distress ourself as we approached the Thomas Point lighthouse, as the engine abruptly faded and died. Since we had traced our earlier problems to the fuel filters and replaced them, we figured that one of the new filters had just gotten clogged up, so we switched to the other fuel tank. But we couldn't get the engine to restart, so we put up the sails and worked our way slowly north while Britt checked everything we could think of. We finally got the engine started by just giving it lots of throttle; Britt thinks the system just had problems sucking in the diesel. But then, after only a short time, the second filter started showing signs of clogging. Britt put the spare filter onto the first tank and we made it with no further problems. But now, replacing the fuel filtration system with something more robust is a major priority.
Annapolis Harbor was deserted; only three of the moorings were occupied, and one of the moored boats left while we were circling around, waiting for the Spa Creek drawbridge. We figured that with the approaching storm, nobody wanted to be in a moderately exposed anchorage on a mooring of unknown strength. The marinas were full, though, and we got one of only two empty slips back at Petrini's, our old homestead.
After putting out a good web of docklines, chafing gear, and fenders, we closed up and snuggled in for the duration. Hurricane Floyd was supposed to hit somewhere in the Carolinas, but we knew that because of its size and strength there would be nasty weather for a few days even up here. We were happy to be as far north as we were, but we worried about Vern and Kathy on Andante, who had headed south from Hampton. They'd called a few days before from Morehead City, North Carolina, so we knew they were right around Hurricane Central. We called them from Annapolis; they were on the Intracoastal near Cape Fear. Andante was in a marina, stripped of all canvas and strapped into a slip, and they were hunkered down in a condo, awaiting the storm. The next morning we heard that Floyd had made landfall at Cape Fear, weakened but still packing 110-mph winds. As of Friday morning, we still haven't been able to raise them on the phone, but that's not too surprising considering that phone lines and towers are down all over the coast. We hope they and their boat are ok.
Well, here we are in Annapolis again, having completed our grand circumnavigation of the Delmarva peninsula. It's clear that we could easily spend a year bopping around the Chesapeake and still not see everything of interest. We're going to have to catch some of the places we missed on the way south this fall, and if we come back to this area in the spring we'll still have more to see.
When we left Annapolis in July we had made arrangements for an equipment arch to be built for us when we returned. This is going to be done next week, and then we will have to buy and install the equipment we want on it. We'd like to get some alternative energy (solar and wind generators) and an external GPS antenna, and a pair of cockpit speakers so we can listen to tunes "on the road". We have also discovered, as so many other boaters have, that we really need to install a second VHF in the cockpit -- the handheld is just too weak, and the radio at the nav station isn't convenient to use since someone needs to go below to use it, and if the motor's on it's terribly noisy there.
One thing that has become clear is that our priorities for boat work have changed as we have done some cruising and seen what works and what doesn't, what we still need and what we probably shouldn't have bothered with. A new fuel filtration system, another anchor, and a whisker pole for downwind sailing are all on our new list. We have a photoelectric switch that we need to install to automatically turn on our anchor light. A self-steering system of some sort would make sailing a lot less tiring. An SSB or ham radio setup would allow us to receive weatherfax data.
We're doubtless going to get only a fraction of things done before we need to start heading south. As long as the important things are taken care of, the rest we can live without or do as we go.
