we left solomons and the drum point marine crew as soon as the broken circulating pump was replaced, which was about noon, and had an uneventful passage south to the mouth of the potomac river. NOAA has been consistently wrong with their weather predictions so far. it had called for quite a bit of wind but the chesapeake was pretty flat and we rode the current most of the way, making very good time. upon rounding point lookout into the potomac river, it got a little choppy AND there were crabpots to dodge but for the most part, the notorious mouth of the potomac behaved. we dropped the anchor in one of smith creek's little coves and hustled to get consuelo off the boat and to the beach. she'd been holding it long enough and all three of use were under some stress regarding that. i actually already had her locked up in the cockpit just in case. NOAA called for a NW wind for the next couple of days and that is how it started out but then the wind did a 180 and our USB modem, which had been working fine all this time... well, all of a sudden, NO internet! grrrr... and i was working, too. and then we swung back to face NW and voila, back online! the wind just kept swinging us around and the signal was on and off. it got really annoying. i managed to get my work done although it took longer than usual; however, at 1:30 in the morning, after finally shutting down, i stepped outside and was able to catch the predicted meteor shower and that was pretty neat to watch. tom, unfortunately, was fast asleep, so he didn't get to see it; however, he got up early the next morning and saw the sunrise, as well as two ospreys chasing two eagles. i missed all of that - i was dead to the world at that hour. we went out for a dinghy ride and saw a better place to anchor, closer to a beach for consuelo, so back we went to the boat and we moved anchorage. well, and the same thing happened again! when we were facing NW, we had internet. if we swung around, we did not. it was very frustrating. in retrospect, the next time this happens, i am going to try moving the cradlepoint router, which has the aircard attached to it, to a different location on the boat and see how that works out.
we also had another nasty surprise: the cups on our anenometer were missing - it looks like the hailstorm from the other day had knocked them off! oh well... probably the reason why when we had that little bit of a blow come through at the new anchorage - it was so little that by the time we had time to get over our surprise, it had come and gone - tom checked our weather center at the time and the wind speed indicator said 6.7 knots. huh?? later that afternoon, as we were approaching the boat on the dinghy, he happened to look up and noticed that all three cups were missing from the anenometer. i guess it was just too much to ask to have escaped the hailstorm completely unscathed.
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| all three cups missing from anemometer, knocked off by the hail |
we explored all of smith and jutland creeks by dinghy and got more sun than we probably should have. jutland creek reminded us very much of the corrotoman river. and i got to see a little osprey harass a big bald eagle, too - incessantly - those ospreys are tough! tom and i worked on boat projects - you know, those little things you say you'll get to when you find a bit of free time? well, we had free time so they got done and aside from the internet issue (again), the holiday weekend was very relaxing until a bunch of yahoos in little boats and jet skis showed up at consuelo's beach, made a lot of noise and started a bonfire. they left a lot of beer cans AND they did not douse the fire at 10:00 p.m. when they finally went home. sigh....
on monday, memorial day, we pulled up the anchor and ran over to st. george creek, also on the MD side of the potomac. up-creek, it is pretty built up so we didn't bother going any further than just past the harry lundeberg school of seamanship at piney point. you can't miss it - the building is huge. we doubled back and checked out tarkill cove but the aircard went kaput there and we had had enough of THAT at smith creek. we moved on to price cove which has a nice long beach and is probably a really popular spot but we figured we'd have it all to ourselves in the late afternoon and at night when all the day people were gone. it's a pretty big cove so the tubers and jet ski folk usually move on and are annoying somewhere else rather than just circling around the same place all the time. it also got really hot in the early afternoon and tom and consuelo had to check their eyelids for leaks. when it cooled off, we all went to the beach for a really long walk.
the one really good thing about consuelo's being banished from our bed is that i don't go nuts anymore about her getting dirty. she went wading and rolled in the sand and i stayed calm. she got hosed down on the swim platform and toweled dry and she was "clean enough." we had dinner and watched a particularly spectacular sunset. yup, holiday weekends are a pretty good thing! ok, i confess - i had to work but there wasn't much of it so it still felt pretty festive.
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| spectacular sunset at price cove on st. george creek |
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