st. mary's river.

anyone who cruises the potomac river knows about st. mary's.  st. mary's city no longer exists but st. mary's college sits on top of the excavation and it is a beautiful campus situated next to an absolutely gorgeous body of water - horseshoe bend on st. mary's river.  i would imagine that the tranquil scenery would be very conducive to study and things academic!  it is where tom's youngest, ted, went to school.  we were meeting up with ted and his wife, maggie, as they were returning to officiate the national collegiate sailing championships.  they managed to squeeze in some time with us to get caught up.  i failed to get a photo of the trash bag with all of the empty beer cans that they took back with them when they left the boat.  i completely forgot to bring out my camera! in fact, i had to steal a photo of father and son from maggie (thank you, maggie!).

we know what ted will look like in his 50s

i managed to remember to get a pic of the sailing boats. 

and a pic of a boat i wouldn't mind owning.  don't get me wrong - tadhana is beautiful - but the fleming...  well, see for yourself.

a fleming 55

and the sunset. 

palmer cove.

from olverson's, we went back down the yeocomico river to palmer cove, not very far away.  apparently, some people (eric and chris) who live along that cove own a boat that tom and his family had built and eric and tom had been in contact.  palmer cove is very pretty but it is built up and no place to beach consuelo that isn't private property, so it had never been a consideration as an anchorage until now. we were invited to tie up at the home's dock but we declined as anchoring is just so much simpler and more comfortable - one anchor dropped as opposed to four (or more) dock lines tied, tweaked and re-tweaked, not to mention fenders and fender boards. in the meantime though, we were welcome to use their lawn as consuelo's toilet so that worked out pretty well.

consuelo's toilet

we decided to park ourselves for a while as we didn't have to be in st. mary's until monday.  both tom and i had work to do and, of course, the endless boat projects, which are just so much more fun to do when at anchor.  the difference between tom's and my approach to projects is marked - i usually find something lying around that i can use while tom's projects are much more involved, requiring design and engineering and power tools!  they also sometimes require a trip to either west marine or the hardware store and may take several days.  he also often improves on my jury rigging.  we went for our usual dinghy ride exploration expedition and visited a couple of boatyards that tom described as "the place where old wooden boats go to die." pretty sad.  tom's and my take are one and the same when it comes to boats - NO wood on the outside!  yes, they can be very pretty.  no, we don't have the time, the inclination or the funding for the maintenance required.  anyway, consuelo got very tired after all of that, i guess, and wasn't particularly interested in dinner which worried me a little - when has she ever not taken an interest in food??  we were invited for dinner at eric and chris' home and i overruled tom's suggestion that we leave her on the boat because i wanted to keep an eye on her.  she was fine, as it turns out, but like any other child, she made it pretty clear after dinner that she was bored and that it was time to go home.  yes, she has been embarrassing me for 13.5 years, what can i say?  good thing she is so cute. 

the next day, sunday, was picture perfect - you couldn't ask for more spectacular weather or more beautiful surroundings.  it was like going to church - a religious experience.  we had our usual sunday morning pancakes and bacon for breakfast and then opened up the flying bridge which had been covered up this whole time.  days like these are what cruising is all about.

here is the obligatory sunset photo:  

sunset at palmar cove

the only "fly (literally) in the ointment" was that it seems to be midge season.  every morning, the boat was covered with these mosquito look-alikes.  they came at night, attracted by the lights, and although they do not bite (at least!), it was a pain having to clean the dead bodies off the boat every day. if you didn't, they left marks that would be harder to clean off the longer you waited.  the evening we went out for dinner, the transom lights were accidentally left on.  when we dinghied back to the boat, the transom was BLACK with the bugs.  i heard a sound and i thought we had left something running until tom pointed out that it was a collective buzzing from the little buggers!  all three of us stood on the swim platform for a while.  tom unzipped the cockpit enclosure and reached in to turn off the lights and i was waving away in the dark with a paper bag to get them away from the door and then 1-2-3, open door and rush in en masse and slam the door shut!  good grief...  :(

here is a little more information on our bug:

LINK:    chironomidae

olverson's.

from price cove at st. george creek, we decided to cross the potomac from MD to VA and head to olverson's lodge creek marina on the yeocomico river.  the weather was not looking good for later in the day and we were running a little low on water and well, let's face it, i was starting to have withdrawal symptoms from not doing laundry!  for those who don't know, if  you are an MTOA member, you get one night free at olverson's and we decided to take advantage of that. olverson's is not high end but they call themselves the friendliest marina in the bay and they certainly are friendly and helpful. most of olverson's consists of covered slips and even if you have a slip without a roof, the walkway is still covered which was really kind of nice since it rained a lot while we were there.

there is a unique culture here in virginia with respect to the covered slips and it's not just at olverson's. people start decorating - you have the standard "it's 5 o'clock somewhere" and "margaritaville" signs and posters, strings and strings of little colored lights, flags, mobiles, plaques, and then some people really start going wild with stuffed deer heads, stuffed fish, giant clocks  and other weird things hanging from the ceiling, nailed to the posts, etc.   for these people, their boats in their covered slips ARE their vacation homes so they start adding furniture, basically extending the inside of their boats to out on the docks to better socialize with the neighbors.  you have the usual chairs and tables, some couches, and grills and smokers, but then the more creative ones start building - dock boxes to hold more stuff, bars and bar stools,  whole kitchen counters with cabinets and sinks and then they bring in the appliances - electric fans, TVs and full-size refrigerators!   those who had big boats in their slips that they eventually replaced with a smaller boat, will build over the slip to extend the dock so that they have more space to put stuff.  it's really quite incredible - you walk down the dock and feel like you're walking through someone's living room!  i think that for anyone who has never been, a visit to olverson's or D dock at norview marina in deltaville, if you are ever in the area, should be mandatory!  it's a unique experience.

we didn't expect to stay as long as we did at olverson's but since they had a courtesy car we could use, we decided to drive down to deltaville the next day, pick up some stuff at storage, three weeks worth of snail mail, including tom's new folding bicycle, a special order at west marine and then go grocery shopping.  all of that took pretty much the whole day.  we had a huge thunderstorm that night with lots of lightning and the next day was pretty wet and miserable, too, so we decided to stay one more day and ended up borrowing the car again and driving to colonial beach for lunch.  that was nice because the last time we were there, we were just passing through, only spent the night at the marina which is a couple of miles from town, then left the next day so we never got to see the place. while walking in downtown colonial beach, through a pottery shop window, i saw a woman carrying THREE beagle puppies so i had to go in.  the one little female was just absolutely adorable but i had to walk away.  consuelo, who was waiting in the car, would NOT have been amused.  the lady said she found the puppies by the side of the road in la plata, MD.  someone had just dumped them there.  she was looking for good homes for the puppies but, well, we weren't in the market for a new puppy.  i have done the geriatric to pediatric thing before and let me tell you, it is not for the faint of heart.  beagles are especially difficult because they require more entertainment than normal to keep them focused on you instead of following their noses.  even tom said he was tempted.  please....  one dog is enough!  it was hard to walk away though - she was just so soft and sweet. 

we also stopped at a couple of obscure marinas/boatyards.  this is something tom and i both enjoy doing - just walking through boatyards and poking around.  other people do antiques, yard sales, or whatever, but we do boatyards.  the one at coles point has a spectacular view of the potomac.  anyway, it was fun to play hooky from work.  we had originally planned to cruise to colonial beach but it really was too far away by boat for this trip and the land cruise in the rain did us just fine.  i also enjoyed the sight of "amber waves of grain" although not all the fields were quite amber yet.  just seeing those grasses undulating in the wind and the rain as we drove by, i thought it was beautiful.  since i grew up in the suburbs, farming has always been something pretty foreign to me.  i'm not very good with plants either - i manage to kill most of them - so it is probably best that i just look at other people's work. in any case, it was a fun day despite all the rain. 

not too many photos for this blog entry.  the rain just killed all the light.

memorial day weekend.

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. 

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. 

spectacular sunset at price cove on st. george creek

my mama duck.

there are other stories that i want to tell besides the usual about where we went, what we saw, who we saw, tips for other cruisers, etc.  this story is about my mama duck - i want to tell it before i leave her behind for good and she forgets all about me.

it was after a winter storm early last year, 2013.  one of our neighbor boats at regatta point marina had a swim platform that was very low to the water and it was littered with debris, mostly pine needles.  i never paid much attention, passing it while walking up and down the dock, but one day, i noticed the duck.  she was easy to miss, a little brown thing blending right in there with the debris, just sitting there not moving and i wondered - is that a nest?  well, one day, when there was no duck sitting there, i took a closer look.  it just looked like a clump of pine needles and junk but there were indeed 12 eggs and she had covered them up with more pine needles!  cool, i thought - i can watch this development, it will be fun!  i did some reading up on mallards and i walked by several times a day to check on her.  i had some dog food left over from the swan (another story for another time) so i brought some over and tossed them on the swim platform and left.  when i came back later, the food was gone, so i started bringing some every day.  well, the crows found the nest one day while the little mama duck was gone and they got three of the eggs before some of my neighbors managed to chase them away.  we were all pretty upset about the broken eggs and i decided that i better not be tossing food all over the swim platform to attract the crows either.  instead, i put a pile of food behind the nest and camouflaged them with some pine cones.  the first time i did that while the duck was sitting on the nest, she got up in fright but she wouldn't leave.  i just kept talking to her in a soft voice and left as soon as i had put the food down so that she would know that i didn't mean any harm.  also, her nest was getting a bit thin so i brought over some more pine needles and the next time i looked, they had been rearranged and incorporated into the nest.  this went on for about a month - food and pine needles - she would watch me warily but she never got up anymore when i came over.  in the meantime, from 12 eggs, it became 9, then 7, then 5.  i really have no idea what happened to the other eggs - i checked at least once a day but that was about it.  two of the 5 eggs hatched into cute little fluffy ducklings but the next day, they were nowhere to be found and the little mama the duck stood by the nest for a little while looking lost and confused.  then i didn't see her any more after that.  i was heartbroken and depressed.  when i inspected the nest after she left, there was nothing there but pine needles - not even egg shells or any trace of anything remotely duck.  oh well...  it was sad and i didn't want to talk about the duck for a while.   but i did have photos at least, so for one brief moment....

link:      mama duck and eggs

a few months later, in the dead of summer, tom came home in the rain one day and told me that there was an injured duck on the walkway from the parking lot so i went out to look at it.  was it the same duck?  i think so.  she wasn't afraid of me.  or maybe she was just too weak.  this duck looked like it had been attacked by some animal.  she had puncture wounds on the top and the sides of her head and all the feathers had been stripped from her neck.  she was also wet, which is unusual for a duck.  she just looked sick and weak.  i didn't know what else to do so i brought her a handful of dog food and she ate that right up, so i went back to the boat and brought her another handful, and from that time on,  a couple of times a day, i'd come out and look for her and give her some food.  she was never in the same place but the funny thing is how every time i was out, she was somehow always around, not too far away.  i kept saying that i didn't want her to know where i lived but pretty soon, she had figured that out and would come over and chirp at the door.  the bad part was that a drake started accompanying her and before i knew it, i had TWO ducks to feed.  he was always scared of me and wouldn't come close though.  interestingly enough, neither of them were scared of consuelo at all.  in the meantime though, the wounds were healing and her feathers started growing out again and covered up the scar.  i transitioned the two to cracked corn instead of dog food but they didn't seem to understand the corn so i mixed in some dog food with it but the corn was so messy on the dock that i decided they had to have bowls.  that was funny because they didn't understand bowls either.  these were clear glass bowls so i didn't think it was going to be so complicated but apparently, it was, so back to dog food - i had to make a trail of dog food that led to the bowl and it took a little while before they finally figured out that you went over the top of the bowl instead of whacking your bill on the glass!  the drake was hogging the bowl so then it became two bowls, one for her and one for him.  and then it became three bowls, one for water to push the corn down.  it was getting out of control!  but after a while, they came less and less and one day, they didn't come at all.  i kind of missed them but we were cruising every weekend anyway. 

link:    injured mama duck

they showed up again in the late fall.  by this time, they had both gone wild, not coming too close but hanging around like they were remembering me from somewhere.  i knew it was my mama duck because of the bump on her head  - scar tissue.  the corn got thrown in the shallows instead of being served in bowls and they didn't come every day.  sometimes, the tide was just too high and i couldn't throw the corn far enough and it would sink too deep for them to dabble so i started walking up the dock to the shallows with the corn.  they eventually began to follow.   and so it went - corn in the shallows behind our boat at low tide and corn in the shallows by the fixed dock at high tide.  they didn't come regularly though. in february, we moved for a month to the port urbanna marina as regatta point was having a water issue.  when we got back, it  took two days before the ducks showed up again.  one stormy day in april, they were standing on the floating dock just behind the boat, waiting around.  when i came out, she went to the finger pier close to the door and chirped.  it was windy, it was raining, and they wanted to be fed?  the drake backed off as usual but my little brown duck had no fear.  so i dug out the glass bowls again.  who knows what goes through their little duck minds?  certainly not i!  i just feed them. 

link:   bowl feeding

this spring, my little brown duck was scarce.  i suspected that she was nesting.  she did come over late one night though when tom and i were just getting home from dinner out with friends.   she followed me home so i came out with some corn for her but it was high tide so i had to walk back up the dock to toss it in the shallows.  that was the last time i saw her before we started cruising again.  interestingly enough, the drake, who had always been wary of us came over ALONE three times for bowl feeding.  he had never come without her before.  i had hoped to see her one more time before we went off cruising.  now i'll never know if she had a family or not.

hailstorm.

so far, we have been having a very pleasant stay at drum point marine despite the fact that we are here because we are broken.  there is a west marine within walking distance so tom has managed to get some projects done.  no excuses since supplies are readily available.  gary, drum point marine's owner, is himself working on replacing our circulating pump at the current time.

yesterday evening at about 1700h, we had some weather come through.  tom had been watching the radar because we wanted to run over to west marine to get some non-skid tape and didn't want to get caught out in the rain.  i asked about closing up the cockpit enclosure and he said that we had time.  i no longer listen to him about not bothering to close the overhead hatches when we leave - i ALWAYS close those. it doesn't matter if there is NO chance of rain, they will be shut no matter what.  living in deltaville all these years, we have gotten used to seeing weather cells on the radar approaching and then splitting up and leaving a clear window right over us - i don't know why this happens but it often did.  the northern neck of VA would get slammed and those of us on the south side of the rappahannock river would be just fine (except, of course, for the tornado in 2011 - EVERYONE felt that one!).  in any case, this is not what happened.  we did make it back from west marine in plenty of time before the wind and rain arrived and then we got blasted with hailstones as big as marbles!  this went on for a while and i have to say, it was really quite alarming.  i've seen hail before - pea-sized and lasting for a few seconds - but nothing at all like this! the racket was horrible.  the water was boiling. the whole thing was nerve wracking.  after what seemed like a really, really LONG time, it stopped and all was quiet. the wind died for about a minute and then it started up again, this time going the opposite direction and then came the torrential rain.  it didn't last long and when it was over, the sun came out and it was like nothing had happened - except for the fog over the creek created by the ice falling into the water and mud and run-off cascading from the land into the creek from the rain.  we stepped outside to check up on things and  aside from being seriously plastered with leaves, the boat was fine.  in the meantime, gary and crew were out fishing at the mouth of the patuxent river and i was a bit worried about them. they came in a couple of hours later and they were fine, too.  it was really something.  scary even when you think about it with that wind changing direction like that, like there was some kind of circular vortex going on.  i'm glad that we were tied up at the dock instead of anchored for this one.

tom took a video while all of this was happening and here is the link to it: 

hailstorm

i took a not-very-good photo through the window:  

hailstones! 

so much for planning.

we stayed in oxford for a week.  or rather, consuelo and i stayed in oxford for a week while tom was gone to martha's vineyard over the weekend. it was very relaxing and campbell's town creek marina is a really neat place.  it's small but very comfortable. when we left, the plan was to cross the bay heading south and then make a decision about where EXACTLY we were going to spend the night depending on how things went. it was really a nice day, great weather, and both the choptank river and the chesapeake were pretty flat.  that always works for me.  i don't enjoy the banging and the crashing, listening to my dishes rattling in the cabinets, watching consuelo be terrorized, etc. etc.  we decided that instead of staying a night in solomons and picking up the anchor and moving again the next day, we would just head straight to smith creek on the potomac river and then sit at anchor for a couple of days.  about six miles south of the patuxent river, i asked tom a question, the answer to which was to be found in the engine room.  lucky thing because when he opened the hatch, he discovered a lot of blue coolant fluid in the oil pan under the engine.  now, tom is mr. safety himself.  he had crawled all over the engine room checking on this, that and the other before we left oxford, and if there had been a leak then, he would certainly have noticed it.  the leak must have just happened so it's a lucky thing that he had an excuse to go down there.  anyway, he filled up the coolant overflow container and started checking around.  he found the leak and his provisional diagnosis was that it was the circulating pump.  anyway, we called drum point marine in solomons.  these are the people who repaired tadhana's engine after we got hit by lightning in 2012.  their top technician is a girl named katie.  ok, i am going to digress a bit here.  diesel mechanic is kind of an unusual profession for a female but my theory is that because she is a woman in a man's world, she simply has to be better than any of them.  that's how it usually works.  katie and i got along great and tom was very impressed with her.  i think someone asked us back then if we had a problem with a woman working on our engine.  WHY would we have a problem??  the bottom line is that the work gets done properly, no?  the added advantage was that katie was NOT messy - you know how some mechanics leave greasy fingerprints everywhere?  they are usually men :)  as it turns out, katie's pretty well known in her profession and not just because she's the only rose among the greasy thorns.  in any case, i just happened to have katie's personal cell phone number.  it's who you know, you know.  tom spoke to her a while and then we turned around and headed back north to solomons.  for some strange reason, now when i look at the hairpin curve track on the chartplotter on my computer, i just find it amusing.  tom had the kitchen timer set for every 10 minutes to remind him to open up the hatch and look at the overflow container to see how much coolant we were losing and how quickly.  when we ran out of coolant, he just ran fresh water through the system.  we went slowly and limped in to solomons. katie and gary, drum point marine's owner, both met us at their service dock.  they couldn't have been nicer or more helpful. katie confirmed tom's diagnosis and so it was just a matter of available replacement parts.  and so, here we sit in a boatyard again - at  least this time we don't have to be hauled out.  after we got settled in, i went back to work and when i looked up from my computer, i thought my  view was very pretty.  drum point marine's yard is at the head of back creek.  if you don't look at the boatyard itself, which, i'm sorry to say, is a disaster - it looks like a junk yard - the cove that it is in is very nice to look at.  tom suggested that i take a photo of "the view from my desk" at every place we stop.  he said i'd have quite a collection and i thought that was a really neat idea so i'm starting this collection with back creek as my first photo.

the circulating pump will not be installed until friday, two days from now, as they are waiting for the part and tomorrow afternoon, drum point marine's employees are scheduled for a fishing expedition.  that is fine.  if one is going to be stuck for a while, solomons island is far from a bad place to be stuck.  both tom and i are getting work done.  we have electricity.  we have water. we have wifi and it is easy to get consuelo off and on the boat.  grocery store, west marine, post office and restaurants nearby and as long as i'm facing my computer, i've got a terrific view with lots of action  - ospreys, great blue herons, mallards...  and the bickering barn swallows seem to like to hang out on tadhana's railing, too, so i get a close-up of them every time i look up.

as an addendum, i would like to reiterate the cruiser's definition of cruising:  "cruising is doing boat repair in exotic locations."  we got our baptism of fire early on in the course and it wasn't even that fiery either.  let's hope it stays that way!