October 15, 2007

At anchor, ICW Mile Zero

Portsmouth , VA

Sea Wings, Sea Wings, Sea Wings, where are you????

This author has been greatly remiss in not updating our email log for weeks (ok, more like months) and I have no real excuse. We have had time, but it always seemed to get filled with something else and days turned to weeks, etc, etc. So I have a lot of catching up to do.

We arrived today at mile zero of the ICW with our bow pointed south back to Jacksonville for a few weeks, then on south to the islands. We were last at this location on July 26 with the bow pointed up the Chesapeake Bay and we have explored the east and west shores of the Bay for all of the time between. Trying to put all of that into one long installment would be not only long but even more boring than our shorter updates. So I will concentrate on the highlights and low lights of our weeks on the Bay.

We tried to see as much of the Bay as practical, crisscrossing back and forth between the western and eastern shore, with river trips up to Washington and Baltimore. While we made many stops, I will concentrate only on our favorites, the ones that have stayed with us for reasons good or bad.

The first weeks saw us on the lower Bay and we landed on the western shore anchored in Deltaville, VA for almost two weeks. This is truly a unique town in that it has only 900 residents but over 3,000 boats. With only one main street and a notable lack of tourist “traps” it did have every marine service you could need. There were new boat dealers, an Ullman loft, electronics specialists, glass work, Yanmar dealer, etc, etc,…………it even had two West Marine stores!

The lack of tourist appeal meant that all the restaurants were local, there were no high rise condos, no McMansions, no resorts, no WalMart, but lots of boats and boat people and always lots of cruisers. We were also struck by two boat facts…….all the local fishing boats, even the ones parked behind the larger, newer homes, were traditional working boat style (called “deadrise”), most looked to be homebuilt, and a very obvious lack of the flashy center console and ‘cigarette’ boats we are used to in Florida.

The second was that while most of the marinas in Deltaville have more boats on the hard than in slips (they have winter up here) both the ones in and out of the water are in excellent, seaworthy condition. Rarely do you see the derelict boats that crowd our marinas and anchorages in at home.

And the marinas are always full of cruisers passing either north or south or storing their boat while building the kitty or taking a land sabbatical. There are probably a hundred sailboats on the hard at Deltaville Marina, and reading the home ports on their transoms is like taking a trip around the country or the world. Also, it was the first stop on our trip where sailboats outnumbered powerboats, like maybe four to one!

To illustrate the attraction of Deltaville to cruisers……. one day we were leaving the Deltaville Marina lounge after doing our laundry and bumped to a familiar looking fellow carrying a small paper bag. Turned out to be our North Florida Cruising Club former commodore, Rick Elbracht. Seems he was in Hampton on business and had an afternoon off so he drove to Deltaville, stopped at the local convenience store, bought a beer and headed for the marina looking for some cruisers to hang out with for the afternoon. So we spent an enjoyable afternoon on Sea Wings pumping Rick for information on the Bay from his cruise several years ago. It was lots of fun, and how random!

After a hundred mile trip up the Potomac River, we spent almost two weeks in Washington, DC. The Capital Yacht Club was recommended by several cruisers we had met along the way and we intended to say there for a day or two to service the boat, do the laundry and then move onto anchor. But we enjoyed the members and club facilities so much that we ended up staying there the whole time. The slips are reasonably priced, the library stocked with a great selection of nautical titles, the bar is inviting and bartender Rob mixes smooth drinks and always has great tunes on the sound system. Oh, and it is also located within easy walking or bike distance from the mall, so being a cruiser/tourist is really easy.

Not only did we enjoy the national museums (the new Air and Space at Dulles and the Hirshorn Gallery were our favorites) but even more so the time we spent with our longtime friend Casey Clarke. We have known Casey since she was two years old when we met her and her parents on a weekend sail to Shell Island off Panama City, FL. She and our daughter Blair have been friends for years and now after graduating from college she was working in DC. We arranged to meet her and her significant other, Steve, at the Yacht Club. They were going down the river to pick up their boat, then meet us and raft up for the night.

As they motored up, Casey was shouting, “I’m engaged, I’m engaged!!” Turned out that Steve had popped the question on the boat ride up the river. So Casey invited a group of friends over and we got to host the engagement party on our boat, just as we had done only a year before when Blair and Ashley had gotten engaged on the beach in Virgin Gorda, BVI and we hosted a similar party on our charter boat. And thus began our adventures in DC with the twenty-somethings.

Casey and Steve invited us to join them and some of their friends for “Screen on the Green”. We asked if they really wanted to hang with the oldsters, but they insisted so we joined them for the last in a series of six movies, shown on a gigantic screen on the mall between the Capital and Washington Monument. The movies, sponsored in part by HBO, were shown one night a week for six weeks and the final one was “Casablanca”.

Now you have to picture this……literally tens of thousands of people on blankets eating and drinking wine awaiting dark for the movie to begin. At one end of the mall the monument awash in lights, at the other the lighted Capital building. After a cartoon, the HBO theme is played to introduce the movie(the one they play before feature movies on HBO). At this point the entire group (tens of thousands) of “HBO dancers” jump up as one and dance for the 15 seconds or so as the theme plays. Then we all sit and watch the flick. What a blast!! And the next morning you would never know it had happened. Gone was the sound stage, the gigantic screen, the trash and empty wine bottles, the port a potties, all gone, spic and span.

But the best was yet to come. After she took us on a walking tour of Alexandria and dinner on the water at Georgetown, we were invited to the coup de grace…………….the Demolition Derby Championship at the Montgomery County Fair. Seemed Casey had become a fan and wanted to catch the championship. So it was off the fair, cotton candy, corn dogs, warm beer and all the local color that is so much a part of the fair atmosphere. Then to the grandstands to witness the action in the “Arena of Thrills” as the locale talent tried to outdo each other in junk cars. For several hours the cars crashed away at each other, the smell of burning rubber and steaming anti-freeze hung heavy in the air and the crowd of mullets and mohawks jumped and waved and cheered. The best action was provided by the “bumble bee” class consisting of small, imported sedans. They didn’t have enough weight to KO each other quickly so they flailed away at each other for what seemed like hours.

After eleven days we finally headed back down the Potomac and up the western shore to Solomons Island, MD (the original home port of Sea Wings). We stashed the boat there for a week and drove up to Pennsylvania to visit Lew’s family. We had a long overdue visit with the folks and then headed out across the bay to the eastern shore and St. Michaels, where one of our biggest adventures awaited us…………..

Best regards and fair winds,

Lew and Lyn

SV Sea Wings