Day 259: Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Port to Port: Still Pond Anchorage to Chesapeake City, Maryland
Underway: 7:53 am Motor Off: 1:10 pm Miles Traveled: 25/21 Stayed At: Free Dock
Mile 21 to Mile 0: Weather is going to be a deciding factor for us over the next few days. Currently, today and tomorrow look okay although the wind is supposed to pick up from the south 10-15 with gusts to 20. Not good weather to get across the Delaware so we are going to take it slow and spend a day and a half in Chesapeake City and a day (hopefully) in Delaware City at the north end of the Delaware waiting for a better weather forecast. Right now, Friday looks good with winds out of the northwest 5-10. We’ll see tomorrow.
As such, today was a relatively short day. Last nights anchorage was beautiful – scenic, easy to anchor, completely protected and quiet. We were all alone on the water. There are advantages to getting going a little early in the spring. We had an uneventful cruise up the last section of the Chesapeake – it’s a relief to be done but there is so much more to see we’ll have to come back some day. A couple boats passed us going north and a couple towboats pulling large ships passed us going south. Towing one of these ships done a narrow canal has to be a nerve wracking challenge. I hope we don’t meet one later this week.
We arrived in Chesapeake City in the early afternoon and found the free docks empty – you never know what you are going to find but we got lucky again. This weekend these will probably be packed with partiers – there is a bar restaurant just kitty-korner from us. We are on a nice floating dock and large clean public restrooms are a few hundred feet away. They charge $15 for electricity and $10 for water but we need neither so this is a wonderful place to hang out for a day or two.
The sun came out a little while after we docked and it got hot – a rare event so far this spring. For some odd reason, I decided to scrub the dinghy – it had gotten dirty in Baltimore and it looked like a derelict. That project went so well that I decided to clean the hull on Aurora too. She has an orange eyebrow two feet up on the bow and a foot up from the waterline all the way around. It will get dirty again – especially on the Hudson but it annoys me to look at it all the time. A couple hours of the right chemicals and a little scrubbing and she looks almost like new. Cindy plotted our course to Delaware City and Cape May, New Jersey at the south end of the Delaware so we can mostly relax tomorrow and poke around this little town to see what surprises we can find.
