Almost Normal

The wind dropped, the temperatures rose, and George and I went out for a few days at anchor. Since we started sailing to the Bahamas, spending a night or two at anchor on the Choptank River seemed like no big deal. Now that we are quarantined due to the pandemic, and we couldn’t sail at all for a month, it seemed like a very big deal to us. The wind and temperature were delightful and life seemed almost normal for a couple of days. We saw our friend Willem, on Mariner, as we sailed down the river. We anchored in Trippe Creek on the Tred Avon River and had the anchorage to ourselves. In the evening a boat with what sounded like small children came and anchored not far away. In the morning we saw that it appeared to be a grandfather with two young granddaughters. We watched as grandpa raised the anchor while the youngest girl—probably around six—was at the helm. He had given her a very brief tutorial which we heard —“this is forward, this is neutral and this is reverse”—before he walked up to the bow with the older child. It went well until he asked the driver to put the boat in neutral. For whatever reason she wasn’t able to do it and the boat kept moving and went right over the anchor. The older girl finally ran back to the helm and got the boat in neutral. Grandpa eventually got the anchor up. As they were leaving grandpa told the driver to point the boat toward a particular house in order to leave the anchorage but she basically went around in circles. At a few points they were headed right for us but not very close. It all ended well and was quite entertaining. Yesterday was a gorgeous day. We enjoyed sitting in the cockpit, working on a few small projects, and just feeling grateful that we could get away and appreciate the beautiful day.

This morning was cloudy, cool and blustery. Yesterday we had noticed a few small bugs that looked a little like mosquitoes. We had put our screen door up to keep them out of the cabin. This morning there were thousands of them in the cockpit! Fortunately they did not bite.

We had originally planned to stay out another night but the forecast for tomorrow is even worse than today’s so we decided to sail home. We will be taking as many of these opportunities as we can this summer.

NOTE: You may have noticed that the blog has a new look. It started with correcting the time on the Spot Tracker (Where is Breeze On?) and snowballed from there. We have a bit of extra time these days!