The Chesapeake Bay

Saturday, November 2 – Monday, November 11, 2013

The Chesapeake Bay, like our visit to New Jersey, was another walk down Memory Lane.

 

Lou's Mom joined us in our travels
from Edgewater Park, NJ to Rock Hall, MD

I fell in love with the Chesapeake Bay when I was younger—my family used to visit it often, and when I was ten my parents purchased Serenity, a Legnos Mystic cutter that we sailed around the bay in the spring and fall, bringing her up to New Jersey for the summers.

Later I fell in love with the Chesapeake again, specifically the Eastern Shore, when I lived in beautiful, historic Chestertown and attended Washington College, a friendly and intimate liberal arts school with a commitment to experiential learning—and the perfect place for me.

I was eager to sail on the Chesapeake Bay again but also eager to revisit two of my favorite places—Rock Hall and Chestertown.

After a week visiting our families, we left the Red Dragon Canoe Club in Edgewater Park, NJ, Saturday morning to travel back down the Delaware River.  But we didn’t leave alone—we had a first-class passenger aboard:  Lou’s Mom was joining us for a weekend of cruising, a taste of our adventure, and her first overnight on a boat!

It was cold but sunny as we made our way down the Delaware, anchoring at sunset just below the C&D Canal, as we’d done on our trip north.  The next morning after breakfast, tea, and coffee, we pulled anchor and began our trip through the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal.  Overnight the wind had increased, but the canal was sheltered and the sun made the air feel warm.  When we emerged from the Canal into the Elk River we raised our sails, and with strong winds off our starboard quarter, had an excellent sail towards Rock Hall.  In Rock Hall my parents would meet us for dinner, and our passenger would depart.

 

Sunset over Chestertown, MD

In our planning though, Lou and I had forgotten one thing—Daylight Savings—so our timing was an hour off, and it was darker than we’d intended it to be when we reached Rock Hall.  After dinner we said our goodbyes, and the next morning raised sails again as we moved towards Chestertown.  Eventually, as the Chester River began to tightly wind and turn our sails were dropped, but the trip up the river was picturesque and quiet.

Originally we had hoped we’d make it to Chestertown for the Schooner Sultana’s Downrigging Weekend & Wooden Boat Festival, but we would have had to cut our family visit shorter than we wanted, so we missed it for this year.  We were lucky though because we only missed it by a day, so as we traveled towards Chestertown we saw the boats that were traveling away, as well as those that hadn’t gotten around to leaving yet.  Our stay in Chestertown was short but wonderful, and we were sad to leave but also excited to keep moving.

Our first bridge opening!

We had just agreed to crew on a delivery that a friend was captaining, bringing the boat from New England  to Florida.  The trip would start in about two weeks, and we would need to leave Evelyn somewhere safe while we were gone.  We’d be taking a break from our own travels to return to them in December, so we wanted to be sure we were a bit further south and inside the protected Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), so that we wouldn’t have to worry too much about snow and wintry weather when we returned.  That meant our Chesapeake Cruise would need to be shorter than we’d originally hoped, and that we had less time for visiting our friends in Maryland along the way.  But we still have our trip North to look forward to in a few months, so we were comforted knowing we’d be in the Chesapeake again!

From Chestertown we spent a night in the Corsica River, and the next day decided to head towards Tilghman Island.  We had our first bridge opening that day as we passed through Kent Narrows, followed that afternoon by a second when we cut through Tilghman Island.  The Island was crowded with boats and we loved it—it was so much fun to look at the work boats and reflect on all the styles and designs of fishing boats we’d seen since Maine.

 

Tilghman Island

We woke up the next morning and thought we’d travel across the Bay towards Solomons Island—and we did.  It was a calm day on the Bay and we were soon nearing where we had thought we might spend the night.  The forecast for the next day predicted rougher weather and strong, gusty winds, so we decided we’d keep heading south, and would anchor inside the Potomac River, to set ourselves up for a short, easy sail the next day with the wind and swell behind us.  So we continued past Solomons, and turned into the Potomac.

The irony of our decision was that in choosing a path we thought might be easier, we set ourselves up for a combination of factors—landscape, weather, environment, and our own reactions and choices—that led to the most difficult twenty-four hours of our journey thus far.

Fish traps along the Potomac

Within a few hours we would run aground, only to pull ourselves off.  By the following afternoon our Peapod would sink, and we would manage to raise it.  After that the rhythms of our trip would change; we would no longer go for long exploratory rows, and visiting shore would seem more difficult.  But that is the nature of a trip like this—to take each day as it comes, and experience each moment.

The Peapod story is long, so I decided to tell it separately, and wrote it down just as soon as it happened to capture the evolution of our emotions.  That story is posted here.

Our departure from the Chesapeake was bittersweet—without our Peapod which was, besides Evelyn, our primary form of transportation, but headed towards the ICW, a place we were eager to see.  On Monday, November 11, we left from Reedville, VA, and put in a long day of travel—ending that night in Portsmouth, VA, and ready to start the next chapter of our journey.

Leaving the Chesapeake, and turning towards Norfolk