Good morning Baltimore

While in Rock Hall, Maryland, we encountered a local lady who saw us lugging groceries back to the boat.  She offered us a ride in her Gem car, which—wait for it—was named Pearl.

That’s kind of like encountering the ghost of Hank Williams at a crossroads in Alabama or some such mystical thing.  Crazy.

A heron next to us watched us leave Rock Hall Landing at 8:30 for the short hop across the Bay to Baltimore.

It’s been a steel-gray couple of days since we left St. Michaels.  The color sky that reminds us wistful old salts of our youthful winters spent cod fishing in the Bering Sea.  Oh wait, that was a TV show, not us.  Mostly us old salts had to listen to the young salts wistfully recall two days earlier when they could lay in the sun instead of snoozing while wrapped up like mummies.

When the cruise isn’t exciting enough, however, just make lemonade.  Which in our case meant busting out the drone for the first time while underway.  

A few things to note:

• Return To Home doesn’t work.  Ok we knew that one.
• The distance shown on the controller is distance from the launch GPS coordinates, not the controller’s current location.  That was an unexpected surprise.
• The path map also is useless.  Can’t follow it back to the boat if the boat moves a mile or two.
• The boat engine noise drowns out the drone motor noise.  So you can’t use the sound to help locate it.
• Against steel-gray it’s impossible to tell what direction a black dot is moving, assuming you even can find said black dot.
• Doug’s eyesight is horrible.

Because of all that, when the low battery beep starts—and you’ve lost sight of the drone from the boat and the boat from the drone—massive panic ensues.  All hands on deck.  Mayday.  $1,000 overboard.  Fortunately young eyes and a solid piece of luck allowed a deck landing just as the battery died.  Dana says we never can do that again.  We’ll see.

We also encountered our first Traffic Separation Scheme crossing the Bay into Baltimore.  Fortunately there wasn’t much commercial traffic as the hazy skyline came into focus.

We visited Fort McHenry a couple of years ago.  There was a huge exhibit of iconic moments involving the American flag.  One of us pointed out to the guides that in fact the “Miracle on Ice” photo of Jim Craig wrapped in Old Glory was taken after the U.S. beat the commies in a semifinal game, not the gold medal game.  They didn’t seem to care that their exhibit was flawed.  We aren’t going back.

The saddest part of our trip so far is losing Mallory, who took a train back to her summer job in Washington.  She was with us the first 227.8 nm of our adventure.  Having both girls with us reinforced how much we miss them when they are gone.

The weather appears to be a problem so we may be stuck in Baltimore longer than ideal, but at least Shannon still is with us.