Category: Summer 2021

Thursday morning was such a glorious day for a short day of cruising, it’s a shame we wasted it on a short day of cruising.

Because the ten miles up to Norfolk promised to be easy, Dana got a nice run in, during which she discovered a small battlefield park that Doug then walked to at a much more civilized pace.

We couldn’t verify it ourselves, but one of the many informational signs claimed that The Battle of Great Bridge was the first land battle in which the colonial upstarts defeated the mighty British.  If that were true we’d expect something more prominent here.  Indeed, the first artillery piece to fire a shot in the battle now is in front of some silly county building in Ohio, which seems like an odd place if that cannon literally started the string of successes that led to us using dollars instead of euros.  However, at a minimum a band of gutsy farmers beat back the redcoats and sent Royal Governor Lord Dunmore scuttling home to Mother England.  Pretty cool little place.

Fortunately, we had no battle over either The Great Bridge—which lifted for us right on time—or The Great Bridge Lock, which likely is the last lock we’ll see until the Federal Lock in Troy, New York.

Of course, the Dismal Swamp sign mocked us yet again.  Grrrrr.

Although the distance we were traveling may have been short, the time it took not so much.  Because the @#!%ing Norfolk Railroad Bridge Number 7 lowered just before we reached it.  Both times through here we’ve been stopped, for two trains each time.  And those trains are slow.  And the bridge operator is unwilling to raise the bridge until the last train across reaches Atlanta.  We left AYB planning a thirty-minute buffer for Dana’s noon conference call, but that and more was eaten up by what now officially is our least favorite bridge in the world.

Finally, however, we busted on up the Elizabeth River through the naval shipyards.  This part we like.

Yup, this is cool stuff.  Like the USS George H.W. Bush, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

Although our spot at Waterside Marina looks serene enough, we spent most of Thursday afternoon and evening wrangling electrical issues.  Not ours, but the marina’s.  According to the dockhands, shortly after our arrival the main electrical service entrance started smoking, which isn’t a good thing.  So they shut down the docks, all of which we discovered only after returning from lunch to find our boat involuntarily off the grid.  Which meant no air conditioning despite the extent to which people from Arizona rely upon it.  “The electrician will be here at 6:30,” they said at 2:30 just as the day was heating up.   A combo of the generator and some luck got us through until we got power back, however, and we did like our spot.

Interesting side note.  Remember Lord Dunmore from ten miles and a few paragraphs ago?  The marina WiFi password is dunmore1.  Can’t be a coincidence.  We’re debating whether to notify the FBI that there’s a Tory in the Waterside IT department.

Later Thursday evening, the awkwardly-named Perseus^³ showed up.  Now this is a damn big sloop.  Nearly two hundred feet long.  Even bigger than her sister ship Parsifal III, which we would know all about if we watched that trashy Bravo show Below Deck where all the crew sleep with each other and then regret it, but we don’t watch trashy shows like that.  Except sometimes.

We know it’s a crappy picture, but the Captain had the temerity to leave Saturday morning without warning us to get our camera ready for a better one.

Here’s something you don’t see every day.  A battleship bow-in to a city street.  It almost looks like that time Jack Colton pulled his sailboat through Manhattan to woo Joan Wilder, except much bigger.  It’s the USS Wisconsin in case anyone wonders.

Friday one of us slept all day in his fuzzy cat-sized bed, one of us hiked around town and got a pedicure, and one of us visited the MacArther Memorial.  The former two failed to take any worthwhile notes or photos, but the museum was awesome.

For anybody interested in military history, this is a must-stop stop.  Full of memorabilia and interesting details of the great General’s career, some well-known and some obscure.  Like the fact that his mother got an apartment to be near him at West Point.  If that doesn’t get you hazed, nothing will.

According to the half-hour video, MacArthur almost single-handedly won WWII for the good guys.

Not to undermine MacArthur’s very significant contributions, but we’ve also been to the Nimitz museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, where they’re pretty sure local boy Admiral Chet deserves most of the glory.  Others might point to Fat Man and Little Boy (the atomic bombs not the Paul Newman bomb).  We think the outcome is all that matters, of course, because the outcome is all that matters.  The memorial and museum and marble coffin lids were awesome though.

But wait!  There’s more!  In addition to almost innumerable plaudits, awards, and medals, the Five-Star General has his name right there on the mall.  Fredericksburg doesn’t even have a Dillards, or Spencer Gifts, or Orange Julius, which pretty much settles any debate.

What Norfolk has in boats and heroes, unfortunately, it lacks in pickleball.  Just outside the back of the mall on what looks to be an abandoned parking lot we did find painted courts, but sadly we’re not traveling with our own nets or with opponents so no pickleball for us.

Friday night the marina filled up, which mostly was ok but we could’ve done without the dude who blocked our view of the concert stage when the somewhat decent cover band started playing.

We really like Norfolk, but somewhat ironically we might like leaving Norfolk even more.  Because heading north we get to pass the Norfolk Naval Base.  It’s not quite as jammed as Pearl Harbor, but it’s still dang awesome.

Yup, that’s USS Ramage—aka Warship 61–the guided-missile destroyer which may have frightened us into submission last time through but this time they had the good sense to stay out of our way.

Next up, USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest military vessel in the world.  Nearly five thousand sailors and pilots and whatnots live aboard when underway.  With two nuclear reactors she can cruise at thirty knots continuously until about 2050, except with a crew that size they probably need to stop for lots of pump-outs.

And then next door we have another Nimitz-class carrier, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Her claim to fame is the involuntary record-setting 205 days at sea, when the Navy decided that at least one ship should remain Covid free.  True story.

It’s cool to see these boats lined up in their slips, but we’d really like to see one underway.  Oh well, maybe next time.  Hey wait!  That’s a Navy Security Vessel on the radio, warning that a carrier is returning from sea and that everybody should get the hell out of her way.  He didn’t use those exact terms but we took it that way, and when he later specifically asked us—and by “asked us” we mean told us—to get Tumbleweed to the other side of the green channel marker, we obliged.  Those dudes had mounted machine guns.

Dana got some good shots of USS Harry S Truman as we slid past anyway.

Doug wanted to ask for a fly-by on behalf of Ghost Rider, based on the assumptions that (1) they’ve all seen Top Gun and (2) they’ve got a sense of humor.  But again, those dudes had machine guns.  Reel Grace was following us up to Deltaville and Tim took the money shot as we approached.  Because of the distance it’s kind of hard to tell, but we’re pretty sure all those people on the flight deck are lined up trying to get good photos of Tumbleweed.

Another startling coincidence.  Reel Grace used to be George and Meg’s Viridian, which we first met in Rock Hall the same life-changing day we met Second Wave.  We last saw her as Viridian—with a for sale sign—at Grand Harbor on Pickwick Lake.  Small world.

Anyway, done with Norfolk means done with the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.  Back out on the Chesapeake Bay for the next couple of weeks or so.  More specifically for now, back to Deltaville, like a buzzard that keeps returning to an armadillo that’s been smushed by a truck.  For anyone who isn’t up to date, until four years ago we’d never even heard of this place.  Then we were stuck here in the freezing rain for three weeks in 2018.  Then at the end of the Loop we were stuck here again for a few days, but at least we had Brent and Karen along for emotional support.  Then last year we brought Misty Pearl back down to stage for sale, although that was a business trip so no blog posts to prove it.

It’s not that there’s much too wrong with Deltaville, it’s just that there’s not much to Deltaville.  And what little there is isn’t close to the marinas.  But we arrived in time for a grocery run in the courtesy car—yes, the engine warning light was on, because that’s in the courtesy car regulations—and docktails at sunset with Tim and Jen.

Sunday brought Barry and Robin from Crossroads, which used to be our sister Selene 43 but then we broke up the family and shacked up with another family.  Barry is an electronics whiz and is helping with a few things.  Great to catch up.

Tomorrow will be our second shortest cruising day in history, behind only that time Misty Pearl and Second Wave had to move slips in Clayton and Brent still celebrated with his post-docking Shiner Bock.  Zimmerman Marine is about a hundred yards away.  We’re leaving Tumbleweed over there for minor work and heading to the mountains.

Look, it’s not that we dislike the place.  Dozier’s is a great little marina.  Zimmerman does great service work.  But the ZMI service dock is not set up for comfortably staying aboard, and there’s nothing at all close by.  So—for the second time—we made lemonade by going to the Shenandoah Mountains.

Yeah, the ski lifts were closed, the leaves weren’t changing, it was a bit hazy, and these Virginia wing-nuts prefer tennis to pickleball.  But the weather was great.

Basically we had an awesome time that had nothing to do with boating so we’ll skip the details, except the detail about Oscar hiking in his sister’s footsteps on the AT.  He only did about fifty feet of the 2,190 miles before getting in the backpack, but still.

Doug may or may not have dropped the dinghy crane weight and hook into Broad Creek moments before we left for the mountains, but either way it doesn’t matter because everything will be back in shipshape before we push off for Cape Charles.

We’ve noted before that this blog—in addition to providing entertainment of questionable value and inconsistent quality to millions of people around the globe—is our personal cruising diary.  Which means that we make notes along the way, and then an edited and summarized compilation of those notes somehow turns into a blog post.  The good folks at WordPress put the “publish” button in the general vicinity of the “save draft” button, however, so that someone with poor eyesight and fumble fingers easily might hit the wrong one in an inattentive moment and actually publish something rather than just save changes.  Which is what yielded the last truncated and inaccurate post.  The amazing thing is that this is the first time it happened.

So we really did go up to Wintergreen, and it really was fun.  But the part about leaving for Cape Charles was a premature error that would’ve been fixed or rendered accurate but for the wrong button.  And possibly but for the wine.

We also would’ve added a few other things.  On the way back on Wednesday, for example, we popped by St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond. 

Built in 1741.  Unfortunately it was closed, so Doug had to scale a wall and hang on to a shaky rusty fence that also may be over 250 years old just to get a nearly-worthless photo of the site where Patrick Henry supposedly made the proclamation for which he’s famous.

Before Misty Pearl was Misty Pearl she was named Patrick Henry, which either is an amazing coincidence or only barely relevant.  Also, the sign says that Edgar Allan Poe’s mother is buried at St. John’s.  We ate at Poe’s Tavern in Wrightsville Beach.

Richmond is full of history, but we had to choose between another lunch at Chuy’s or more sightseeing, which wasn’t much of a choice.  So after church and Chuy’s, we picked up some boat provisions and returned to the ZMI service dock.

The plan was to have all the work done so we could head to Cape Charles this morning, which is why we left Wintergreen Wednesday.  But the dinghy crane parts that the dude in Seattle said he shipped out via UPS last week never arrived (and oddly he couldn’t give us any tracking information.)  Which means we got back to Tumbleweed and the crane still was in pieces.

A few tidbits.  First, the unattractive warehousey building alongside of Tumbleweed may look innocent enough, but we’re quite certain the sole design criterion was to have it block even the most powerful cell and WiFi signals.  Mission accomplished.

Second, amongst all those buildings around the boatyard, there’s not a single one that houses a delicious restaurant serving up our favorite foods.  In fact, the closest such building is about twenty miles away in Gloucester.  We’d match up Bangkok Noi with any Thai place in the country, but it ain’t close enough to reach by foot or even by snazzy electric scooter. 

Third, that Mainship 400 in the photo is Red Pearl, which surprised us when we came back around the rickety corner Wednesday evening because she wasn’t there when we left.  We spent an awesome evening aboard Red Pearl the day we met Steve and Kathy in New Smyrna Beach and then they joined us at a Thai joint in St. Augustine that was good but not Bangkok Noi good.  We lost track of them when we left Thunderbolt back in April of 2019.  Sadly for us, Steve and Kathy know that when you’re stuck in Deltaville, get the heck out of Deltaville, because they were no place around.

Anyway, we in fact did leave the service dock this morning, because enough is enough.  Just as we passed the marina formerly known as Dozier’s, we spied a familiar transom peering out like a bear in a cave.

Dang.  We not only missed the Red Pearl crew, but while we were gone Jeff and Terri also came, dropped off Change of Pace, and high-tailed it to someplace else.  We really were hoping to meet up with them as they go south and we go north.

Out into the Chesapeake again.  Absolutely perfect day.

Unless you were the dude on a sailboat being towed to safety.  Then it wasn’t such a perfect day.  Except unless your sail has been shredded, do you really even need a tow?  According to Jimmy Buffett, “Einstein was a sailor.”  It shouldn’t take an Einstein to put sheets to the wind instead of calling Tow Boat US.

Our arrival in Cape Charles after an effortless few hours crossing the Bay reminded us why we love boating.  The town Dockmaster put us tight up against a cool little town where everything is reachable by foot.  In fairness they can’t fix our dinghy crane over here, but we hardly care.

The crane parts—which Seattle guy sent only after the guy who builds North Pacific Yachts leaned on him for us—arrived about five hours after we left.  That figures.  We’re staying here until Sunday, and then we have to go back across.  To Deltaville.  We spend so much time there we probably should just buy a house.

The obvious question we’re asking ourselves is why the hell have we always gone up and down the western shore of Chesapeake Bay?   Never again, unless a boat problem puts the proverbial gun to our head.  First up on the eastern shore, Cape Charles.  Shout out to @EmilyAsAnArtist.

We arrived with enough time to scope out the town, with the plan to explore more on Saturday.  First impression?  Awesome.

Big plans for Saturday.  Explore town and visit the famous beach.  And wash the boat, because the water pressure at the dock is spectacular.  So we’ll explore town, visit the beach, wash the boat, and go to the concert in the park, because we almost always miss the concert in the park by one day.  Except we woke up to rain, went to bed shortly after the rain stopped, and mostly it rained all day in between.  So mostly we sat all day on the boat.  No concert.

However, for a couple of years now we’ve been carting around login credentials for an online marine weather seminar.  It seemed fitting to learn what makes rain on a day Zeus decided to park storm clouds over the good townsfolk of Cape Charles, so we watched until it made us both sleepy.  About the only other thing we did was make our way in the rain to a restaurant that required an email inquiry and then the owner called Dana to make sure we were acceptable as customers.  That was a first.**

Sunday gave us a chance to clean the flybridge and walk around town in beautiful weather, including a stop at the cute bookstore.  Open literally every day of the week all summer except one.  Closed on August 8.  Sunday was August 8.  Of course.  

Even more of a bummer than missing the bookstore was missing the docking competition, which occurred last week.  Essentially guys in powerful fishing boats—with equal parts testosterone and foolishness coursing through their carburetors—lined up at a distant starting point, then sped to a narrow set of pilings, spun around, slammed into reverse, and backed into the slot.  The fastest guy to get four lines on the posts was the winner.   We would’ve paid to watch the carnage described by the Shanty bartender, but had to settle for a photo of the pilings.   The bartender didn’t mention what the winner won, but presumably it was a replacement boat.

Later Sunday, back across the Bay to Deltaville and the Zimmerman service dock.  The only interesting thing was the tug pulling the barge with the tow rope in the water.

That dude could learn a thing or two about catenary from Rick and Mary, who recently used Exhale—and judging by their photos also used perfect form—to tow a stranded sailboat several hours to safety.

Monday ZMI fixed the crane, we still had no WiFi or cell service, blah blah blah, let’s just jump ahead to the eastern shore again.  During the blahs, however, we did get the dinghy back in time for a quick spin around Broad Creek.  Oscar wasn’t excited about missing nap time but we made up for it by not stuffing him into his personal floatation device.

Also, the trip across the Bay today should’ve taken four hours but instead took five hours, because we travelled an extra eight miles trying to avoid beam waves by zig-zagging like Otis Campbell on his way to sober up at the Mayberry jail.  But the payoff was that after the troubled waters we had about five miles of smooth up picturesque Onancock Creek.

And then we popped out at picturesque Onancock.  

We’re gonna stay here another day, although Dana will check out Onancock while Doug spends most of it on Tangier Island, which we’d visit by boat but for that pesky five-foot draft.

One more thing.  While crossing the Chesapeake today we kept hearing “NASA Surveillance” hail boaters who were heading towards an area that was restricted a few hours later because of a rocket launch.  Sure enough, at 6:01 an Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft passed by us on its way to the ISS.  This was much better than that time we waited for hours at Vero Beach and then the actual launch from Cape Canaveral was in the dark and the GoPro video was worthless.

——————

*“All you need is love, love, love is all you need,” at least according to Lennon and McCartney.  So here’s the iconic Cape Charles beach sign.

**After interrogating Dana the lady said we could come to dinner, which provided a great opportunity to paraphrase the Groucho Marx line about not wanting to join any club that would allow someone like him to be a member, but we were pretty sure that by dinner time we’d be hungry so we didn’t use it on her, which was a good thing because she turned out to be really nice.

Wednesday morning brought the ferry ride to Tangier Island for one of us, and brought keeping each other company in Onancock for the other two.  As for the latter, there’s not much to report.  No photos from the hair place that did a masterful job for Dana.  But here’s a little something, particularly for Presbyterians.

Also Onancock has a tree that by our rough calculation is four Dana wingspans in circumference.

Despite being well up a creek, Onancock was a bustling port back in the years before Salem started hanging witches.  Now—according to Better Living Magazine—it’s one of the “Coolest Small towns in the South,” and like a place “plucked right out of a Nicholas Sparks novel,” which probably means something to people who read Nicholas Sparks novels.  We found the wharf to be best of all.

As for Tangier, it’s just about as odd as Doug anticipated after reading Chesapeake Requiem, a most excellent book by Earl Swift.  Mark Crockett—the knowledgeable Tangierman captaining the box-stern deadrise ferry—said Swift provided an accurate depiction of things.  The nice ladies at the history museum, however, clucked in their funny accents that Swift shouldn’t have included certain stuff, but then both of them allowed that they hadn’t actually read the book.

A few interesting tidbits about Tangier.  In 1814 the British built Fort Albion on a part of the island that’s now under about fifteen feet of water.  Supposedly the Tangier preacher provided a sermon on the beach before they left to sack Baltimore, warning them the attack was doomed.  The bad guys took off anyway, unsuccessfully shelled Fort McHenry, indirectly gave us the National Anthem during that same battle, and now they’re stuck with cricket and soccer instead of football and baseball and probably regret the decision to ignore the Tangier preacher.

Since then, generations of Tangier watermen have supplied most of the blue crabs consumed in the world.  In fact, to this day visitors only run into women and children, because the men all are out carefully placing crab traps in the areas they anticipate Tumbleweed will want to go.  Judging by the boats and crab shacks and houses, every family is in the crabbing business.

Thanks to rising seas, the island now has shrunk to three small ridges suitable for buildings, with encroaching marshes.  The highest land is about two feet above sea level.

Small roads and no gas stations mean mostly golf carts, which jammed the area around Swain Memorial Methodist Church for the funeral of a beloved 93-year-old woman who spent all of those years attending that same church.  Odd funeral, again because virtually no men were around to attend.

As the Bay water rises, not surprisingly the island continues to shrink.  Heck, there’s no room left in the small cemeteries so front yards make up the difference.  Which at a minimum makes Halloween much easier for anyone willing to use grandpa’s grave as a prop. 

Tangier has a bit of a Summerisle vibe, where the islanders all were happy and then—spoiler alert—to ensure a bountiful harvest they locked Edward Woodward in a giant flammable wicker man and set it ablaze.  Hopefully it won’t come to that in Virginia, but unless these honest, hard-working, well-intentioned folk come to accept that science and math don’t give a damn about religion or politics, their future is doomed.  It’s a neat experience unlike any thing else in the world, however, so anyone who has the chance should visit.  Hurry though, because in a few years nothing will be left.

Out Thursday morning for the short run across Pokomoke Sound and up to Crisfield, our first Maryland stop.  Nice and smooth all the way.  The only interesting thing was passing Courtney Thomas, which delivers mail to and from Tangier.  (The poor Courtney Thomas thus has not one, but two existential threats to keep her up at night.)

Then on in to what looked like a dead end but opened into Somers Cove, a public marina surrounded by public housing.

The marina may not be in the best part of town, but it’s inside a huge guarded fence so it felt marginally safer than, say, the Joliet wall.

We don’t read Nicholas Sparks novels, but Dana did learn about world-famous Smith Island Twelve-Layer Cake from The Invisible Husband of Frick Island.  Like Tangier, nearby Smith Island rapidly is being consumed by the Chesapeake Bay, which probably is why Smith Island Cakes now are baked at the not-coincidentally named Smith Island Baking Company in Crisfield.

Smith Island Bakery makes Maryland’s Official Dessert, perhaps because the gross-sounding Old Bay Cake Bites are so yummy.

We’re working our way up to St. Michaels, but needed another stop before hop-scotching through Solomons.  Several rivers penetrate the Eastern Shore and lead to small towns, so we had our pick.   We chose the Wicomoco over the Nanticoke.  Because Max at ZMI said Salisbury was an awesome town to visit.  Lesson number 1:  don’t trust Max’s definition of awesome.

We did take one photo in Salisbury, so as to provide evidence in the murder trial if we’re killed in our sleep tonight.

Yup, that’s us, right there on the splintery fixed dock, a good portion of which will leave embedded in our dock lines if we do get out of here.  We would’ve taken more photos but the super-cool Dockmaster went home and we didn’t want the sketchy dude—who already was on our side of the padlocked security fence—to see that we had a camera.  Lesson number 2:  when visiting a town recommended by Max, don’t wait until eating dinner in that town to research crime statistics.

In fairness though, the twenty or so Wicomico River miles before we reached Salisbury were dang scenic.

The Upper Ferry—which uses a surface line to go back and forth—created something of a hazard, but the ferry dude cheerfully agreed to lower the line for us when we hailed him on the VHF.

Dana took a picture of a sign on the river bank.  Only with the benefit of hindsight did we understand what they were trying to tell us about continuing on to Salisbury.

Here’s an interesting note.  Salisbury is in the heart of Delmarva, a clever contraction descriptive of the area’s location.  We’re in Maryland, but only six miles from Delaware and twenty-five miles from Virginia.  Come to think of it, we’re barely fifty helicopter miles from Cape May, but since Tumbleweed can’t fly, we’re a couple hundred miles up the Chesapeake Bay and down the Delaware River from getting there.

Here’s another interesting note, which required Dana to sneak up on the flybridge for one more photo.  When an Osprey has time to build a nest big enough for Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s entire family, you know the dude who owns the boat only pretends to be a fisherman.

We’d planned to stay here two nights, but hell no.  Although we don’t love Solomons and the jellyfish, we do love going to sleep without wishing that Oscar, just once, was a youthful 120-pound German Shepherd with a mean streak, rather than a skittish little old deaf chihuahua mix who absolutely plans to stay in bed buried under covers if a bad guy attacks.  So Solomons tomorrow it is, weather be dammed.

That was supposed to be the end of this post.  But just then a storm smashed us with 40+ gusts.  Whitecaps on the river.  Driving rain.  This all would be fine if we were tied up happily on a nice floating dock.  Heck, it’d be okay if we still had our Misty Pearl fender boards.  But instead, our lines are stretching, our horizontal fenders are bouncing to the sides of those splintery posts leaving unprotected rub rails, and our heroic efforts on the slippery dock in that driving rain improved our lot only very slightly.  The good news, of course, is that not even the Salisbury Slasher will be out in this.