After Anne’s return to Annapolis, we hosted some new friends on the boat. Jim had befriended a cruising couple, originally out of Houston, who are at the marina for a couple of months to get boat work done. We also had a chance to host our new Annapolis friends, Pete and Marlys, before heading out. The sailing community is so friendly — it’s been great to meet people with similar interests, stories to tell, and local knowledge.
Our first stop out of Annapolis was an anchorage in the Sassafras River. There, we met up with Kim and Scott, two of Anne’s friends from her Portugal-Azores sailing passage last fall. They are taking their sailboat down to Norfolk to prepare to head to the Bahamas for the winter.
It was great to catch up and dream about meeting in the Bahamas in the future! Speaking of local knowledge, they were also helpful in providing advice for our upcoming travel around New Jersey into NY. They live in Marblehead and have sailed for years around Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. It got us so excited for our upcoming travels!
From the Sassafras, we headed to Chesapeake City for our next anchorage. It sits at the Maryland end of the C&D Canal that connects the Chesapeake (C) and Delaware (D) Bays. We had a quiet anchorage in a marina basin and a delicious seafood dinner at the marina (the novelty of dinghying to dinner hasn’t worn off yet) in the quaint village, a shipping center since the early 1800s.
Today, we got a 6:30 am start in the canal to catch the tide. Our engines plus the current had us going 10 knots (about 11.5 mph), which feels really fast after days of moving at 6 kn. The canal is one of the busiest in the US, making it relatively easy for ships to move between Philadelphia and Baltimore, but we encountered no traffic on our way to the Delaware.
We’ve officially left the Chesapeake. Excited to explore points further north and looking forward to returning to the Chesapeake in September!
