Hanging out in the Chesapeake

One of the last things to do before leaving “the Ditch” near Portsmouth Virginia is pass through some locks which connect the higher-level Chesapeake Bay waters with the lower-level ICW. While holding our boat’s dock lines in the lock and waiting for the water to rise, I noticed a sign with mileages to various destinations including “Jacksonville Florida, 750 miles” and “Boston, Massachusetts - 720 miles”. This drove home the fact that we are, in fact, well over halfway home.

We’ve spent the past two weeks hanging out in the lower Chesapeake Bay, visiting Norfolk Virginia for a few days (a nice surprise, I expected a town which was primarily industrial but it turned out to have a lot of interesting neighborhoods and history). We rented a car and visited Colonial Williamsburg, which is a town-sized living history museum, did some sailing on the Chesapeake and anchored for three days in lovely, quiet, Mobjack Bay. With nowhere to land our dingy nearby (all of the shorefront is privately owned), a local homeowner took pity on me and invited me to use his dock so that I could come ashore for a run. He then suggested a running loop which was nearly three times as long as the “about three miles” he said it was, but I guess he felt guilty for his misdirection because he circled twice in his pickup truck to make sure I was ok. The countryside in this part of Virginia – which I now know rather intimately – is lovely, comprised of historic plantations, pastoral horse farms and quiet roads.

We are now in the delightful town of Urbanna, Virginia, population 600, which pretty much shuts down except on weekends, so things have been very quiet. This has not been a problem, since driving rain and high winds have kept us boat bound for two days. Yesterday we braved the elements at Amelia’s insistence to go out for pizza and celebrate Mother’s Day. This turned out to be an enormous mistake because, as we ate our pizza, we watched through the window to see a hurricane level storm develop. The proprietor was kind enough to drive us back to our marina but we still got thoroughly soaked. We all have a little cabin fever and are looking forward to the storm moving on tomorrow so that we can spend time outside our boat and even go somewhere.

We plan to continue exploring the Chesapeake over the next few weeks including visits to Oxford, Cambridge and St. Michaels on the eastern shore before visiting Annapolis at the end of the month. Along the way, we hope to rendezvous with our boating friends from Wyoming, who plan to explore some of the same waters for the month of May.