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Nobody Doesn't Like St. Mikes

2011-01-25T15:33:00.003-05:00

by Ann Levelle

One hundred degree heat and nearly 100 percent humidity was not going to keep the crowds away from the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Musuem during its annual Antique and Classic Boat Show. Know why? First, the museum is packed to its figurative gills with jaw-droppingly stunning classic boats. Second, this is St. Michaels--Chesapeake country's favorite destination--the town you keep going back to, no matter how many times you've been before. Case in point: My husband John and I, along with our friends Drew and Kinley Bray. The four of us had decided to come down to St. Michaels on the Saturday of last year's show since none of us had been there in ages, so this seemed like a perfect excuse for the adventure. And aside from the heat, it was. But that's the beauty of St. Michaels, really, heat seems to have no bearing on anyone's good times in this summer tourist haven. Both boaters and landlubbers alike find its charms irresistible despite what nature throws at them.

We wandered the museum grounds gazing longingly at all the lustrous wooden Chris Crafts, Trumpys and Matthews on the hard and in the water. Every one of the boats--from tiny runabouts to 50-foot wooden yachts--has been painstakingly restored, woodwork gleaming from God only knows how many coats of varnish. We also strolled through the vendor area for a bit, grazing among the artwork, crafts and throngs of cool old boat parts and accessories. By the time we'd done the rounds of the show, we were all hot and hungry and were ready to go next door to the Crab Claw for a little lunch. We got a table in the blissfully cold dining room surprisingly fast, considering the crowd. Then we dined on a couple of baskets of clam strips and a dozen crabs for good measure. They were fantastic as always.

As we were walking back to the car, my cell phone rang: It was my old pal Annie calling from South Carolina.

"Hey, whatcha doing?"

"I'm down in St. Michaels, we went out for crabs and to the antique boat festival."

"Sounds like fun! Where's St. Michaels?" she asked (I swear I'm not making this up).

"Seriously? You grew up in Maryland and don't know where St. Michaels is?"

"Um . . . guess not. So where is it and what's there?"

"Well, it's on the Eastern Shore," I replied. "And it's a cool little boating town with lots of good restaurants and a huge maritime museum. It's a pretty fun place."

"Oh," she said, sounding excited. "You want to take me there when I come up this week? We need to get a boat trip in when I visit, you know."

"Done," I said, "We'll take a powerboat too, so we don't have to waste precious time sailing down."

Fast forward to Tuesday, another record-breaking hot and humid June day. The sky and water were an equally hazy blue-gray color, and the water was as flat as could be. I couldn't be happier to be zooming down the Bay in one of the Chesapeake Boating Club's Albin 28s with the wind in my hair. Annie was pretty excited too, since our last few outings had been during similar weather, but slinking along at five knots in a sailboat. In the Albin, though, we made it from Annapolis to St. Michaels in a delightfully short two hours, and were quite surprised when we rounded red "4" to find an enormous cruise ship docked at the maritime museum. We slowed to the requisite five knots and puttered toward town, admiring the Hooper Strait Lighthouse as we neared the museum. As cruise director, I also thought it prudent to swing through Fogg Cove to show Annie the Inn at Perry Cabin, where a good bit of the movie Wedding Crashers was shot. She was duly impressed, especially by the movie part.

Back in the harbor we aimed for the telltale red roofs of St. Michaels Marina. The marina's tall flag staffs, bearing both Old Glory and the Union Jack were also visible between some of the larger boats docked at the fuel dock. Fortunately for me (lacking confidence in docking as I do), St. Michaels Marina has a lot of very big slips to accommodate the Bay's finest. So I had no trouble sliding the comparatively tiny Albin 28 into the basin and then to the spacious slip--and, equally important, to the awaiting friendly and very helpful dockhand.

Anxious to get into town for some lunch, we kept things brief at the marina office and store. There we met owner Mike Morgan, who personally gave us a quick rundown on the marina, the WiFi, the pool, shower combos, etc.--and, perhaps hearing our stomachs growl, the lowdown on the three restaurants that surround the marina: St. Michaels Crab & Steak House, Town Dock Restaurant and Foxy's Marina Bar. And the mix of Old Glory and the Union Jack? What's that about? I asked. Ah, he said, that's a nod to the persistent old (and highly dubious) historical meme about St. Michaels, "the town that fooled the British" during the War of 1812.

Of course, Annie, who didn't even know where St. Michaels was, had no idea what he was talking about. So, as we began our short walk to town--all two blocks up Mulberry Street, that is--I expanded on Morgan's explanation, telling her that during the War of 1812 the British were poised to attack St. Michaels--which was a target because of its dozen or so shipbuilding facilities. The townspeople, in addition to chaining off the harbor entrance, lit lanterns in the trees far behind the actual town, causing the British gun ships to overshoot the town. The trouble with this legend, I told Annie, was that the actual attack happened well after dawn, which seriously undermines the whole lantern story. Not to mention that at least one house--that one in fact, I said, pointing to the so-called Cannonball House that we'd just passed on Mulberry Street--was actually hit and still has burn marks from the cannonball rolling down the stairs. (As it turned out, the Cannonball House was now up for sale, too . . . for a whopping $1,495,000. Later I found out that the house, built in 1805, sold in 1831 for $1,000. Ahh, inflation.)

Annie wasn't exactly riveted by my brief history lesson--which was good, because not only had we reached St. Michaels' main drag, Talbot Street, but also, I was fresh out of history. For the moment, anyway. Since it was a Tuesday, the red brick sidewalks were pretty empty, but as we walked along, peering into shop windows, we saw quite a few browsers indoors. We had no trouble getting a table at the tiny Key Lime Cafe, a bright and airy restaurant with a very welcoming staff, housed in a tiny old cottage on Talbot Street. The menu, which changes regularly with the seasons and at the whim of the chef, was limited, featuring just a few appetizers, sandwiches and salads, but we each found something tasty. Honestly though, we'd have been quite happy with nothing but ice water, because it was furiously hot outside. Thankfully our waitress was excellent in her refilling duties and we had a couple of nice salads to hold us over for our afternoon of sightseeing.

After lunch we continued north on Talbot toward the maritime museum. Annie, obviously had never been there, and I, despite having visited the previous weekend, was more than happy to visit again since over the weekend I had focused solely on antique boats. Just inside the museum gate, docent Rick Green met us to give us the rundown of the marina exhibits. Volunteer docents are an important part of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum experience, and Green was one of many enthusiastic guides we'd have throughout the day.

We started our tour at the boatbuilding shed, where four shipwrights were hard at work on various wooden boats--a lapstrake skiff, an Adirondack fishing canoe and a duck canoe.

Volunteer docent Mary Sue Traynelis led us through the shop, explaining various planking methods to us (namely lapstrake vs. board-on-board). Then she showed us the painting room, while she explained the Apprentice For a Day program, in which anyone (kids, teens, whole families) can spend the day helping shipwrights build replicas of Bay boats--from Smith Island skiffs to canoes. Volunteers can choose to work for a single day, a weekend or any number of days throughout the 17-week boatbuilding process. She ushered us to one of the boats they had just finished building, which took a little more than 18 weeks to finish (due to lack of apprentices).

We bade Mary Sue good-bye and continued our tour around the museum grounds, visiting the lighthouse--and of course every air-conditioned exhibit we could find: the At Play on the Bay history exhibit, an art exhibit featuring watercolor master Marc Castelli [see Horton at Large, page 64], and a Holland Island history exhibit. We also managed to at least peer into the outdoor boat shed, the oystering building and the Waterman's Wharf, where you can try your hand at oyster tonging, eeling and catching crabs in a tank.

After a couple of hours, we figured we'd done our scholarly tourist duty at the museum and had earned ourselves a little time either with a frosty beverage or at the marina pool (or both). We didn't get halfway back to the marina, though, before a frosty beverage found us. A teen-age girl was handing out coupons to the Drink Shack, or, as the cutely painted sign on the sidewalk read, Drink Shack in da back. She pointed us between two gift shops to a tiny oasis where a man in a brightly painted building was selling fruit smoothies, fresh lemonade and virgin frozen pina coladas and daiquiris. Tiki umbrellas and tables were set up atop sand colored gravel and we enjoyed a couple of fresh smoothies in the shade--a true oasis on this hot and humid afternoon. We finished our beverages on the way back to the marina, where the small pool, nestled between the docks and the marina office/ship's store beckoned.

"So what do you think of St. Michaels?" I asked Annie as we lingered neck deep in the blissfully cold water.

"It's nice! I didn't expect there'd be this much to do in a tiny Eastern Shore town. I'm not sure we'll be able to cover it all in two days."

My sentiments exactly. It had been a few years since I'd spent any extended time in town, and I'd forgotten how much there is to do here. At the risk of sounding like a tourist brochure (which, by the way if you need any, there's a tiny shack just south of the maritime museum entrance on Talbot Street that has hundreds of them available for the taking, including town maps and brochures on just about every attraction in town), St. Michaels really does have a bit of something for everyone. Boaters get some great marinas or a nice anchorage with only a short dinghy ride to town. And whether you come by land or sea, you get a world-class maritime museum--which is to say, all the Chesapeake history and culture you could want--plus tons of restaurants and shopping, a couple of excellent hotels, B&Bs galore, boating excursions and tours, and a dash of history. In case that wasn't enough, the town hosts a ton of town-wide events throughout the year that draw thousands of visitors to each--log canoe races, summer concert series, a fall festival, Christmas in St. Michaels, boat festivals and rendezvous, the list keeps on going. And with every visit you feel a little more a part of the tiny community that ties it all together.

Phew, okay brochure rant over. It was six in the evening and the day's heat finally started to let up. Annie and I waited until the bells at nearby Christ Church ended their evening concert, then headed back to the boat to clean up for dinner. We decided--wisely I might add--to eat at Town Dock restaurant, which backs up to the marina, since hefty storms were predicted and we wanted to leave the boat open as long as possible. The restaurant, which touts itself as casual fine dining, has outdoor patio tables, but given the heat and upcoming storms, we opted to dine on the indoor patio, which boasts huge windows and a great view of the marina and the harbor.

Annie ordered excellent Panko fried oysters for an appetizer. By the time she (okay, we) finished these oh-so-plump oysters, we could hear the thunder rumbling in the distance. And about halfway through our dinners--shrimp scampi for Annie, and a delicious vegetable ravioli with a walnut cream pesto sauce for me--the increasing racket told us it was time to dash to the boat and button things up, so we could finish our dinner without worry. It was a heck of a storm and we sat for a good hour and drank our bottle of sauvignon blanc and watched the show.

The next morning proved just as hot as the last, but not to worry--we had a day of mostly air-conditioned activities planned. We started out the day as I have started nearly every other day in St. Michaels--at Carpenter Street Saloon for breakfast. It's a no frills kind of place, but provides the kind of perfectly tasty and inexpensive breakfast that cures most any over-drinking issues and sets you up for a good day of sightseeing. And clearly it's the place to be in the morning, as the breakfast crowd was pretty decent even on a Wednesday.

We filled up on egg sandwiches and scrapple and such, then moved over to the saloon side of Carpenter Street to watch the U.S./Slovenia World Cup match on TV. For a good while it was just us and the bartender, but as the morning progressed, it became clear that tourists aren't the only clientele here at C-Street. By halftime in the game, the bar was hopping with local servers and bartenders from other restaurants who were all hanging out eating and gossiping (presumably before their lunch shifts started). Since we had a captive audience of locals at our service, we asked what we should do while we were in St. Mikes. Somewhat confused by the question, they only offered one reasonably straight answer: eat and drink. Then they mentioned the winery and brewery were both fun outings. Continue reading here.

Marina at Marina Shores: Slip into Something Comfortable

2011-01-25T15:31:00.002-05:00

Like a slip at the Marina at Marina Shores, in Virginia Beach's Lynnhaven Inlet.

by Jody Argo Schroath

My first visit to the Marina at Marina Shores on Long Creek in Lynnhaven Inlet didn't get off to a very good start. It was all my fault. Really, I have nothing but good things to say about the marina, its facilities and its people. No, it was just me playing dumb against the tide.

I had entered Lynnhaven Inlet, which lies right outside the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, just as the tide was turning. Not that the Albin 28 I was piloting had any problem with that. I wound through the channel markers, watching carefully for shoaling, the inlet's big bugaboo. No problem there either. I followed the markers left to enter Long Creek. I had been assigned a slip on E dock, the marina's transients dock, but I decided to cruise to the end--I dock--before heading back to E. Then I made my first mistake. Instead of entering the dock against the tide, I backed in with the tide. Dumb! I almost made it. In fact, if I hadn't been single-handing or Skipper the ship's dog had had opposable thumbs, I would have made it. But with no one to snag the upstream piling, I quickly got caught up with the water, which was flowing out in two directions at once--out of Long Creek, and through a flood-control system at the far end of the dock. I'll skip the details, but for the next 10 minutes it was a hefty operation of push-pull, forward-reverse and the liberal application of bow thrusters before I settled nose-first into a slip (I wasn't particular which one).

After that, everything was good. Great, in fact! Skipper and I loved the marina! We walked all over its 16 acres of shady live oaks, sable palms and other indigenous species planted by owner Gale Levine Higgs. We skirted the swimming pool with its inviting pastel recycled-plastic deck chairs. We walked to the nearby grocery store and West Marine. We found the nature trail that leads to First Landing State Park. And that evening, as I sat at a picnic table eating takeout from the Surf Rider Grill--one of the marina's two restaurants--Skipper helped me finish my second delicious crabcake (and a great gulp of French fries when I turned to talk with a fellow boater who was offering a lift into town if I needed it).

In addition to two sets of impeccably clean restrooms/showers, a pool, shops, restaurants, big shady trees, proximity to the beach, trails, parks and more shopping, the marina has great specifically boater-friendly features: a new fuel dock, floating docks, high-and-dry boat storage, full repair facilities, a small beach for slipholders . . . well, just about everything you can think of. Higgs recently spent $2 million on structural and external improvements to the 20-year-old marina that she and her late husband built. Those improvements included making everything eco-friendly (as far as that's possible for a facility that specializes in vessels with internal combustion engines). The marina also sponsors a huge rockfish tournament during Christmas week, with 50 percent of the proceeds going to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

It's a great marina. Now if I'd just learn to use my head getting in and out of slips. . . .

The Marina at Marina Shores
Virginia Beach, Va.
757-496-7000
www.marinashores.com
Fuel: gas and diesel
Power: 30 and 50 amp
Depth: 8'
Pump-Out: Yes

The Great Chesapeake Engine-Break-In Cruise

2010-04-14T09:50:00.002-04:00

A new engine means 50 hours of powering around the Bay. But this is a sailboat, right?

by Wendy Mitman Clarke
illustrations by Rick Kollinger here

It's a half-hour before sunup, the creek is skeined with mist from the cool autumn air, and the trees surrounding Oak Harbor Marina in Pasadena, Md., are full of owls. Great horned owls, to be precise; I've known the pattern of their hooting since childhood, and husband Johnny confirms it when he sees a pair fly right across the pale sky and alight on the masts of two sailboats on the hard. They're huge. They look like a couple of beer kegs with wings.

Hmm, I muse. Many Native American tribes consider owls a warning of impending doom, even death. In minutes we'll be casting off the lines and heading Osprey, our 45-foot sailboat on which we live and cruise full-time, toward Oxford. It's the first sea trial for the brand-new Yanmar diesel that Johnny has spent the last three weeks installing with help from the Oak Harbor crew. The kids are visiting friends; it's just me and him and a whole lot of expensive, unproven moving parts.
"Ready?" he says to me.
"Yup," I answer.
I keep the whole owl-as-bad-omen thing to myself.

This is a story that begins with a hole the size of a pin. It may actually begin earlier than that; we're not sure, since the provenance of Osprey's former engine, a Yanmar 4JH3-TE installed in 2004 or thereabouts, is dubious. The mechanic who finally tore it down and then pronounced it utterly ruined said maybe it never had been broken in properly, and so the trouble had begun at the outset. When we bought the boat in 2006, the engine burned oil a little more than usual, but it passed survey and seemed fine. Over nearly three years of traveling, though, from the southernmost islands of the Bahamas to Down East, Maine, it was clear that the Gray Pony, as we called her, was turning into the old gray mare--definitely not what she used to be, despite Johnny's constant ministrations. By summer 2009 she was drinking oil like a sailor drinks rum. The smoke pouring from the exhaust followed us like Pigpen's dirt cloud (Johnny said we should ask for a state subsidy for all the mosquitoes we eradicated cruising through Maine). Clearly something was dramatically wrong, and we nursed her back to the Bay, cringing all the way, expecting the cataclysm to happen somewhere really interesting--like, say, the C&D Canal, with four knots of current running and two ships up our stern.

We made it to Oak Harbor unscathed, though, and within two days we had the engine out and on its way to the shop. Then came the call from the mechanic who was going to rebuild her. It amounted to, "No way, Jose." Likely because it hadn't been broken in correctly, the engine had developed a pinhole leak in the oil cooler, allowing scalding water to penetrate the cylinders. It destroyed the cylinder walls, rendering them irreparable. "This engine actually ran?" the mechanic said. Well, yes, we said. Pretty well, really, notwithstanding the fact that we were a rolling bug bomb.

It wasn't a decision we had wanted to make, but we didn't have much choice. If we wanted to sail to places like Panama and farther, we wanted a solid power plant under the hood. The silver lining was that we could do it here, while staying with friends, rather than sweating it out in some tropical (read wildly expensive) boatyard a thousand miles from anywhere. We bought a new Yanmar 4JH4-TE, and Johnny set about the complicated, arduous process of installing it.

And two weeks later here we are, ready to embark on the break-in, a period of 50 hours when we would have to pay strict attention to rpm, oil pressure, temperature and--first and foremost--make sure everything was running as it should be. We're heading first to Oxford; it's a good day's trip, not too far from anyplace if something goes haywire, and we have friends there we want to visit. If all goes well, we'll continue back to Annapolis, then work our way south, maybe Solomons, Onancock, Norfolk, before heading south to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. It's the Great Chesapeake Bay Snowbird Break-In Tour, brought to you by Yanmar.

We slip the lines, Johnny nudges Osprey forward, and, quiet as an owl taking flight, we slide into the misty creek.

The first ten hours of the break-in are the most critical. We can't let the engine idle for more than a few minutes in any hour, and we have to change the rpm constantly, letting it run for varying periods at each. If we don't do this properly, carbon will build up in the cylinders and general long-term bad juju will ensue.

We set the red egg timer on the binnacle, I pull out the official break-in notebook (one-subject, college-ruled, from Rite-Aid on special, 99 cents) and make a note: 0720, tach at 2000 rpm, oil pressure on the big 3, temperature 175. SOG 6.2 knots, boat speed 6.7 knots. Conditions, flat calm.

It's a gorgeous autumn morning as we clear the Patapsco River and bend southeast toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. A lovely 10- to 12-knot east-northeast breeze sets up. A sweet beam reach. We should be sailing! As if to point out this fact, I look astern and see barreling up behind us the 160-foot sailing cruise ship Arabella, all sails set and pure white against the morning sun. She's flying toward us--10.5 knots, the chartplotter's AIS information tells me--and I feel like a complete schmuck motoring along here. We're a sailboat, for heaven's sake, and it's a perfect breeze for sailing. A sign should come with this engine that we could hang off the transom, something like: Break-In in Progress. Maybe then I wouldn't feel like I need a bag over my head.

Off Baltimore Light, Arabella sweeps past, and then I realize she has her engine on too. She's going full-tilt toward the U.S. Sailboat Show at Annapolis; set-up is today, and it looks as if she's late for the ball. I don't feel so bad. Besides, Osprey is beginning to take on the heady scent of new-engine. Eau du diesel--a lovely olfactory melange of heated paint, oil and rubber.

At 0850, I note tach 2500, oil pressure 3, temperature 175. SOG 6.5 knots, boat speed an amazing 7.4 knots. If these numbers continue, we've added 1.5 to 2 knots to our cruising speed with this new engine. It's beginning to look like Johnny's suspicion that we never had gotten a true 75 hp out of the Gray Pony was well founded; now we're motoring far better than we ever have. At 3000 rpm, which the manual instructs us to hit every hour or so for ten minutes at a time, the boat is rushing along at 8.2 knots. We've got a Kady-Krogen trawler in our sights. It's the first time we've ever raced a powerboat, and I start feeling a bit weird about this whole thing.

As we pass Sandy Point Light, Johnny is down below, hopping around, wide-eyed, not unlike Marty Feldman as Igor in the movie Young Frankenstein, just before he and Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) are about to bring the Creature (Peter Boyle) to life. Johnny has his orange earmuffs on, he's dashing around, checking this, dialing in that. An engine mount bolt has vibrated loose, and he's mincing around the hot hunk of metal, fishing for the bolt before it gets into mischief. Every now and then, as he dashes forward to the shop for another tool, he looks up at me and grins a bit maniacally. Igor, definitely.

So the day goes. We're driving like an old lady with restless leg syndrome, our speed fluctuating from 6.8 knots to 8.3, now 7.4. But this is what we're supposed to do, and the engine is running great. Off Poplar Island, Johnny gazes longingly at two guys trolling slowly in a Grady-White. One of them obviously has a big fish on, probably a nice fat rockfish. We're in one of our 3000-rpm phases and fly by at 8 knots--more like 8.5, given the half-knot of current. Assuming he could even get a lure down, Johnny would rip the jaw out of even a Formula One rockfish at this rate. He sighs, missing his favorite autumn Chesapeake hobby. Then he brightens. "At this speed," he says, "we can catch Spanish mackerel!"

By 2 p.m. we are pulling into Oxford, passing the Strand and heading for Oxford Boat Yard, where we're taking a slip for the night. We've made it here in seven hours--our fastest time ever--even with adverse current much of the way. It doesn't seem like the engine breathed hard even once. We decide on its name, grandiose, perhaps, but hopefully fitting its future: The Silver Stallion.

Fast-forward a couple of weeks, and make it dark. Well, dark except for the glaring lights of the LNG plant off Calvert Cliffs; somewhere among them, obscured in the sodium-vaporized foreground, are the lights of a tugboat called Hoss which is bound for Norfolk, pushing something heavy. We see him on the radar, we see his AIS signature on the chartplotter, but we can't really see him, even though he's steadily converging with us. Right now, our instruments say he'll pass within only a few hundred feet. Not nearly far enough. "Maybe we should slow down and just let him go on by," I suggest.
"Won't be good for the engine," Johnny says.

Getting run over by a tug called Hoss won't be good for the engine either, I'm thinking, but keep it to myself. I know Johnny's just waiting to see if we can gain enough distance during our 20-minute, 2,600-rpm phase, which will be followed by the 10-minute, 3,000-rpm phase. But soon it becomes evident we can't, so we call Hoss on the VHF and explain our intentions to turn and duck behind him. In a thick drawl that sounds like something straight out of the bayou, he thanks us for the accommodation. After he passes we slide in a mile or so behind and follow him down the Bay like an obedient puppy, figuring he'll mow down anything out there that we can't see, like fish traps or errant crab pots. It's a beautiful, late-October evening. We'd left Oak Harbor--again--just after noontime and are making a 76-nautical-mile run straight to Reedville, Va., so we can visit my brother and hole up while a low-pressure system swings through.

Also, we're in a bit more of a hurry now. Our trip from Oxford to Annapolis had been uneventful, although I felt like reaching for the bag again off the Naval Academy when a group of midshipmen out enjoying the breeze in a Sonar training boat yelled, "Hey, where are your sails?" as we zoomed past on our way up the Severn River. So embarrassing, this whole Osprey-as-powerboat thing. The delay--and the trip back to Oak Harbor--happened after our Yanmar mechanic came to test the engine's vitals and pronounced that we had too much water in the system, causing too much back pressure--all because of a convoluted exhaust arrangement. It's the same system that came with the boat, and since it's making these problems for our new engine, we wonder whether it was what helped kill the old one. So Johnny spent two days reconfiguring the whole thing, installing a new muffler that allowed him to remove four 90-degree elbows in the system and adding a water-diverter valve. He also changed the propeller's pitch, so the engine could reach the proper rpm at wide-open-throttle. Then another sea trial with the Yanmar guru, who gave it his blessing, and we were free to resume the break-in cruise.

"Ding!" The red kitchen timer makes me jump. I get a little twitchy out on the Bay at night, even with all the wonders of modern electronics. There's just a whole lot to hit out here, but at least I'm not on watch alone tonight, as I am when we're in the ocean. This is a short run, and given the potentially tricky nature of the Bay and all of its traffic in the dark, Johnny and I will keep each other company. The kids are already asleep below.

Our engine numbers are a little different now, thanks to the changes that we've made, but the bottom line remains that the Silver Stallion has changed Osprey completely under power. We're flying along, even into the short chop that the evening southerly has started to build. I write down, "Tach 2600, temp 175, oil pressure 3, SOG 6, boat speed 6.9, wind 15 apparent on the nose." I look up in time to see the 919-foot cruise ship Grandeur of the Seas, bound for San Juan, waltz by at 18 knots. It looks like a floating sequined dinner gown. Passing northbound at the same time is the 581-foot cargo ship Crystal Ocean, headed for Baltimore.

Not until we pass the Patuxent River does the evening traffic settle down for a while, and I do the same with it. To the east, Orion rises like a giant just awoken from sleep, appearing over the horizon at first on his side and slowly climbing to his full vertical height as the night wears on. The Milky Way makes a mockery of the Grandeur of the Seas' dazzling lights, and the night is full of shooting stars. The wind angle keeps opening up, and it would be lovely to be sailing . . .

"Ding!" Time to change the rpm again. Tach 2400, temp 175, oil pressure at the big 3. It's boring but, in this case, boring is good.

At Smith Point we watch as the 958-foot Atlantic Compass and the northbound 689-foot Safmarine Ngami pass one another in the narrow separation lanes. Somehow the ships are even blacker than the night itself, like moving blocks of darkness. Finally, we can duck away from the huge, mobile dangers and head inshore toward Fleeton Point, where we count on our radar to pick up the smaller, stationary obstacles like pound nets and unlit buoys. Even from out here, we can tell they're cooking fish at Omega Protein in Reedville, Va., and not just by the plume of white smoke backlit by the plant's distant lights. Around here, they say that's the smell of money, and maybe so. But, geez, what a stink.

We drop out of warp speed (that's how it feels coming off of 3000 rpm now) and pick our way carefully into Cockrell Creek, past the roaring, fuming menhaden plant and up to the doorstep of Reedville, where we drop the anchor. It's about 2 a.m. We're treated to a few more shooting stars until the smell of money drives us down below to sleep. Safe and sound, and quiet at last, we don't really mind.

It seems to be a sailing axiom that wherever you wish to go is the direction from which the wind will be coming. The exception seems to be when sailboats have to be motorboats. Our friends Julie and Mark Kaynor, from Blacksburg, Va., told us that after they repowered their Tayana 37, everywhere they went on the Chesapeake during the break-in period would have been perfect sailing. The same is holding true for us.

We enjoy a pleasant, two-day stay in Reedville that includes visits with my brother, frequent trips to Chitterchat's ice-cream parlor, and tours of the town's exuberant Halloween decorations, all punctuated by the occasional knee-buckling wave of aroma from the Omega Protein smokestack across the creek. The predicted thunderstorms and nasty weather do not really materialize, but when the front does finally pass, it's followed by a blustery northwest wind.

Naturally, it's this wind that's directly up our sterns as we leave the Great Wicomico River and turn south toward Norfolk. This is Osprey's kind of weather--strap down the mainsail, pole out both headsails, and she flies on rails straight downwind. But here's the problem: Once in Norfolk, we'll head to the Dismal Swamp Canal. Narrow, shallow, and at this time of year busy with other southbound traffic, the canal is not a place where we can power according to the break-in rules, that is, change rpm constantly, limit the idle time, and race along at 7 to 8 knots from time to time at the high end of the rpm range. We need to have as many of the 50 hours under our belts as possible by the time we enter the canal, and as we leave Reedville we're only at 36. And so we wallow along in the quartering swell like a skinny, low-slung trawler with a big stick poking out of her deck.

Pretty soon, though, we can't stand not having any sails up, so we unfurl our small jib, which helps stabilize the boat in the waves, and also makes us feel better. Sort of. All around, other southbound boats are popping out of the Bay's woodwork--the myriad creeks and hidey-holes that make such wonderful, protected anchorages and quiet places to rest. And every one of them is taking advantage of this perfect breeze, the white of their sails flashing every now and then above the ruffled, pewter water. Down here, the Bay seems as broad as the sea, and we start to see the Chesapeake's autumn oceanic visitors flitting over the waves--gannets and small petrels.

Off New Point Comfort we pass the milestone of 40 hours, and with the ebbing tide and a slowly diminishing breeze, the seas are flattening out. So, okay, we can motorsail now without feeling too guilty about it. But as we
approach Hampton Roads, it's clear that we aren't going to have our 50 hours by the time we drop the hook in Portsmouth, off Hospital Point. In fact, it's 44.6 hours on the dot. For once, we've gotten here too quickly. We should have dawdled some more.

Oh well. We spend the night in the Hospital Point anchorage and wake up at dawn to the low, chesty thrumming of a really big engine. Just across the Elizabeth River, only a few hundred yards away, the cruise ship Carnival Triumph is sidling into the pier at Nauticus. It's still all lit up with its nighttime dazzle, and I'm amazed again at how these enormous ships manage to move so precisely in such tight quarters. The ship isn't tied up for more than a few minutes before a Vane Brothers tug and barge start to maneuver into position for fueling.

I hear the ship's melodious chime that precedes an announcement to the passengers. A lovely voice is saying something over the ship's P.A. system, presumably about arrival and breakfast. Then more chimes. Hmmm, breakfast. Up on the binnacle, our red timer and its own little chimes await, promising nothing quite so delicious. Just 5.4 more hours of life by the "dings;" we should be nearly to the North Carolina border by then. But at least, on this last morning in the Bay, there aren't any owls hooting.

By Boat & Bike to Easton

2010-04-14T09:15:00.003-04:00

It's all the way up the Tred Avon River, but if you're okay in five feet of water and don't mind a one-mile walk or bike ride, the jolly old town of Easton can be your oyster.

by T.F. Sayles

photos by T.F. Sayles & John Bildahl here

Here's an interesting coincidence: Easton, Md., that lovely old town on the Eastern Shore, seat of Maryland's Talbot County, was founded in 1710. And, as it turns out, that was also the year I first mentioned in an editorial planning session that Easton might actually be a decent boating destination, despite its apparent distance from the nearest deep water. The subject has come up in every planning session since 1710--and there have been several--and the conversation has always gone something like this:

Me, pointing at the map: "See, it's actually only a mile or so from downtown Easton to the Tred Avon River, which is definitely navigable this far up. So, if you could tie up there, or anchor out and find somewhere to leave a dinghy, it wouldn't be all that long a walk or bike ride into town."

Someone else: "Sure . . . you could do it in a powerboat, but not in a cruising sailboat, because you're down to four or five feet of water there. Also, that's a pretty small marina there and it's kind of an industrial spot, with fuel storage tanks all over the place. And to get into town from there you have to go through a pretty rough neighborhood.  I wouldn't want to walk it at night."

Me: "Hmm . . . Oh look, Oxford! We haven't done Oxford in  a while, have we? . . ."

And so it would go, year after year, century after century--until last summer, when I was driving through Easton, on my way from Salisbury to Annapolis, and decided to scout out this theoretical boater's back door. I'm delighted to say I was right, because (a) it always delights me to be right, and (b) I now knew exactly where I'd be going on my upcoming and much anticipated September cruise: Easton. My spur-of-the-moment scouting trip revealed that, yes, the mile or so of Port Street that takes you from the river to downtown Easton is not exactly scenic. But it's not a "rough neighborhood" either, at least not in my vernacular. A bit down at the heels, yes. A modest-income neighborhood, yes. But rough? No. The scouting trip also revealed the funky but sublimely hospitable little camp store of a place that would be my beachhead for the trip--Easton Point Marina, which, according to owner and manager Kathy Meehan, did indeed have some open slips in early September and would be happy to reserve one for me. All that remained was to jigger my early-September schedule a bit, reserve one of the Chesapeake Boating Club's Albin 28s for, say, a Thursday through Saturday, and get my 15-speed Huffy out of the basement. The latter was important because my walking distance is limited these days, thanks to the ol' trick hip, which goes for only a quarter-mile or so before I start to toddle like Walter Brennan. (It's official, I'm old; not only do I have an arthritic hip, but my cultural references include Walter Brennan.) So I'd need a bike. But, on second thought, maybe I could rent one, which would save me a lot of bike-schlepping--lashing it to the car, lashing it to the boat, etc. Enter the Eastern Shore Bicycle Company, which was happy to rent me one of its very civilized and blessedly simple single-speed, coaster-brake, fat-tire Electra cruising bikes. The charge for three days was a reasonable $68, which included a helmet, a cable lock and, best of all, delivery to and pick-up from the spot of my choosing. Clever chap that I am, I chose the marina.

Oh, and one more thing: I should book a room somewhere in town for at least one night of my stay. No, let's make it two nights. Yes, I know, that would be wasting a perfectly good V-berth . . . but what am I, an Explorer Scout? Yes, I could sleep on the boat all three nights. I could also dine every night on canned Vienna sausages from the Wawa, but I'm not going to do that either. No, given the choice, I'll go with mints on the pillow every time. The Tidewater Inn, with its $120 Labor Day special, was the hands-down winner of the price wars, so I booked it for Friday and Saturday nights. I'm a weenie, but I'm a frugal weenie.

And so it was that, after an uneventful three-hour cruise across the Bay, through Knapps Narrows, into the Choptank River and finally up the Tred Avon, I found my helmeted self pedaling eastward on Port Street, headed for dinner at Mason's Restaurant on Harrison Street--though not directly, because I had half an hour to kill before my seven o'clock reservation. I happily squandered the time exploring this pretty old town, learning the street names, relishing the perfectly temperate September air, and coming to a near-religious appreciation of the beauty and simplicity of a fixed-gear bicycle on flat land. Down Harrison Street, back up Washington Street, across on Dover, up Locust, down Harrison to South Lane and . . . oh, look, there's Mason's. And there's a bit of sturdy picket fence where I can chain the bike. Ah, how civilized I am, how light my carbon footprint on this fine summer evening.

Mason's, it turned out, was a very good place to start. What had begun in the 1960s as a small knickknack shop with its own line of chocolates gradually evolved over the years into a popular lunch spot. Now, after two significant expansions in the last decade, it has blossomed into one of Talbot County's best restaurants--still with its own line of chocolates, and a lovely new coffee bar to boot. And chicken piccata to die for. That's what I ordered, though it's a miracle I had room for it after the "ciabatta tower" appetizer--a little orgy of toasted ciabatta bread and Gorgonzola. Add a glass of pinot grigio to that and you had one happy little scout riding his retro red-and-white bicycle back to the boat, whistling the theme song to "Leave It To Beaver" and having a good laugh at the nickname I'd come up with for the bike: Mrs. Cleaver. I know, it's not that funny. But to me, that night, under the influence of Gorgonzola, it was hilarious.

I had a lot on the agenda for the next day, so I resolved to get up at . . . nine-thirty? How did that happen? Oh well, up an at 'em at the crack of nine-thirty, then. I found Mrs. Cleaver exactly where I'd left her, chained to a post behind the marina building (egads, that doesn't sound right), and off we went, straight up Port Street. This is a quiet stretch of road nowadays, but it was designed to be just the opposite. Straight as a string, it was laid out in 1711, only a year after the town--originally named Talbot Courthouse--was established by the colonial General Assembly. As it does now, the road led from Easton Point (once called either Cow's Landing or Cowe's Landing) to Washington Street just south of the courthouse, and it was of course the town's very lifeline. Easton Point was "the wharf," where the schooners and clippers and steamships came and went, where the lumber and lampshades came ashore and the oysters and canned tomatoes went aboard, and abroad.

So, with all that history passing under my wheels, it was appropriate that my first stop that morning would be the Historic Society of Talbot County's (HSTC) Museum and Gardens on Washington Street, to see about signing up for the weekly tour (Fridays at 11:30) of the restored 1810 James Neall House next door. But--my bad luck--only moments before I arrived the volunteer docent who normally does the Neall House tours had called to say he had a family emergency and wouldn't be coming in. Sorry, said the museum volunteer. Rats, said I. Maybe some other Friday. So I grabbed a self-guided tour map and struck out on my own, vowing to come back to the museum later that day to have a closer look at what looked like an intriguing exhibit on Talbot County during World War II.

As with so many towns of its age, fire has re-written much of Easton's architectural history, erasing most of the wood-frame structures of the early-18th-century chapters and replacing them with the less vulnerable brick buildings of the Federal period (the Market Place Fire of 1878 must have been a big one; it's mentioned repeatedly in the self-guided tour). But that's not to say it's all brick or Victorian-era wood. Indeed, way down Washington Street, past the hospital and nearly out of the city proper, is what is thought to be the oldest frame building in all of Maryland: the 1684 Third Haven Meeting House, still used by the local Quaker community. And in the center of town there are a number of late-18th-century frame houses still standing--the 1789 Mary Jenkins House on Washington Street, for example, home of the HSTC's own revenue-generating consignment store, Tharpe Antiques.

After tooling around town for an hour or so, I began to see that everything I needed or wanted to see in Easton was in, or within easy walking distance of, what I came to think of as the Historic Rectangle--the four or five parallel blocks of Harrison and Washington streets between Goldsborough and South streets: the HSTC museum and historic properties, a dozen restaurants, three or four bars, at least four B&Bs, countless shops and galleries, the Avalon Theatre (where I planned to see a jazz trio on Saturday night), the Academy Art Museum (which a friend had told me not to miss and was on the next day's itinerary) and of course the Tidewater Inn.

I stopped for a late-breakfast nosh at the Coffee Cat, a sunny little corner cafe at the foot of Goldsborough Street, which had been known as Coffee East until late 2008. Now, under new management, it's the daytime half of a very popular commercial duet. Right next door is the Night Cat--a 60-seat nightclub that features local and regional music three or four nights a week, depending on the season. That night's act didn't ring a bell, but on the list of upcoming shows I saw more than a few names that did--Deanna Bogart, Tom Principato, Danni Rosner. Clearly not a musical backwater by any stretch.

Fortified with a breakfast sandwich and three cups of really good Guatemalan medium roast, I mounted Mrs. Cleaver again and. . . . Okay, I'm thinking maybe this whole Mrs. Cleaver thing isn't such a good idea. I think from here on I'll just go with "the bike." You'll know which bike I mean. There was only one. . . . So, anyway, I hopped on the bike and headed north on Washington Street, intent on visiting the HSTC Museum's World War II exhibit--before I realized that this would probably be my best chance to scoot out to the bike shop I'd looked up the night before--Easton Cycle and Sport--which, according to Mr. Google, was straight east from here on Goldsborough, out near Route 50. Mr. G was right, as he usually is, and I found the two things I was looking for at the bike shop: a rear-view mirror and some kind of hey-here-I-am-on-a-bike-please-don't-run-me-over flashing light or reflector strip. Twenty minutes later, with the help of a disposable hex wrench and my Swiss Army knife, I was all set--a side-view mirror attached to the left handlebar and a flashing light Velcro'd to my helmet. (I didn't realize it at the time, in the sunlight, but it was a damned powerful little light. I caught a glimpse of it that night in the reflection from a store window, and I looked like a channel marker on wheels. I imagined a boater groping his way up the Tred Avon two miles away: "Is that the red 16?" First mate: "No, it's some guy on a bicycle. He seems to be having fun.")

Anyway, safety issues resolved, I worked my way back west to the Historic Society Museum, eager to have a closer look at the World War II exhibit. I'm a sucker for World War II history, so it doesn't take much to get my attention . . . but this was really a fine exhibit. Taking up a good two-thirds of the museum's narrow but deep space, it was an intriguing glimpse of the war from the homefront, from the citizen's point of view, with most of the artifacts and photos donated by or on loan from Talbot Countians: plane-spotting and civil defense, boatbuilding (Oxford Boatyard built 126 boats and repaired 71), scrap-saving, sugar rationing, tire rationing (Price's Tire Shop switched to retreading and recapping for the duration), war bonds, victory gardens, blackout window shades, military uniforms, weapons, food packages for allied POWs, and, to my great surprise, a display about the German POW camp right here in Easton--from which, during the growing season, prisoners were sent out to work at local farms.

After a quick browse through the aforementioned Tharpe Antiques, across the street from the museum, I hopped back on the bike and rode a block south and then east to the Academy Art Museum at the corner of South and Harrison streets. I'm glad I listened to my friend and didn't miss this. It's a splendid old building, for starters, built just after the Civil War as the town's first public high school. Now its large, bare rooms and halls are filled with art--mostly photography during my visit, which coincided with an exhibit called Picturing America, 1930–1960--Photographs from the Baltimore Museum of Art (Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Walter Rosenblum, et al.). Supplementing that was an exhibit featuring photographs from the museum's own collection, called American Photographs from the 1950s Until Now. It was all quite absorbing, as was the small (12-piece) but well chosen survey of paintings by Baltimore painter and academic Bennard Perlman.

Back out in the fresh air, strapping on the helmet once again, I was tempted to just head vaguely northeast and see what I might see, but good sense intervened, telling me it was time to move my base of operations from the boat to the Tidewater Inn. I pedaled back down Port Street, jammed two days worth of clothes into a backpack and locked up the boat. An hour later I was sprawled across the bed in my rather small room on the second floor of that lovely old 1949 hotel. But the term "small room" is relative, is it not? Indeed, to me, a 6-foot man having spent the previous evening in a 5-foot-10-inch V-berth, this room seemed quite nearly cavernous. I took a shower, because I could. I took a nap, because I could.

Later, after a leisurely twilight ride around town (that's when I saw my flashing head reflected in the store window), I ventured only as far as the hotel's own restaurant for an excellent dinner of wood-grilled pork chops, accompanied by a warm apple and blue cheese slaw and marvelous, lemony German potatoes. Yet another splendid meal. Then it was off to bed, to that acreof mattress and embarrassment of pillows that awaited me in room 303. I drifted off to sleep, thinking how grand life would be if every day had such an easy, nourishing cadence: eat, ride the bike, absorb culture and/or history, ride the bike, eat, ride the bike, absorb culture and/or history, nap, eat, ride the bike, rinse, repeat. This I could get used to.

It all came to a lovely crescendo on the third day, and I use the musical term intentionally, because the day ended with a concert by jazz pianist Monty Alexander. That was at the Avalon Theatre, Easton's homegrown Art-Deco movie theater from 1921 to 1985 and now its lively and very successful performing arts center. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The day--another perfect one, headed for the low 80s, with no discernible humidity--started with a tasty French toast breakfast at Darnell's Grill, a homey cafe next door to the Tidewater Inn, then a pleasantly aimless bike ride up and down the streets of the mostly residential neighborhood east of the historic rectangle.

Then I moseyed down to the north end of the rectangle, looking for the Saturday morning Farmer's Market I'd read about in one of the brochures I'd brought along to breakfast. The map had showed it at the north end of Harrison Street, just before it bends west and merges with Washington Street. And sure enough, that's where I found it. Actually I heard it before I saw it. That's the thing about bicycle touring; you hear things you'd never hear in a car. From a bike, a well attended farmer's market is audible from a block away. And this was well attended indeed. I didn't stay long though--not because there wasn't plenty to see and buy, but because there was no point in it. Whatever I bought here would have to survive transport by bike, boat and car, and that seemed like unnecessary vegetable cruelty to me.

So off I went for a bit more aimless exploring, then a light lunch (hummus and grilled naan) at the organically minded Out of the Fire restaurant on Goldsborough, and then back to the Tidewater Inn for a quiet afternoon of reading and people-watching from a rocker on the hotel's shady wrap-around portico.

Soon it was time to get dressed for dinner and the show. Of course by "dressed" I mean merely a shirt with an actual collar and pantlegs that reached all the way to my ankles. Resplendent in my grown-up shirt and largely unwrinkled khaki pants, I strolled (if it can be said that Walter Brennan ever "strolled" after riding a bike all day) to the Inn at 202 Dover--a beautifully refurbished 1874 mansion, now a B&B that quietly dominates the corner of Dover and Hanson streets a block east of the Tidewater. There, at the inn's Peacock Restaurant, I enjoyed a splendid meal of free-range chicken, served with sea-salt-sprinkled asparagus and a heap of macaroni and cheese (clearly the retro side dish de rigueur these days) and a nicely matched glass of organic French sauvignon blanc. Okay, what the heck, two glasses--I'm on foot tonight.

Then it was showtime at the Avalon--two mesmerizing hours under the spell of jazz great Monty Alexander, the Jamaican pianist who has shared the stage and studio with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Dizzy Gillespie.

It was the perfect coda for my Easton adventure, made all the more memorable when I ran into Alexander and his drummer the next morning at the Coffee Cat. They were grabbing a quick bite before heading to the airport and, eventually, Chicago. I was grabbing a quick bite before heading to Easton Point Marina, and, eventually, Annapolis.

Speaking of which . . . have I mentioned that Easton is in fact accessible by water? That's what I've been trying to tell people since 1710. Turns out I was right, and I like being right.

Mr. Annapolitan

2010-01-21T16:34:00.003-05:00

I'm no longer a Baltimorean (or, as some cruel folks put it, a Balti-moron). That quirky little city on the Patapsco has its merits, to be sure--great restaurants and neighborhoods, gobs of marinas and maritime culture, a remarkable aquarium, a fantastic visionary arts museum, and a world-class symphony orchestra. I could go on, but I won't, because I'm an Annapolitan now.

Yes, back in November I became a bona fide work-here-live-here-vote-here-recycle-my-trash-here Annapolitan. And I like it--even more than I thought I would. Of course I knew I'd love the short commute. The trip is now one-thirty-sixth of what it used to be: one mile instead of 36 miles. And, for the first time ever in my working life, I can pop home for lunch. Let me repeat those lovely words: I can pop home for lunch. Yes, miracle of miracles, I can be home in less time than it takes to heat up a chicken breast in the office microwave.

I expected all that, but I didn't expect the suddenly heightened sense of belonging, of being home, of truly being an Annapolitan. (And that very word has a lovely ring to it, does it not? I think so, which is why I've already used it three times, four if you count the headline.) Of course I've worked in Annapolis for a long time--nearly 14 years--and I've gotten to know the place fairly well. But I see now that I've only known it in a shallow Monday-through-Friday sense. I see now that because I merely worked here, instead of both working and living here--and shopping here and going to the movies here and owning a home here and buying cat food here--I've kept a sort of emotional distance from the place. Yes, I agree, that's an odd thing to say about a place, but there it is; those are the best words I can find for how it feels to both live and work here now.

And then there's the matter of Annapolis's sheer . . . Chesapeakiness. It's just so much more Chesapeakey than Baltimore. Some will take issue with that, I'm sure. How dare you, sir! they'll say. Baltimore not Chesapeakey? She's the queen city of the Bay, sir! She's as Chesapeakey as it gets! And of course I accept that, up to a point; Charm City is very much a part of the Bay's history and culture and aura. But it's a city. It's Baltimore. So it can only be Chesapeakey in a . . . um, city-like, Baltimorey way. Know what I mean? (Yes, I know, I'm throwing around some fancy words here, but try to keep up with me.)

Annapolis, on the other hand, fairly oozes Chesapeake mojo. There are maritime businesses on every corner and boats everywhere--in driveways and parking lots and backyards and of course in the marinas, those little groves of aluminum trees that grow at the edges of the countless creeks you find at the ends of countless woodsy dead-end streets. I haven't found a good Afghani restaurant here yet, but that is offset by the fact that I can, on any given Saturday morning, walk the few blocks to Bay Ridge Road and buy a dinghy.

I suppose it boils down to this: For all those years, leaving Annapolis every night and heading up I-97 to Baltimore, it always felt vaguely wrong, like going off the reservation or wandering away from the home fires at night. On the contrary, leaving work and heading for my spiffy little condo, exactly one mile away, feels quite right. That said, I think I'll pop home for lunch.

Tim Sayles, Editor

For more insights into Chesapeake culture and society, visit ChesapeakeBoating.net

Fleet Week

2010-01-20T15:33:00.004-05:00

by Paul Clancy

Four peaceful creeks and one lovely old Virginia town--a Fleets Bay package deal.

Here's what I remember best about our trip: the day we dropped anchor in a lovely creek and rustled up lunch. Sandwiches (with pickles, or else why bother?) and cookies to follow. And our boat, ever attentive to wind and current, did a nervous about-face as the wind shifted from west to north to northeast. If it was a harbinger of things to come, we'd worry about that later. What mattered most was that as we left the creek and headed back north, we were flying close-hauled up this gorgeous little bay, thrilled just to be there, doing that, on such a splendid day.

We were exploring Fleets Bay, just around the corner from the mouth of the Rappahannock River. Tucked in just north of Windmill Point, it's the broad collective mouth of four neatly arranged creeks--Antipoison, Tabbs, Dymer and Indian. And for us, out on a mid-October jaunt, determined to go somewhere we'd never been, it was just the ticket. Three of the four creeks (all but Tabbs) are wide and deep enough for Ode to Joy, our five-foot-draft sailboat, and they all offer generous, protected anchorages. Plus there's Kilmarnock, Va., a great little town to explore, with a bustling marina that has much to offer. And the bay itself? It's one great big watercolor painting, with a shoreline brush-stroked with sandy beaches and deep woods.

We'd come to see the place we'd heard much about, and to visit its revitalized town, soak up wisdom and jokes at a popular hangout (favored by a former governor and his breakfast buddies) and enjoy some quiet nights at anchor under 14-carat stars. It had been a little rough coming up the Bay from Norfolk. We'd splashed anchor in Horn Harbor in late afternoon and resumed the journey at dawn, still bucking north winds and waves. But soon after Barb and I turned the corner at Windmill Point and silenced the engine at last, we felt Fleets Bay's welcoming tug. And the tug of its history.

First of all, there's Antipoison Creek and its famous Captain John Smith story. Everyone who gives you an explanation starts by saying, "Legend has it . . ." a phrase that always makes me suspicious. But this story actually makes sense: During his travels in 1608, the famous English explorer had been badly stung by a cownose ray at the mouth of the Rappahannock. Smith was certain he was a goner, the story goes, but the local Indians knew better; they applied a poultice of mud from the banks of the creek. Ergo Antipoison Creek. And, for that matter, ergo Stingray Point, where the incident had begun.

A dozen or so years later, Captain Henry Fleet (also spelled Fleete) arrived in these parts after dropping off a boatload of settlers at Jamestown. His idea was to trade with the natives--English goods, tools, fish hooks and such for furs and skins. But as he made his way up the Potomac, he was captured by the Anacostan Indians, who kept him as a prisoner for five years. Making the best of the situation, Fleet learned their language and, later, after being ransomed, proved invaluable as a negotiator. One of his noteworthy accomplishments was securing land from the Yeocomicos for what was to become St. Mary's City, Maryland's first capital. He served in the general assemblies of both Virginia and Maryland before settling in what became known as Fleets Bay. He's buried at Fleets Island near Windmill Point. Fleets still abound in the area, including Alex Fleet, the mayor of Irvington, Va.

As everywhere on the Chesapeake, the names of the creeks mirror the history of the people who have lived on them--though no longer the Corrotoman, Chickacoan and Wicomico tribes that once dwelt here. Dymer and Tabbs were both fur traders. Antipoison and Indian are European monikers as well, even if they do make reference to the earlier inhabitants. The land here also offers up the occasional evidence of British occupation and Civil War skirmishes--the latter in the form of Union cavalry raids and gunboat bombardments. But there's a gentleness too--you might even call it gentility--as well as a sense that people living here belong here, however temporarily. Maybe even we cruising sailorfolk.

We sailed straight up Indian Creek to Chesapeake Boat Basin, and were invited to tie up at the T-head of one of its piers. The marina presides over the small harbor where Kilmarnock Wharf used to welcome steamboats, and even the occasional showboat. Right next door is a Perdue grain depot, where corn from local farmers is trucked in and then heaped into barges, bound for chicken processing plants. Until Clay and Lisa Holcomb bought the marina in the late 1990s, the place had been more than a little run down. But the Holcombs brought new life to it, and continue to make improvements. Indeed, we saw a bit of that for ourselves as workers put finishing touches on floating docks, 32 of them, that will be open this season for overnight visitors. And right next to a newly painted clubhouse, an old building was coming down to make way for a swimming pool.

The Holcombs do as much as they can to attract transients, though their very location does most of the work. Being roughly halfway between Norfolk and Solomons, it's the perfect layover for people making that run--and the approach from the Bay couldn't be easier, with a channel that is straight, wide and deep. And if you're in an exploring mood, Kilmarnock is only a mile and a half away--a 10-minute ride on one of the new fat-tire, coaster-brake bikes that are available free to marina guests. The town has good restaurants, a new inn and dozens of nice gift and antiques shops. The Holcombs also hope to persuade the town to make the marina one of the stops of the Kilmarnock Trolley, which offers 25-cent rides to White Stone, Irvington and other nearby spots.

Kilmarnock was no more than an Indian trail crossroads at first. In the 1700s, William Steptoe began operating a storehouse and ordinary there, and "The Crossroads," as it was called, became "Steptoe's Ordinary." Then, in 1764, an agent for a mercantile firm in nearby Glasgow changed the name to Kilmarnock after his hometown in Scotland. But Steptoe lives on. From May to October, merchants and the local art league put on "Steptoe's First Friday Walkabout," a kind of street party, with live music, entertainment, food and sidewalk sales.

Barb and I had a little walkabout of our own--or a ride-about, to be exact. Right after landing at the marina, we borrowed a couple of bikes and rambled to town on the quiet country road, past a large cornfield dotted with purple and pink morning glories. In town, we parked the bikes and strolled along newly brick-paved sidewalks, part of Kilmarnock's recent Main Street revitalization project, and peered into gift, home furnishing and antiques shops. "Everyone in this town has perfect taste," Barb quipped after we paraded past several . . . well, tasteful places.

That night we prepared dinner on one of the grills provided by the marina and dined in its guest lounge while pouring over charts and making plans for the next day. Our choice for breakfast was easy. Lee's Restaurant has been serving home-style food, homemade pies, fried chicken, stewed tomatoes and the like in Kilmarnock since 1939, but it might be best known as the place where locals gather almost every day for breakfast. And from the chatter at the long back table we knew we were in luck. First of all, while polishing off our eggs and grits, one of the waitresses smiled at a fellow who had gotten up to leave. "See you, Governor," she said.

I followed him outside and mumbled an introduction. "I'm Linwood Holton," he said with a craggy smile. Holton was governor from 1970 to 1974, and is probably best remembered as a progressive Republican who set an example by sending his four children to majority black schools when Richmond was ordered to desegregate. One of them, Anne Holton, is now married to the most recent governor, Tim Kaine. Governor Holton is also known as the politician who fought the old-South Democratic Byrd machine and brought Republicans to power--before falling out with them when, in his mind, they went too far to the right.

He now lives in Weems, Va., on a point of land on the Corrotoman River, just off the Rappahannock. Until recently he had a 38-foot yacht, on which he and his family cruised the Bay from one end to the other. He's enjoyed great power and prestige in Richmond and Washington but now finds small-town life more agreeable. He grew up in Big Stone Gap, a town of 3,000, "and we're now in a town that doesn't have 300, I wouldn't guess. I'm back to my roots, except it's the other end of the stick."

While we talked on the corner near Lee's, he referred to his friends inside as "my redneck crew," but wished he hadn't said it. "Don't get me in trouble with my friends." I didn't get him in trouble--even though I used the line as an introduction. The whole tableful of locals laughed and invited me to sit with them. It was about 9 a.m., the start of "the second shift," they said--the shift that makes sure the stories told in the first jibe with the second. True or false, the stories told at this table, looking out on Main Street, are the stuff of news and gossip.

"I can come in here at seven and sit till ten," said Robert Mason, editor of the Rappahannock Record, "and get more news than I can print."

Dave Hinson, sitting in the middle of the group, warned me not to take them seriously. "You listen to some of these people long enough," he said, "you won't know what right on red is." I moved down to the end and spoke with Bradley Sisson, who told me he was 94 and doing okay, although his vision wasn't so hot. It's been a great place to live, he said. Even back in 1933, just before he joined the Marines. "We had plenty to eat--oysters, wild duck and fish," he said. "but we didn't know what a dollar looked like!"

Then he told me about the old menhaden factory, which didn't have controls on its boilers and put forth a ferocious odor. "We had an old boy who ran a service station, Fitzhugh Stevens, who could aggravate people to death," he said. "One morning Stevens opened up early and this [out-of-towner] pulled in. When he got out of his car, he said, 'My God, what in the world is that smell?' Stevens said, ‘We have an undertaker in this town, and he's got an old tar barrel with a fire in it and sometimes when he gets behind and starts his cremations up. . . .' He was lying, of course, but the guy thought he was serious. He said he'd never smelled anything like that."

Later that morning, eager to continue our exploration, Barb and I cast off and sailed out of Indian Creek--and before long we were swinging around the wide shoals of Fleets Bay Neck and heading into Dymer Creek, the next stop south. The second inlet on the creek's south shore is dominated by one of the largest mansions I've ever seen, a rambling English Tudor-like affair that locals refer to as "the castle." It occupies the spot, I later learned, where the old fish factory once sat.

Just around the corner from there we tied up at the dock of Dymer Creek Seafood and Winegar's Marine Railway, side-by-side businesses that have long served the region's palates as well as its boats. There we met Cathy Davenport, granddaughter of the business's founder, John Winegar. She runs the onshore operation now, while her husband and their son, both watermen, bring in the catch. They sell to wholesalers.

A couple of fishing boats, the Bay Princess and Ashley B, rested at their dock. There's a large soft shell business there, too, with almost 60 tanks.

Nearby, a yellow-painted deadrise (owned by a clammer, Davenport told us) rested on rails after having been hauled up by a 1929 Model A Ford motor. For us, it lent a timelessness to the whole scene. For Davenport, it's just part of it all, part of who she is. "You see that house?" she said, pointing through trees to a gentle rise just back from the railway. "That's where I was raised." Back then, she said, there were only 11 other houses on the creek.

Even though it was October, it seemed like a summer day. An old black dog lay in the sun, a kitten rolled in the dirt and several fat gulls perched on pilings. Davenport told us that even though she loves to travel in the winter, sometimes to exotic places, this is where her life is centered. "I'll be honest with you," she said. "Nothing makes me happier than sitting on my patio with my coffee and watching the world go by. It's so peaceful."

Our next stop was Antipoison (pronounced by locals as if it were spelled "Antapoison"). What appears to be the creek's wide mouth is in fact another bay, according to the chart--Little Bay, to be exact, tucked in under the brim of the mushroom-cap peninsula called Fleets Island, which has Windmill Point at its other end. We only had time to duck into Antipoison Creek for a quick lunch on the hook, but we could see why it is known as the most protected of the creeks, with Fleets Island blocking the easterlies.

We got back to Chesapeake Boat Basin in time to walk the mile and a half back into town and get a tour of the Kilmarnock Museum, tucked into a small frame building on Main Street. It's loaded with photos of bygone years--the old firehouse, an outlandish hotel, a Spanish-style theater and a couple of bottling plants--a time when local promoters touted Kilmarnock as "the New York of the Northern Neck." Our guide was museum founder Augusta Sellew, whose family has lived in town for generations. "My grandfather and his brother had a general store that sold everything from horse collars to feed to women's hats," she told us. "You name it, they had it. And all of it had to come here by boat." The town endured three disastrous fires, as well as a 1933 hurricane that took out the wharf--ending the town's steamboat era with a bang, not a wimper. Building booms followed each of these catastrophes, so it's no surprise that Kilmarnock, after a bit of a slump a few years ago, is growing and prospering yet again.

We fed our faces at a place called Buenos Nachos, a Mexican grill on Main Street. There's something on the menu called a Kilmarnock Quesadilla, containing shrimp and crab, and in the interest of careful reporting, I tried it . . . and liked it. They also didn't do so bad in the margarita department, either--although here, where the Spanglish pun is king, it's called a "buenarita."

From there, feeling quite bueno, we strolled over to the Kilmarnock Inn, to have a peek at what would be our decidedly upscale accommodations that night. Nothing like sleeping on a sailboat to make you appreciate a great big fluffy bed and a bathroom with an actual tub. This extravagant inn's story goes back to 1984, when Shawn Donahue, a local real estate developer, bought a vacant century-old house on East Church Street and couldn't figure out what to do with it. Kilmarnock was pretty much a ghost town then, he says, but he knew it was coming back and he'd be part of it. An anchor hotel was what it needed, he decided. One day while having lunch at Sal's Italian Pizza, where they had one of those paper placemats showing all the Virginia presidents--eight of them--it dawned on him: a B&B with eight "presidential" cottages!

"I never have an original thought," he said with a shrug. "I see something I like and copy it." It took years, but eventually, the idea came to fruition. Each of the cottages, placed in a campus-like half-acre compound, has a distinct architecture; thus there are buildings resembling Jefferson's Monticello, Washington's Mt. Vernon, Madison's Montpelier and so forth. There are even cottages representing minor presidents like Taylor, Tyler and Harrison. The main house, the Wilson, includes "The 14 Points Lounge." It's all quite elaborate, with multiple guest rooms in all but one of the cottages (the Madison is dedicated to the honeymoon suite). We stayed at the plantation-style Monroe Cottage, which has four guestrooms, each named for a Virginia river.

The next day--sadly, our last on Fleets Bay--we had a choice: try to make it home in spite of the nasty weather approaching, or leave the boat and come back. We chose the latter, renting a car and going home. High winds persisted for two solid weeks and finally, in very late October, we retraced our steps to Kilmarnock. Back on board, we fueled up that afternoon and motored to Pitmans Cove--another popular anchorage here, just around the corner from the marina. There, planning to get an early start the next morning, we dropped anchor near a trawler from clear across the continent: Victoria, B.C. There were more Canadians about, as well; as Barb and I broke out the wine and cheese and settled in the cockpit, a riot of Canada geese took to the air from a nearby farm field. One of the squadrons was so big it seemed to take forever to form up, ending up looking like a fish hook trailing a long line. We swung gently at anchor, reading and knitting, listening to John Williams playing classical Spanish guitar. At night, the cove was splashed with stars. Dawn on the Bay was drop-dead gorgeous as we sailed out of the creek, glad to have come this way.

For more articles on Chesapeake boating, news, culture, and events, visit ChesapeakeBoating.net

Bird Onboard

2010-01-12T13:47:00.002-05:00

by Ellis W. Merschoff

Sea Gypsy was pulling nicely in a stiff southerly breeze, making close to her hull speed at 6 knots. The early autumn light seemed to carry the shoreline colors out onto the Bay, emphasizing that summer was indeed over.

"What is that squeaking?" asked Sherry, as she settled in on an easterly course toward the Craighill Channel front light.

"Just the wheel," I replied. "It has been making some noise off and on for a while now." I replied.

"No, it sounds like a . . . eeeech!" screamed Sherry at sudden appearance of a bird. A female goldfinch. (We looked it up later.)

Sherry squirmed away from the wheel, trying to keep her distance from the chirping hitchhiker perched on the taffrail. Unhelpfully, the bird hopped to her shoulder, eliciting another outburst. Fortunately, the goldfinch quickly made a second short hop to the binnacle mounted on the wheel pedestal. Now that we could keep an eye on her, our guest was less frightening. Soon, my wife Sherry, our guest Diane, and I started to become more comfortable with our unlikely visitor. Now, this is different, we all agreed. Even the bird seemed to be surprised by the turn of events.

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Three Hulls on the Potomac

2010-01-12T13:38:00.002-05:00

by John Robinson

We're beating into the steep chop of the Bay off of Smith Point. Adam is at the tiller. The breeze is stiff out of the northeast and Go-Go Girl's sleek hulls are majestically parting the waves. With our three sons along for the adventure—Adam, 15; Ian, 14; and Taylor, 11—my wife Marybeth and I are exploring the 100 miles or so of navigable Potomac from the Bay to Washington D.C. Eyeballing an imaginary line between Maryland's Point Lookout and Virginia's Smith Point, my Adam yells, "Well, I guess we are officially in the Potomac now!"

At dawn this morning we left our home port on the Rappahannock aboard our Corsair F28 trimaran. I've been looking forward to this trip for months. The boys are recently out of school for the summer and the weather forecast looks fine. Life is good. As we round a bend in the St. Mary's River--which is especially calm and inviting after the crossing of the boisterous mouth of the Potomac--the sailing ship Dove comes into view. This stout vessel is a reproduction of the ship in which Leonard Calvert and his crew arrived in the new world in 1634 to establish first significant English settlement in what is now Maryland.

Prior to anchoring for the evening off of Church Point in the shadow of the Dove, we tie up at the St. Mary's College pier, with the dockmaster's gracious permission, and explore on foot. We wander the grounds of the college and the living history museum of St. Mary's City. It's a beautiful place, and I can't help but imagine how grateful those colonists must have been to be settling in such a place.

Later, after cleaning up another of our one-pot dinner stews, I sit in the netting between the hulls of Go-Go Girl writing in my journal as the sky blazes orange to the west. Ian entertains us with his guitar, and Marybeth studies the cruising guides. Taylor and Adam are finally coming back aboard from swimming and paddling our resident surfboard over to the Dove.

We delight in the immersion of ourselves into the life and history of the Potomac. Our days are full with all the activity that cruising entails: navigating, sailing, motoring, reading, playing, learning. We visit memorable creeks and points of interest. One of those is St. Clements Island, about 15 miles upstream from the mouth of the St. Marys River, also on the Maryland side of the Potomac. This is the site of the first landing by the St. Mary's settlers, and we are intrigued to visit it as well. A long, dilapidated pier makes access to the island easy, and we enjoy walking the sandy paths which crisscross the quiet island. The only structure standing there is a large stone cross erected in 1934 to commemorate the first landing. It's an evocative place, and on the day of our visit we have the island to ourselves.

On our Potomac cruise we sail when we can, which turns out to be more than we had expected. Otherwise we motor along with our trusty Honda outboard. When we sail under the Rt. 301 bridge, and see the cars and trucks speeding overhead, we feel like we're worlds away in time and space. Here we are on river time without a schedule, our trip unfolding before us at its own rate. We have definitely been looking forward to this: the sunken ghost fleet of Mallow Bay. The remains of over 100 wood- and steel-hull ships built for service in World War I, but too late and never commissioned, lie in the shallow water of this cove off the Potomac. We anchor among them for the night and listen to the frogs inland and gaze at the stars overhead, the water gently lapping at the boat's hulls.

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2010 Best of the Bay Photo Contest -- 6 more days to submit!

2009-12-09T10:03:00.003-05:00

Deadline for Best of the Bay Photo Contest submissions is December 15!Get yours in now! Click here for photo contest rules, judging and prizes, and past winners.

The Next BIG Thing

2009-12-09T10:02:00.003-05:00

Two travelers on a small sailboat try to put the whole National Harbor experience into perspective.

by Jody Argo Schroath

Night had fallen, and behind us 18 stories of lighted glass and steel atrium glowed like a colossal moon. It was July 3, and my old college friend Jean and I were just about to join a group of boaters from Occoquan, Va., at the end of National Harbor Marina's A dock to watch the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center's first ever July fireworks show. But first she wanted to take a few pictures. As usual. Jean was using her underwater camera, which she had packed for our sailing trip up the Potomac River because she hadn't been sure whether this kind of sailing would involve as much tipping over and getting wet as sailing Sunfish in college had—the last time she and I had been on a sailboat together. I understood. We had tipped over a lot.

But Jean didn't understand. I don't mean about the tipping over. She got that now. No, what she didn't understand was the whole idea of National Harbor, which she was having trouble putting into perspective, despite the fact that we had now been here since the end of June.

"I mean it's crazy cool in an alternate universe kind of way, but I still don't get it. What is it really, and why is it here?"

Big questions indeed. How to explain?

We were standing on the dock as Jean turned away from the river to snap pictures of the thousands of spectators that had gathered along National Harbor's shoreline in anticipation of the fireworks. Finally, she stopped and pulled a brochure out of her pocket and began reading off its facts and figures. "National Harbor is built on 300 acres, has six hotels and about 20 buildings," she said. "When it's completed, it will have 7.3 million square feet of mixed use community space, 4,000 hotel rooms, 2,500 residential units, 500,000 square feet of class A office space (whatever that is), 1 million square feet of retail, dining and entertainment space and 10,000 parking spaces."

"Yes," I said, "it will be bigger than the Mall of America, the world's largest shopping mall."
"Then it's supposed to be a giant shopping mall?"
"Um, I don't think so."

We walked slowly toward the end of the dock; the lights on the atrium moon changed from white to red.

"I think it's supposed to be a kind of all-purpose destination, where you can spend your whole vacation or use it as a base for visiting Washington, D.C., which is a kind of uber-destination. Or you can make sidetrips to Alexandria or Mount Vernon by boat. At least I think that's the idea." I tried a little history. National Harbor's developer, Milton Peterson, wasn't the first one to think that this old gravel pit on Smoots Bay, in the shadow the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and the Beltway, would be the perfect place for something really big. In the 1970s and 1980s there were several big projects for the property that ultimately fell through. One of them was called Bay of Americas and another PortAmerica. "All very grand-sounding too, like National Harbor," I said. "But this was the one that came through—not that it didn't take an act of Congress." (In 1999, Congress passed legislation that exempted National Harbor from Federal review and protected it from environmental lawsuits—though there's no reason to believe any lawsuits would have occurred.)

We greeted our new Occoquan friends—we'd met earlier in the day when they had trickled in for their Fourth of July weekend rendezvous at National Harbor—and watched the city of Alexandria's fireworks arc silently into the jet black sky across the river. I reminded Jean that the tree-lined boulevards and specially commissioned public works of art, the hotels, restaurants, shops, water taxis, tour boats, bass charters, art works, and even the fortune-teller's kiosk, were all meant to give visitors plenty to see and do. "There are just more of things and they're just bigger than we're used to, at least around here. Hey, you live in Orlando, you should be used to this kind of thing."

"That's a point," she admitted.

"Take these folks from Occoquan," I went on. "They understand it." They had told me earlier that they'd made the trip to National Harbor four or five times already. "They can get in their boats and spend an hour or two coming upriver, pull into their slips, take out their deck chairs and relax. They barbecue, shop, listen to a calypso band, walk their dogs and go soundly to sleep in their own beds. When the weekend's over, they pull in their docklines and go home."

"We used to anchor out in the river for the fireworks," volunteered Alan Gross, who was sitting at the edge of the group with his German shepherd Schatzi and had overheard our conversation. "But then we had to get back to Occoquan in the dark with all that traffic. It was nuts! This is so much better!"

The first rocket shot into the air off a barge out in the river and exploded into a shower of color above our heads. Behind us the Gaylord atrium changed from red to blue.

Jean and I had arrived at National Harbor on a sunburst Saturday afternoon in late June aboard Snipp, my Albin Vega 27. After a week of zigzagging lazily up the Potomac against a persistent headwind (is there any other kind?), we had finally eased Snipp out of the Potomac's main channel and into National Harbor Marina. We were glad to get there.

We had spent the previous night at Smallwood State Park on Mattawoman Creek, where we had run smack into a hornet's nest of mid-tournament bass fishermen—men with steely eyes and gritted teeth and only three things on their mind: catch bass, catch them fast and catch them big. They had no patience for people on sailboats. We, on the other hand, just wanted to get off the creek and check into the marina. The problem was that we became so wrapped up in not running aground in the narrow channel into the park that we fell into the clutches of the many headed Hydra of marine vegetation lurking just beneath the surface. It caught us fast. Were it not for heroic action with a boat hook, a paddle and a Swiss army multi-tool, we felt we would soon have been sucked under to join other hapless wanderers. Once freed, we docked—as per earlier phone instructions—then had to undock because we couldn't get to the office from the dock. (There was a padlocked gate at the end of the dock.) We redocked near the office, where we were assigned a slip where we couldn't dock because it was shallow enough to ground a bass boat. We picked out a deeper empty slip and re-redocked. This slip naturally turned out to belong to the Seatow guy, so we re-undocked and re-re-redocked opposite a sailboat sunk at the dock. It was not an inspiring evening.

The stretch of Potomac above Mattawoman is crowded with things to see. First there's the broad entrance to Occoquan Bay on the Virginia side, with lovely Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge on the bay's north shore, and then a good long view of George Mason's handsome Gunston Manor, high on a bluff looking down on Gunston Cove and the Potomac. The river narrows here to a friendly size, and the channel moves restlessly from one bank to the other.

Soon we had our first view of Mount Vernon, that most familiar of American stately homes, as we crowded the edge of the channel to give a three-story-tall tour boat a wide berth as it bustled toward the Mount Vernon channel. Jean was entranced—as well she might be—but I stubbornly insisted that she pay less attention to the scenery and more to spotting floating logs and other debris that often litter this bit of the river. Soon after, Fort Washington loomed above us on the Maryland shore, and then finally we could see the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, and beyond it, the Washington Monument, a sight that never fails to thrill me.

Between Indian Queen and Rosier bluffs, the channel bellies up to the Maryland shore. Here  it was just Snipp and yet another very large tour boat, both of us enjoying an all-too intimate moment between the closely placed red and green markers, and so close to the shore that we could just about touch the red clay and maples. But before long we had shot through to follow the channel toward the middle of the river, where it lines up for the trip through the center span of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Not that we were going as far as the bridge. But I need to mention the channel because it's here—about the time you reach the middle of the river and just as you clear South Point—that National Harbor is suddenly, without prelude, just there, like Xanadu or the Emerald City. It's enough to make you feel like either Kublai Khan or Dorothy—I'm not sure which. Either way, it's straight out of a storybook.

"Good heavens," Jean exclaimed from the bow, "what on earth is that?"

"That is National Harbor, of course, silly girl." "And what you are particularly exclaiming over, no doubt, is the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center, which is three times the size of everything else." I had been to National Harbor with friends in the spring and so was in a position to be annoyingly blasé about the whole thing. But really there's no denying that it's a stunner.

A moment later, however, something else had caught her eye. "Look at that gigantic sail!"

"You are referring of course to the eight-story tall semitransparent glass mainsail that decorates the front port side of the Westin Hotel."

She shot me a dark look and abandoned the binoculars in favor of her camera. Click.

"Jean," I called forward, "what's our next marker?" Click. Click.

"Sheesh," I said (or words to that effect), "find the next marker!"

I sympathized with Jean's desire to take pictures because the approach to National Harbor from the water definitely has it all over the land route for impressive views. But Smoots Bay is shallow and our charts, though pretty new, were not new enough to show the new entrance markers to the marina. And suddenly we also found ourselves rolling in the wake of a lot of very big powerboats. Did I mention that this was a Saturday afternoon? Click. Click.

"Jean, stop that!"

She sighed and put her camera away, then scanned the bay. "There . . . red," she said, pointing to a marker just off South Point.

I made a sharp turn to starboard and immediately asked for the next marker, which turned out to be two markers, a red and a green, just beyond. We continued to follow the markers as they skirted the shoreline until we had reached the outermost dock, which is also the fuel dock. There we turned in to look for our assigned slip: B17. An apropos number because the slip was almost big enough to hold a B-17 bomber. I roughly calculated that it would also hold eight of my Albin Vega 27, if you rafted them up two deep. I don't mean to say we felt a little out of place—no place could have been more welcoming—I mean that National Harbor is just the kind of place where you have to keep readjusting your sense of proportion.

Click. Click. Jean was at it again. But this time I didn't object, because we were tied up in our slip and had already been greeted by the congenial partiers on the boat next to ours. So I left her to it and went off to find harbormaster Eric Bradley. I found him in his office/kiosk on the outside dock, deftly juggling fuel fill-ups and assigning slips to boats looking for a few hours of parking or an overnight stay. A small battalion of dockhands moved efficiently between A, B and C docks, making fast a steady stream of arriving boats.

"Wait until the July Fourth weekend!" Bradley said when I remarked on the congestion. "We'll be completely full, and we're expecting three yachts of more than a hundred feet on the north side of the main dock."

Before coming to Washington to open National Harbor Marina, Bradley was dockmaster at Annapolis Landing on Back Creek in Annapolis. "It's an entirely different set of boats," he said. "[In Annapolis] we had predominantly sailboats and transients from up and down the East Coast. Here we have predominantly large powerboats, most of which never go south of the U.S. 301 bridge. They're happy right here."

A large part of the marina is given over to annual slipholders—they had about 60 percent occupancy by mid-summer—but a generous number of slips are set aside for transient boaters—both overnights and hourly. "We are getting more and more boating and yacht clubs holding their rendezvous here." The groups especially plan their events around special programs scheduled by National Harbor nearly every weekend, like wine-tastings and a Beef and Suds Festival, or seasonal events such as Oktoberfest and repeating Christmas Market, which runs weekends from Thanksgiving until Christmas.

"I was thinking this would be a great place to come around Christmas," I said. "Do you stay open all winter?"

"We move boats off the C dock in winter, because we get a lot of ice pushed up against it by the river, but we keep the marina open all year." Eric explained that there is a breakwater under C dock to protect the inside docks from at least some of the wind-blown chop that builds up across the exposed water of Smoots Bay, especially during the winter.

At this point in our conversation, three boats pulled in and idled at the dock, waiting their turn, so I walked back to B dock, wondering idly whether Jean had used up her camera battery yet. Click. Guess not.

"Shower," was all she said. I held up the electronic key to the slipholders' facilities and smiled. We dove into the cabin for a couple of reasonably dry towels and some fairly clean clothes and went looking for the showers.

"Whoa, what's that?" Jean stopped suddenly and stared at a small beach, just to the left of the main dock, where a giant face, legs and hands poked dramatically out of the sand. Over, under and around the Volkswagen-size body parts, dozens of children scrambled eagerly, as dozens of parents snapped photos with equal enthusiasm. Click. Jean did too.

"That's The Awakening," I said, trying not to sound too annoying. "For about twenty years it was at Hains Point, there on the other side of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge in the middle of the Potomac, and practically zillions of people came to see it." I pointed vaguely in the direction of Washington and East Potomac Park, five miles upriver. "But somebody in his or her wisdom decided it didn't fit the image of the park, so it was put up for sale, and Petersen, National Harbor's developer, bought it and built a beach for it to rise out of."

When I finally got Jean moving again, we crossed a courtyard, which looked as if it doubled as a small stage, and turned right down the first street we came to, National Plaza. There, just across the street from the Westin Hotel and next to Olympia News, was the entrance to the harbormaster's office and the marina restrooms, laundry facilities and showers. Showers!

As I emerged sometime later, I ran into John and Betty Lockard of Arlington, Va., who keep their boat Irish Ayes at the marina. The Lockards had gotten their slip the previous May and their boat that June. "We love it!" they enthused. "The only issue is that we need to remember to make reservations at a restaurant if we want to eat dinner when we're here on the weekends."

Hmm, good thought. As we waved goodbye, I pulled out my cell phone.

All cleaned up, it was time to explore this all-American Oz on foot. The first thing we did was head for the Spanish steps.

"Spanish steps?" Jean asked.

"Yup, Spanish steps," I replied. "Probably because they lead to American Way, National Harbor's Main Street, which," I continued quickly because I could see this was making no sense, "is modeled after a main shopping street in Barcelona called Las Ramblas, which Petersen apparently fell in love with and so wanted to copy here. So," I continued, "like many southern European cities, it's a boulevard, shaded by a canopy of plane trees. This makes it a cool and shady refuge in the hot summer sun and bright and warm in the winter, when the trees are traditionally pruned back, practically to stubs.

"I know, I've seen plenty of European boulevards" she replied a little coolly, "I grew up in France, remember."

"Oh, yeah."

"And the Spanish Steps are in Rome, not Spain."

"Oh, yeah."

Fortunately, by this time we had reached the steps, which are flanked by two large mosaics placed in the walls on each side. Both mosaics are by Washington, D.C. native Cheryl Foster and depict Marylanders, especially those who've made a living on the water.

At the top of the steps is the belvedere. "A place that commands a view," I parroted. This belvedere is a large platform that overlooks the beach with the awakening giant, and beyond that the marina, the Potomac, and finally Alexandria on the opposite shore. A "view" by any standard. But Jean wasn't admiring the view. She had her head down and was meandering this way and that over the belvedere, studying Maryland artist Steven Weitzman's 1,600 square-foot map, which portrays the early American history of the Chesapeake Bay. The piece, Chesapeake Journey, is made of Fotera, a kind of structural concrete, like terrazzo, that Weitzman developed for public art pieces.

"Enough of this," I said finally, "let's go shopping!"

And so we did, wandering up one side of each of National Harbor's half-dozen streets and then down the other, sometimes cutting between streets through cunning little pedestrian passages. On Waterfront Street, we dawdled through Art Whino and Fossil. On National Plaza, we sampled gelatos at Aromi d'Italia. And on American Way we browsed through South Moon Under and Govinda Gallery, then carried off an espresso from Mayorga Coffee Roasters and continued up the street until the shops, restaurants, hotels and residence buildings gave way to coming soon signs and a fenced-in dog walk area. We peered hopefully into the fortune-teller's kiosk, but it was empty. I guess they didn't know we were coming. The plane trees have a few years to go before they make a canopy over the street, but the center boulevard is already dotted by various arrangements of stones, brought from New England and shaped and sometimes polished. The effect is a little like southern Europe's old fountains, which often anchor their old main streets.

Before our walk up American Way came to an end, we passed the site of the future home of the National Children's Museum. This 150,000-square foot, Cesar Pelli-designed building is projected to open in 2013. It will be within easy walking distance of another project: a Disney hotel. Just before we arrived at National Harbor, Disney had announced that it had purchased a 15-acre site at the end of American Way, where the company plans to build a 300-room resort hotel at a date yet to be named.

Oh yes, all that, and we hadn't even gotten to the Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center. So we did, and spent another few lazy hours marveling on what you can do with 2,000 rooms and nearly half a million square feet of convention space. We learned that you could hypothetically use the 800-foot-long convention hall to store the entire Washington Monument, if you laid it on its side. And, we were able to answer the question: What can you do with a cavernous 18-story atrium? Aside from the obvious answer—enjoy the view—you can actually build a small Colonial-style town chockablock with shops and restaurants, including a sports bar with a 30-foot-high video wall. You can also run a small stream through the atrium and out into the gardens in front of the building. And you can build fountains inside that shoot 65 feet into the air and dance to the music between 7 and 10 p.m. each evening.

Whew! Thank goodness it was time for dinner. Jean and I were able to summon just enough energy to pick our way out of the atrium and into the gardens. Then we walked along Harborwalk and back into "town." We found Rosa Mexicano restaurant on Waterfront Street, and collapsed happily into chairs on the terrace overlooking the marina. We could see Snipp, which looked a little lost in its colossal slip, surrounded by a phalanx of sleek big-boy powerboats.

Several cold beers, a couple of tortilla soups and mole dishes later, we zombie-walked back to the boat and tumbled into our bunks. But not before Jean had taken just a few photos of National Harbor by night as seen from the bow of a small sailboat in slip B17. It was a beautiful sight . . . and very big . . . and maybe even a little strange.

"Maybe tomorrow everything will fall back into perspective."

"Sure. Good-night, Jean."

For more articles on Chesapeake Bay marinas, boating, sailing, fishing, culture, and history, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

HORTON AT LARGE: Scraping By

2009-12-09T09:58:00.004-05:00

Admire it now, while you can, because Smith Island's graceful scrape boat is rarer than the skipjack and closer to the vanishing point

by Tom Horton

We were off the eastern side of Smith Island, in water so shallow I had to trim up the motor on my little flat-bottom skiff to stay clear of the grassy bottom. A dark, bruised sky hung over the westward marshes and a warm, pink sun rose behind us, lighting the island's soft crab fleet, their low hulls glowing white against the rich greens and golds of spartina grasses. These boats—sometimes called Jenkins Creekers or bar cats, but most commonly known as scrape boats—are as much Chesapeake classics as the more famous oyster skipjacks. And they're even less likely to still be around a decade from now.

In his classic 1976 Chesapeake portrait, Beautiful Swimmers, William Warner described the scrape boat as "a workboat unlike any other I had ever seen on the Bay." Seeming half as wide as it was long, he said, it looked like a "a miniature battleship." There's a reason for that, of course. It's a classic case of form following function; the boat evolved for one purpose, to ply the Bay's grassy shallows for shedding blue crabs.

Said to "float on a heavy dew," scrape boats run from 26 to 30 feet long and 9 to 10 feet wide. The hull is a shallow-V deadrise that quickly flattens toward the stern, enabling the boat to pull its twin scrapes—rectangular steel frames, each with a trailing mesh bag—in knee-deep waters. The broad beam might sound ungainly, but the hull tapers toward the stern—betraying its sailboat origins. And it has a graceful sheer, flowing from a bow height of a few feet to little more than a foot above the water amidships.

And you want a low freeboard when you spend the whole day hoisting aboard scrapes, which weigh 50 pounds apiece, not including the load of sea grass and crabs that come in too. Low sides or not, there's a higher than average inci-dence of back problems among scrape boat crabbers. They spend long days bending in precisely the position back doctors say puts undue pressure on the lower back as they sort through rolls of grasses to pluck out the peelers and softies. And that alone may be why crab potting is now the far more common way of catching soft crabs.

Some people think that's good, assuming that dragging a scrape across the Bay's beleaguered grass flats must be destructive. But the smooth bar of the scrape, unlike a toothed dredge, doesn't uproot grasses. In fact, where scraping is traditional, the grass beds seem relatively resilient. I've often thought if Maryland and Virginia had stuck with scraping as the major legal way to soft-crab, overfishing might not have become a problem. Pots can be deployed everywhere and by the thousands, whereas scraping is limited to grass beds and to ground covered at three miles per hour; and even the sturdiest waterman can only pull two of them by hand. But peeler pots seem here to stay, and other soft crabbers have taken to using a single, large scrape operated from larger workboats by hydraulic power.

The bottom line is that these lovely, superbly functional expressions of Chesapeake crabbing culture now number only in the dozens, if you count working, wooden models. There are some fiberglass scrape boat hulls in service, and a Carolina skiff or two has been adapted for the task. They are functional, but have little art to them.

It is probably a sign of how fast scrape boats are going that the Smithsonian Institution recently took the lines off Darlene, a scraper worked by Morris Marsh of Smith Island, for its archives. You can see photos of scrape boats, and learn more about the 140-year old history of scraping, from Paula Johnson's fine book, The Workboats of Smith Island. Mr. Marsh, still going strong in his late 60s, is the scraper who took Warner out nearly 40 years ago when he was researching Beautiful Swimmers.

Indeed, scraping seems to win over those who master it. Marsh's father-in-law, Ed Harrison, scraped for almost 70 years, nearly wearing through the cross-planked bottom of his boat—from the inside—with decades of walking the planks, tending his scrapes. And an islander who scrapes with Marsh today, David Laird, says he is 71—one year younger than Scotty Boy, the scrape boat he took over from his dad in 1958. "I wouldn't even know how to crab in another boat," Laird says.

Soft crabs may well be caught—or farmed—a century from now on the Chesapeake; but no one will devise a way to take them so intimately and beautifully from the shallowest marsh edges and tiniest crevices in the shore as the scrapers do.

For more articles on Chesapeake Bay tides, marinas, boating, sailing, fishing, culture, and history, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

The News from Newport News

2009-11-12T11:29:00.003-05:00

It may look like nothing but big-port muscle and sinew, but don't let that throw you; there's charm aplenty, if you know where to look, in good ol' New Port Newce.

by Paul Clancy

As soon as you enter Hampton Roads, the city begins to reveal itself. It's sprawling, muscular and—from the water, at least—somewhat forbidding: a commercial fishing basin, a giant shipyard, an open-air coal pier, a fleet of reserve ships aging on the waterfront. Somewhere—ahh, there—between gray behemoths, are a few downtown office buildings, a narrow park and the barely visible top of a victory arch.

But don't be put off. Newport News does have accessible marinas, a few lovely spots for dropping anchor, inviting beaches, a vibrant fishing industry, a gorgeous performing arts center and one of the world's finest maritime museums. And it's all reachable by water, with a little extra effort—okay, maybe a lot.

There's history here, as deep as the water just off the shoreline, and it begins with a name. It may well be, as some contend, that Newport News Point—the point of land that marks the end of Hampton Roads and the beginning of the James River—got its name from the good news that Captain Christopher Newport, leader of the Jamestown expedition, had returned with supplies. But I prefer a more likely theory, that one William Newce, a knighted Irishman, arrived shortly after the 1607 settlement and established a seaport that came to be known as New Port Newce.

It was just off this point of land, two-and-a-half centuries later, that two ungainly ironclad warships, the U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Virginia (nee U.S.S. Merrimack) battled to a draw on a fog-shrouded morning in March 1862, marking the beginning of the end of wooden fighting ships. Every time I pass this way I think of that battle, and how so many naval ships, "ironclads" all, are now built just over there, on that near shore, practically within hailing distance; Also not far from here, perhaps the distance of a cannonball's flight, are the hoary remains of the Monitor itself, resting in a world-class museum.

I'm traveling by sailboat—my Tartan 30, Ode to Joy—from my mooring on the Lafayette River in Norfolk, hoping to take a closer look at what makes Newport News compelling, especially by water. Newport News, a linear city that's at least 20 miles long but only two to four miles wide for most of that length, parades slowly by as I pick up a gentle northerly breeze, put Middle Ground Light astern, slip past the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel and enter the James. To my dismay, there's no ideal place for a cruising sailor to tie up—not in the Small Boat Harbor that is home to a commercial fishing fleet (more on that later), not downtown, not along the beach, and certainly not along the industrial waterfront. I feel like I'll have to keep going to Williamsburg or Jamestown. But I won't give up yet; there is a way to see this town. I keep moving.

At the coal pier, the ship Energy Enterprise out of New Orleans, and a barge from Baltimore are poised under a gantry taking on black coal that is piled in tall mounds on land (regularly sprayed with water to keep down the soot). Not too inviting here. The city's dominant feature, stretching for miles along the waterfront, is the giant Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard. It was founded by railroad baron Collis Huntington more than a hundred years ago to service the ships that unloaded at his docks.

The Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding Co., as it was known then, began turning out military ships by the scores during the war years, becoming the largest individually owned yard in America, until Northrop Grumman bought it not long ago. At one of the piers, towering 20 stories above the water and looking about as big as a reclining Empire State Building, broods the newly commissioned aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, undergoing post-shakedown maintenance and repair.

Security is tight as a tick here. You don't even want to think about docking or losing headway. Nice doggy. Don't worry. I'm just passing. At 3:30 p.m., a siren wails. A shift change, I hope. Miles farther and there's still no place to stop, but that's about to change. Just before the James River Bridge I come to the city-owned Leeward Municipal Marina. I'm fond of Leeward. It was where I found my first boat, a sweet little swing-keel Spirit 23, which I bought there and sailed home. Tucked in next to the bridge, the marina is surrounded by a white cement breakwater. I had stopped here by car a few days earlier to see if I could go anywhere on foot. And to my delight, I could. Just up from the marina a stoplight allowed me to safely walk across the approach to the James River Bridge. And right there on the western side of the bridge was a sandy oasis, Huntington Park. On that day it was teeming with beachgoers: families with blankets, umbrellas and coolers, lifeguards and swimmers. Just beyond a refreshment stand I found a ramp, where half a dozen boats were being coaxed off trailers into the water. One could easily anchor out and dinghy in or tie up at the small pier that accommodates ramp users, even go for a swim at the beach.

There's a fishing pier at Huntington Park that rests on remains of an older James River Bridge, with the Crab Shack Seafood Restaurant—it's good, I hear—perched over the water. Beyond the beach is an elaborate children's park called Fort Fun, and then, a not-so-fun place, I imagine, the Virginia War Museum. But what I was looking for and found was a footbridge crossing a small creek. Aha again! If I wanted to get to the Mariners' Museum by bicycle from the waterfront entrance to Newport News, following the inviting River Road beside the James, I could. This city is opening up a little at a time.

Back in the present, I'm under the James River Bridge and passing by this lovely beach, then several miles of waterfront mansions, as well as the park that surrounds the Mariners' Museum. An hour later, after spotting the entrance markers to Deep Creek, I drop my sails and motor in. On the port side is Menchville, where several deadrise workboats are moored. Ahead is Deep Creek Landing Marina and the Warwick Yacht Club, both bristling with yachts. To starboard is James River Marina, my destination today, and a place I'm looking forward to revisiting.

Owner Marty Moliken, whom I met eight years ago when writing about the James, is there to help with my lines. For the past 60 years, workboats had tied up at an ancient city pier next to the marina. Finally, this year, the old pier was removed as the city improved the bulkheads and dockage across the creek. Now Moliken has gotten the ball rolling for 40 new slips and a raw bar at the end of the old pier. If the building-permit gods smile on him, he says, it could all be up and running by next summer.

At this point, Barb arrives in the land yacht and begins to unload our bikes. We'd thought of bringing them across by boat. It's possible to stow them on deck, but they're not the fold-up types and, frankly, we didn't want the hassle of loading and unloading them. What I was trying to test out was my theory that we could fairly  easily get to the Mariners' Museum from James River Marina—because you just can't visit Newport News without going to that gem of a museum. We'll test my theory about biking there in the morning. Now we test the food.

James River Marina owns what has long been a popular local restaurant. Originally named Herman's Harbor House, it's now called Slightly Up the Creek. We get a table on the front porch overlooking the creek, and while a fan whirs and the sun sets, we indulge in some very good shrimp and crabcakes. And—we couldn't resist—some astonishing caramel bread pudding. The western sky is dominated by sail-shaped clouds, with sunset in their bellies.

With bread pudding in our bellies, Barb and I bed down aboard Ode to Joy, falling asleep to the murmurs of conversation and the occasional peal of laughter from the night owls in nearby slips. We awake at dawn, dawdle over cereal and fruit, then pedal off toward the museum.

Click here to continue reading this article on ChesapeakeBoating.net

The Lowdown on Lines

2009-11-12T11:28:00.001-05:00

Look at the wall of any marine-supply store, and you'll find a dizzying array of lines to choose from. Here's what you need to know to make the right choices for this critical boating gear.

Accepting amateur submissions for the 2010 Bay Photo Contest!

2009-11-03T15:48:00.001-05:00

Chesapeake Bay Magazine is now accepting submissions for the 2010 Bay Photo Contest. Click here for contest rules, submission details, and past winners!

November Issue now online!

2009-10-19T10:46:00.003-04:00

The November issue of Chesapeake Bay Magazine is now on newstands and online. Online, you'll find articles about Newport News, Virginia, nautical lines, and more! Go to ChesapeakeBoating.net and click Current Issue for a full table of contents and a peek inside.

October Cruise of the Month: Cocktail Creek

2009-09-30T14:32:00.003-04:00

A great breeze carried them to Brooks Creek on the Little Choptank River, then made it the perfect
spot for a glass of wine and a mosquito-free night on the hook.

by Jane Meneely

The Bay glittered madly, as if sprinkled with a billion diamonds. The wave tops shimmered. Even the spray spilled across the deck like so many sparkling gemstones. It was as if the sun were in overdrive. And did I mention the breeze? Magnificent! Bearing southeast from Herring Bay on that fine summer afternoon, we had a steady reach across the Bay. All its myriad possibilities lay before us.

My friend Karen studied the chart thoughtfully. What are our options? she asked. I held the tiller of my little sloop Petrel and looked ahead. With the wind like this, we could drive all the way to Cambridge, I told her. But Karen shook her head. She wanted to go someplace new. With her index finger on the chart she traced the shoreline below the mouth of the Choptank River and paused at Trippe Bay. Here? she suggested. Too shallow, I said, and a lee shore at that. Her finger moved farther south to Hills Point. What's the Little Choptank like? she asked. I'd been to the Little Choptank lots of times, exploring its creeks and harbors—even running hard aground once in Hudson Creek. The river is full of hospitable gunkholes, with a few dining spots to boot. We have our choice, I told her. We can anchor out or we can run up Slaughter Creek and have dinner ashore. She nixed the dinner ashore option. I want to be away from people, she said. I'm on vacation. (Karen works as a real estate agent in downtown Philadelphia. I could appreciate her wanting to enjoy the peace and quiet of a night on the hook.) We had plenty of food on board, and a box of Black Box red wine. What more could a pair of old high school chums want? This was our first cruise together as empty nesters, and we had a lot of catching up to do.

We angled Petrel farther south and worked our way to the mouth of the Little Choptank. The river is framed by Hills Point Neck on the north and Taylors Island to the south. The three hummocks of James Island to the southeast offer a buffer to the wide fetch of the Bay rolling up from the south. Although the actual distance between James Island and Hills Point is a good three miles or more of open water, much of it is shallow. So we steered Petrel well to the middle of the river's wide opening in order to find deep water—and safely round the flashing green "1" mark to enter the river proper. Even then we had to stay clear of Ragged Island, at the other end of Hills Point Neck. Once clear of that, we could see the markers leading into Slaughter Creek, which forms the narrows for Taylors Island on the south side of the river. If we had been going there, we would have dropped almost due south from flashing green "5". Instead, we slid on past and headed upriver.

The wooded shoreline had put a damper on our breeze and turned it fluky, so we cranked the engine and headed directly for the river marks. But something caught our eye in the water ahead and to the left, outside of the channel—a huge turtle's head, maybe? Chessie? A floating cushion? It appeared to be fixed. We drew nearer still and swung close to see just what it was. (Petrel has a centerboard, so we can stray from most marked channels with relative impunity.) Holy cow! It was a submerged piling, not marked on the chart. Either that, or it was a snagged deadhead, but snagged in an upright position. Boats navigating mark to mark would miss it, but at high tide that piling would be beneath the surface, just waiting to bedevil any boat that happened by. How did it get there? Karen asked. It was too far offshore to have been part of a dock. More than likely it was a support post for a duckblind in the shoal off Ragged Island. The ice had probably carried the rest of the blind away long ago, and may have even snapped the top off this remaining post, making it virtually invisible to passing boaters—except at low tide.

We continued on our way, staying in the channel and keeping a sharp lookout. Soon we spotted the entrance to Brooks Creek, the first creek on the north shore of the Little Choptank. It looks inviting, but its broad mouth is deceptive; its only navigable water is limited to a narrow channel that snakes into the three-mile creek. At first glance, it would seem too narrow a channel to anchor. But there is a bump, said Karen, pointing to a small bulge in the deep water outlined on the chart.

We had listened to the weather, so we knew we were in for a pleasant night; the NOAA voice had said the wind would veer to the south but stay gentle. The creek doesn't afford much protection from the south, but gentle weather sounded just fine. So we chugged past the first marker, then, just before reaching the second, eased off the main drag into the little hole of deep water Karen had found. Down went the hook, and we were caught fast on the sticky bottom.

Two houses sat on the shore on one side of us; a scraggly thicket of trees sat on the other. The creek's mouth was off our stern and its head beyond our bow. What's more, the delicious breeze that had carried us across the Bay now kept us tight on the anchor and kept  the mosquitoes tight on the shore.

Karen tapped our little Black Box, I found some crackers and a hunk of cheese, and we watched the sky run through a veritable rainbow of hues as the sun slowly settled in the western sky. A dazzling end to a dazzling day. That night, as predicted,  the wind clocked around to the south and found its way through the forward hatch. Had it been stormy, we might have wanted more shelter.

 As it was, we were high and dry and comfortable. We woke up refreshed and ready to sally forth to a new and exotic port. A breeze from the south? Perfect!

View Chesapeake tide tables here.

For more articles on Chesapeake boating, marinas, Bay weather, sailing, and more, visit Chesapeake Bay Magazine.

Feature article : Chesapeakeology 101

2009-09-24T11:46:00.003-04:00

Instead of just giving us the whys and wherefores of Bay science, editor T.F. Sayles takes us on a boat-based "sciencey-stuff" field trip, to the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, Md., and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the Rhode River.

For this and more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

October Issue Online!

2009-09-18T16:29:00.004-04:00

The October Fall Boat Show issue is now on newstands and online. Check out the online articles about nature, boating, golf, and Brooks Creek. Or go to ChesapeakeBoating.net and click Current Issue.

2010 Bay Photo Contest

2009-09-10T15:26:00.002-04:00

Chesapeake Bay Magazine is now accepting submissions for the 2010 Bay Photo Contest. Click here for contest rules, submission details, and past winners!

September Issue Online

2009-09-03T11:35:00.010-04:00

Take a peek at the September 2009 issue of Chesapeake Bay Magazine. Click here for the full Table of Contents and 3 online articles about boating, marinas, and Bay cuisine. Or go to ChesapeakeBoating.net and click on Current Issue.

Check out the new Bay Weather section!

2009-08-24T16:08:00.006-04:00

Check the Bay Weather page for current wind & weather conditions in the Upper and Lower Chesapeake Bay. Includes wind speed & direction on the Bay, cloud cover, temperature, and precipitation for a 7 day time-horizon.

Check ChesapeakeBoating.net often for updates and new features for Bay boaters!

Of Time & Tide

2009-08-13T14:33:00.003-04:00

[03.04 issue]

When an unusually low tide revealed a treasure trove of empty bottles, the neighborhood kids saw cash on the barrelhead.

by Jane Meneely

Memory magnifies events. That said, let me tell you about the time Spa Creek dried to a mere trickle one summer day, when the tide sucked everything out of the creek bed but the docks.

Spa Creek normally wheedled its way past the Annapolis city dock, threaded itself through the Eastport bridge, and rubbed up against a shoreline of old wharves and cattails and massive maple and oak trees that leaned into their own reflections. There were plenty of docks and houses and street ends on the “town” side of the creek; the opposite shore was too far off the beaten track to be worthy of homesteading. A few sailboats lay at anchor in the deeper creek water; workboats clung to the street ends, sterns tied to heavy iron rings in the seawall, bows tied tentatively to an old tree limb or half-rotted piling that had been pounded into the muck.

We lived in a house on Market Street. I was five years old, a grubby little tomboy with scraped knees and hand-me-down dungarees. Photographs show me with an unruly clump of curly hair on top of my head—coiled tendrils reaching this way and that as if flying to the moon would be a safer bet than staying put. My little round belly, tender and yellow as a toad’s, pudges out from my T-shirt like a waterman’s gut.

In those days I rather liked the smell of tar and dogs and the mounds of seaweed, all gnarled with dead fish and driftwood, that bunched up on the lip of the water at low tide, and on this particular morning, the fetid marsh smell rose in hot whiffs from the creek basin and drew us kids down to the seawall to see what our noses already knew: that the creek bed lay as bare and naked as a dead muskrat. We stood there, my eight-year-old brother Dickie, his friends Peter and Vincent, and I, gaping at the broad expanse of muck that lay open to the sky. We stared past the relatively hard sand of the shoreline, which occasionally showed its wet toes on a normal low tide, past the sodden mass of seaweed that lay gasping and sweating without the protective skirt of the creek to hide in, out to where we could actually see the mooring anchor of a little sailboat that lay groaning on its side, a sea gull perched quizzically on the boat’s upended scupper.

As we watched, a group of older boys lurched their way through the treasury of the creek bottom like a ragged band of Neanderthals, pulling pieces of flotsam and jetsam out of the mud and dragging them back to shore. They found an anchor and a few barnacly things that they were enormously proud of, but the muck eventually proved too much for them, and their efforts deteriorated into a colossal running mud fight—fortunately, away from us and around the rim of the creek bed, out of sight.

That was our chance, our opening, our golden opportunity. Those big guys might have found an anchor, but they missed the good stuff. While they whooped and chased each other like savages, they completely ignored the gold mine the creek had laid bare: empty soda bottles. Scores of them. Everywhere. Old ones, new ones. Big ones, little ones. Pepsi. Nehi. Brand names we’d never even heard of—or, more likely, couldn’t read. Some were slimey with goo; others sparkled like diamonds in the hard summer sun. Clearly our ship had come in. These bottles were worth two cents apiece, hard cash, from any grocery store. “Peter, get your wagon!”

The wagon didn’t negotiate the creek bottom too well. Its narrow wheels sliced the mud like a plow. We ended up leaving it on shore. I stayed with it, chief guard and wagon packer. After all, Mom had laid down the law: I’d be whalloped into next week if I had so much as stuck a sneakered toe across the mean low water mark. Young as I was, the irony of such a restriction in this particular situation was not lost on me: Ma, there isn’t water to drown in! But her imposition remained; perhaps my mother thought such an errant tide would sweep back across the flats in a hungry wall of water, scarfing down stray kids and spitting them out like watermelon seeds. Or not—she let my brother go (of course, we had boys to spare).

When the older kids returned from their battle, slimed and choked with mud, they scoffed at our efforts. “Nobody’s gonna take those bottles,” they snorted. “They’ve been lying around for fifty years!” Which doubtless some of them had. “They’re gross and disgusting!” Which indeed most of them were. But blazing with the hope and courage of young enterprise, the boys sallied onward until they’d gotten every last bottle—that is, every bottle that could be had without sinking up to their knees in muck.

It took all of us hauling and pushing to get the wagon up the Market Street hill to a garden hose, where we set to work rinsing and scrubbing our catch of the day. Then we gathered all the empty bottles we could find in our own homes (a paltry haul by comparison) and turned our wagon toward Joe’s.

Joe Collison ran a little store on the corner of Conduit and Union streets. He sold meat and popsicles, and he always knew whether your mother would approve of a clandestine candy purchase or not. (“Not from me, no sir. Not at a quarter to six I’m not selling you a Hershey bar and spoil your supper. No sirree.”) Joe would have nothing to do with our bottles. “You didn’t get those bottles here at my store, you didn’t,” he said, surveying the lot. “I’ll take them there and that’s all.” Like some omniscient god he zeroed in on the bottles we had liberated from the cabinets at home.

We decided to gamble. It was all or nothing. If he didn’t want the whole wagonload, we’d take our stash elsewhere. So we started off for the Acme. This was no mean trek. The Acme stood adjacent to the town dock (Fawcett Boat Supplies today). To get there we had to roll up Market Street, cut through the funeral home parking lot (something we were perennially warned against by our parents, who vowed to thrash us if they ever caught us trespassing there, which threat we perennially ignored), slide down Green Street and across Compromise Street.

Acme would have nothing to do with our bottles either. The manager himself even came out and gave us the once over. “Where’d you get them bottles at?” We told him that we got them from our various basements and kitchens. He didn’t believe us. “I’ll take them,” he said pointing to the same bottles Joe had coveted. We looked at each other with the beginnings of panic. “We’ll try the IGA,” Peter said stoically. “Yeah, they’ll take them,” we echoed dutifully.

So the IGA it was. We had to cross by the gas station (where the flagpole is today) and again by the old fish market to the row of stores that faced the harbor. Then we had to wheel the wagon up the little inclined entryway that had the letters IGA inlaid in the stone. A friendly store clerk gave a laugh as we entered. “Get a load of this, will ya!” he called to the rest of his crew. “Now what do you expect to do with all that?” he asked.

“Turn it in for the deposits?” We faltered, a little abashed by now. We had run out of stores. The A&P, on the other side of the harbor, was too far even for eight-year-old boys to venture.

“You pick all this up out of the creek?”

How did he know? We went honest and told him the whole story, the gathering, the scrubbing, the rejections.

“They wouldn’t take these bottles over to the Acme?” the man asked incredulously. “Why this is the best lot of bottles I’ve seen come through here in all my days. You bet we’ll take ‘em here sure enough. Every last one of them. Count ‘em!” So we counted. I don’t remember exactly how many bottles there were, but I distinctly remember that my share of the haul was 32 cents—a veritable fortune to a five-year-old. You can bet Mr. IGA got every penny of it back, too.

The tide swelled the creek back to normal eventually. It may have taken days for the rhythm to return. Or it may have been the fluke of a single day, an odd oops in the cosmic way of things. I don’t recall that part of the story, only our wagonload of bottles and the remuneration it brought. As for the details, I scan through my memory banks and realize that it was all recorded by a five-year-old. And five-year-olds, I’ve discovered, tell colossal lies.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Jamestown’s Big Bang

2009-08-13T14:32:00.001-04:00

[05.07 issue]

Jamestown’s 400th anniversary gives birth to a universe of activities across the Bay.

by Jody Argo Schroath

By the time 2007 takes its own place in the past, there will be perhaps two or three people in the Chesapeake area who have not been touched by a Jamestown 400th-anniversary event—they’ll be the ones wearing Pampers. And even then. . . .

There are so many special events marking the quadricentennial of the landing at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, that they spilled over backward into last year. The replica ship Godspeed, for example, made a tour of the East Coast before returning to Virginia to prepare for this year’s first landing re-enactment on April 26. Jamestown Live! allowed a million students across the country to watch an hour-long webcast on Jamestown’s legacy that featured questions from students to a panel that included Chickahominy Chief Stephen Adkins, Jamestown’s chief archaeologist William Kelso and former astronaut Dr. Kathryn Thornton. The Virginia tribes held a conference last October on 400 Years of Survival. And last month, radio host Tavis Smiley hosted a 2007 State of the Black Union event on the Black Imprint on America. Smiley asked a panel of 36 notable African-Americans to discuss the role that Blacks have played in the development of America, from the arrival of the first slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the present.

But don’t worry, there are plenty of special activities still on the 2007 event horizon, including the biggest and brashest one of them all. That would be America’s Anniversary Weekend, May 11 to 13, at Jamestown, a mega-celebration that will feature three days of special events and all manner of famous folks—James Earl Jones, Ricky Skaggs, Chaka Khan, Sandra Day O’Connor and, of course, the Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra (they grow their own instruments). To help you make sense of all the Jamestown 400 hoopla—which will include a visit May 3 and 4 by Queen Elizabeth II—we’ve ruthlessly marshaled these activities into several neat groups— Jamestown events, all-around-the-Bay-events and (our readers’ favorite) events with boats. Finally, you’ll find two related stories—the first, how our understanding of what happened at Jamestown has changed over the years as we have changed; the second, information on cruising the Jamestown area.

Jamestown Events
When we talk about Jamestown, of course, we are talking about not one Jamestown, but two. For Jamestown newbies, here’s how we went from zero to two: Since Jamestown had all but disappeared as a town by the middle of the 18th century, 1907’s 300th-birthday celebration was held in Norfolk instead. But organizers of the 1957 event moved the 350th birthday party back to Jamestown—to a facility constructed for the purpose, called Jamestown Festival Park and located adjacent to the original site. Jamestown Festival Park is now named Jamestown Settlement, while the site of the 1607 landing, early forts and town is called Historic Jamestowne. Hence two Jamestowns and three sites for the 400th Anniversary Weekend (the third is Anniversary Park, across Route 31 from the settlement, and where many of the weekend’s concerts will be held).

Jamestown Settlement, under the operation of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation of the State of Virginia, includes a re-created Indian village, a reproduction Jamestown fort, 70,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor exhibition space—where you can walk down a 17th-century English main street—and reproductions of the ships that brought the first settlers: Susan Constant, Godspeed andDiscovery. Special 400th-anniversary programming at the Settlement begins April 27 with the opening of “The World of 1607,” an ambitious cycle of four exhibits put together by 28 scholars using ma-terials borrowed from all over the world with the aim of putting the settlement of Jamestown in a global context. The idea is to make us nonscholars recognize that events do not occur in a vacuum, but rather as a part of larger forces, including political, social and artistic. Items that will be part of the exhibit include a 15th-century copy of the Magna Carta, a 1607 jade wine cup of the Emperor Jahangir of India and a 17th-century African carved-ivory saltcellar. Don’t you feel smarter already?

A lot of the other special programming at Jamestown Settlement will take place only during the Anniversary Weekend. This will include artillery demonstrations, honor guards, story- telling, pageantry and plays. There will be demonstrations by artisans and craftspeople, and more than enough to keep several thousand children as happy as clams for hours at a time. The replica ships will also be open for tours, and costumed interpreters will act as guides in all areas of the park.

The archaeological site, known as Historic Jamestowne, is a partnership between the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). It’s on nearby Jamestown Island, connected to the mainland by the Colonial Parkway and a short bridge across Sandy Bay. In 1994, the APVA hired archaeologist William Kelso to excavate the site in hopes of finding something exciting for the 2007 anniversary. Although earlier excavations had failed to find evidence of the original James Fort, Kelso found it on his first dig—that April. The site of the fort was long believed to have been flooded two centuries ago by the James River. In fact, nearly all the fort’s original footprint is on dry land, with only one corner under water. In the years following that discovery, Kelso and his workers have uncovered more than 700,000 artifacts, including a particularly intriguing skeleton found just outside the original walls buried with a ceremonial captain’s staff. Kelso believes this may be the remains of Bartholomew Gosnold, captain of theGodspeed and one of the colony’s key leaders. [See sidebar, page 57.]

Historic Jamestowne has recently added a sleek, multi-windowed Archaearium, which uses clever display techniques to show off a selection of the artifacts within view of where they were unearthed. Also at Historic Jamestowne, visitors can visit the glassblowers house, the remains of a late-17th-century church, archaeological finds such as the outlines of Jamestown’s last statehouse (1663), an early burial ground, and statues of John Smith and Pocahantas.

Special Anniversary Weekend events at Historic Jamestowne will include commemorations of past Jamestown celebrations, a series of programs called 104 Men and Boys, lectures and the official send-off of the replica shallop that will spend the rest of the summer re-enacting Captain John Smith’s 1608 voyages of discovery on the Chesapeake [see “The Captain’s Trail,” October, November 2006]. Smith had set off from Jamestown not long after the settlers arrived to explore the Bay in search of gold and the long-sought Northwest Passage to Asia and to make contact with the Native American tribes living along its shores. During two major voyages of discovery, Smith and his crew sailed or rowed up nearly every tributary on the Bay and Smith himself created its first detailed map. The re-enactment voyage that leaves Jamestown May 12 will largely retrace Smith’s trips, making about two dozen stops at cities and towns along the way.

Musical events will play a big part in the Anniversary Weekend schedule—including a 1,607-member chorale and 400-piece orchestra, famous performers such as Bruce Hornsby, Chaka Khan and Ricky Skaggs, and award-winning musical groups from dozens of schools and independent organizations all over the country (including that all-gourd orchestra). In addition, there will be re-enactments, plays, fireworks, pageantry, demonstrations and dramatic readings . . . in short, just about everything you can imagine. No more than 30,000 people will be admitted on any one of the three days, so buying a ticket in advance is essential. For a detailed schedule of events, visitwww.jamestown2007.org. You’ll find ticket information there, too, and in the sidebar on this page.

All Over the Bay Events
While the Anniversary Weekend will produce the biggest bang for the history books, you can be sure that there will be a Jamestown 400 boomlet near you. It may be a Signature Event—the term used by Jamestown 2007 organizers for a dozen or so major events around the region, many of which adopt the anniversary’s official theme: A convergence of three cultures. Among these are the American Indian Intertribal Festival in Hampton, Va., on July 21 and 22 and the African-American Culture and Commerce Expo on August 24 and 25 in Hampton Roads. Also on the schedule is the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., June 27 to July 8, which will feature performers, storytellers and crafts from native Virginia, southeastern England and West Africa. September 16 to 19 will see the concluding Forum on the Future of Democracy in Williamsburg. (You’ll find more information on all these events at thewww.jamestown2007.org site.)

Elsewhere, a special exhibit in Richmond is especially worthy of note. “Rule Britannia! Art, Royalty and Power in the Age of Jamestown,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, runs from April 28 through August 12 (www.vmfa.state.va.us/rule.html). This is an exhibition of 17th-century royal portraits and maritime paintings—some of them massive—that include special loans from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II, museums such as the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private British collections. Some of these works have rarely been seen by the public.

In Norfolk, the Virginia Living Museum will offer two special and very different programs as its contribution to the Jamestown festivities. “Survivor: Jamestown Maze,” which runs through November 25, challenges children and adults to wind their way through a maze, making decisions along the way in order to survive in this new world. Also at the Living Museum, backyard horticulturalists will delight in a new permanent garden that highlight’s Virginia’s botanical history from 1607 to the present.

Two more Norfolk events are worthy of note. Sail Virginia, June 7 to 12, will feature military parades and ceremonies, historical re-enactments, maritime and cultural activities with tall ships off Ocean View and Norfolk Naval Base, and Harborfest weekend, with plays and special exhibits. (www.sailvirginia2007.com) Norfolk will also be the location for Working Waterways and Waterfronts—A National Symposium on Water Access, May 9 to 11, at the Sheraton Marriott Norfolk. (www.wateraccess2007.com).

The Kimball Theatre in Williamsburg (www.vptheatre.com) is currently showcasing a historical play, Smith, Being the Life and Death of Cap’n John by Ivor Nel Hume. This runs April 5 to December 31.

We could go on, but the list of Jamestown-related events at locations throughout the Chesapeake would stretch into next month’s magazine, so we recommend that you checkwww.jamestown2007.org/calendar.cfm. You can search by date and area.

Events with Boats
Happily for all of us boaters on the Bay, a great many of the 400th-anniversary events will be taking place in and around the water. Here, too, it’s enough information to sink a ship, so we are only going to hit the high spots. But we’ll give you some websites where you can find out more. The water-centered events fall pretty much into two categories: re-enactment events that feature one or all of the three replica ships, Godspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery, and re-enactment events centered on the 1608 discovery voyages of Captain John Smith and his crew. To make things even more interesting, the Bay has produced not one, but three replicas of Smith’s 30-foot open boat, called a shallop, that was carried aboard ship from England and then reassembled in the New World. Each of the replica shallops has its own itinerary—though occasionally, like on this first event, they will all be together.

By way of Jamestown re-enactments, this is the Big Bang. On Thursday, April 26, all three ships and all three shallops will be at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach for a dramatic redo of the Jamestown settlers’ first landfall in America at Cape Henry. The first-landing program will start at 9 a.m. Can’t make it that early? Don’t worry, the second first-landing program will start at 3 p.m. There will be an admission charge at the park for the event.

The replica ships will leave Virginia Beach on April 28, as the Godspeed takes the lead in the Signature Event called Journey up the James. The Godspeed will stop at three other ports before arriving at Jamestown on May 11 for the start of the Anniversary Weekend. [For all the ports of call of Godspeed’s Journey up the James as well as its journey on the Bay this summer and fall, see sidebar, page 57.] Recreational boaters are invited to join the flotilla from Virginia Beach to Hampton on April 28 in what Hampton calls the Great American Dock Party. The date also coincides with the city’s International Children’s Festival. (For infor-mation on participating marinas, call 800-487-8778.)

Although all three shallops will be at Virginia Beach on April 26 for the First Landing event, the “official” shallop—the one built in Chestertown by Sultana Projects—will get its formal send-off at 10 a.m. on May 12 from Historic Jamestowne for the start of its re-enactment of Smith’s voyages of discovery. (You’ll need an Anniversary Weekend ticket to see the send-off.) The first of 20 official stops in the re-enactment voyage will be at Onancock on May 19 and 20, coinciding with that town’s combined celebration of Captain Smith and the 200th birthday of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At all of the official stops, visitors will be invited to meet the crew and view the traveling exhibits that go along with it [see sidebar, page 56].

Special events are planned to coincide with official stops of both the shallop on its re-enactment voyage and the Godspeed as it visits ports throughout the Bay following the Anniversary Weekend, so check the schedule in the sidebar and then look for informa-tion near your home port or favorite cruising grounds.

Finally, this summer’s Captain John Smith 400 voyage will inaugurate the nation’s first all-water historic trail, the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Water Trail, which was approved by Congress in December 2006 and which is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. At three points in the Sultana shallop’s trip, NOAA will activate its first three “smart buoys” that will give information about the historic and ecological significance of the particular location, as well as live readings of weather and water conditions and of water quality. The first buoy will be located 400 yards offshore due south of the Jamestown monument and will be dedicated during Anniversary Weekend. The second will be a mile or so northwest of the Point Lookout Light near the mouth of the Potomac River. The third will be activated when the shallop approaches Baltimore and will sit about a mile east-south-east of Seven Foot Knoll light. Boaters (and everyone else) will be able to dial these buoys by calling the toll free number 877-BUOYBAY. You’ll be able to access the buoys over the internet at www.buoybay.org.

Okay, that’s it for us. Now it’s up to you. Take a look, learn more about America’s beginnings, and then get on board and go see it for yourself!

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Good Men Down

2009-08-13T14:30:00.000-04:00

[03.05 issue]

The 1977 sinking of the Claud W. Somers left six men dead and an island community puzzling over what happened and why.

by Jane Meneely

There was no question in Thompson Wallace’s mind about going out that day. He was in debt and the ice had finally broken up. He’d owned the skipjack Claud W. Somers less than a year, and he was bound and determined to make good on her—she was the embodiment of his long-held dream to own his own dredgeboat. When the wind came up and the rest of the oyster fleet headed home, he stayed put in the open water at the mouth of the Honga River, determined to get in a few more licks. Then he headed back to Chance, the small harbor on the Deal Island narrows that he had left before dawn that March morning. He wasn’t worried about the weather, though he knew as well as anyone how treacherous spring gales could be, how they could sneak up on you and hammer you to pieces. What he didn’t know was that today the wind would build to near hurricane force—and that neither he nor his crew would ever set foot on dry land again.

The people who live on Deal Island still shake their heads over what happened on March 4, 1977. The details they offer differ to a degree—because so many people witnessed the event from so many different perspectives—but one thing is certain, they can recall the tragedy as if it happened yesterday, instead of nearly 30 years ago. Some of the eyewitnesses have since passed away, but the community of watermen that continues to work the waters of Hooper Strait, Tangier Sound and the Bay beyond, has preserved their stories and woven them into the fabric of island life.

I saw this for myself when I first began asking questions about the Claud W. Somers. I had driven to Wenona, Md., the harbor on the end of Deal Island and home to a few of the Bay’s last remaining active skipjacks. I’d gone into Arby Holland’s little store next to the wharf and was chatting with Arby’s father Paul. The older Holland had parked himself at a small table where he was dealing himself another hand of solitaire. He was telling me what he knew of the Somerstragedy, but he couldn’t recall the name of the man who had offered Wallace a tow. “Just wait a second. These fellows will know,” he said nodding toward crabber S. T. Webster and one of his buddies out in the parking lot. Both wore the white rubber boots and ubiquitous ball caps of working watermen. When they came in to retrieve some packing boxes for their soft crabs, Holland piped up: “You boys remember who’s the man towed those boys in? Fellow from up Wingate, maybe?”

Webster frowned, and I thought he would say, “What boys? When?” But he knew just who Holland meant. “Don’t rightly recall,” he said, “but I’ll bet Grant Corbin would know.” Webster grabbed a package of crackers and joined in the conversation. “Thompson was a good waterman, lots of experience. I saw him sailing into the dock many a time. It’s a shame about all that,” he said reminding us that all but one of Wallace’s crew that day were related.

In my quest for living memory of the incident, I did eventually talk to Grant Corbin; I also talked to Elsworth Hoffman, retired head of the local DNR who supervised the search when the boat didn’t return; I talked to longtime skipjack captain Art Daniels; I talked to Esther Wallace, Thompson’s widow, and Kevin Wallace, Thompson’s son; I talked to Donald Mills, who went out in the foggy dark after the storm to try and find the men; I talked to Don Simmons, whose father, DNR officer Jennings Simmons, was with the group that found and retrieved the bodies; I talked to Snooks Windsor, who helped raise the Somers off the bottom once she was found, sunk in 20 feet of water at the mouth of the Honga River, and who watched as the bodies of the drowned men were brought ashore at Wingate. I talked to anyone I could find who had any recollection of the event—and gradually the Claud W. Somers’s story began to emerge.

Thompson Wallace was born and raised on Deal Island. He was one of 23 kids (yes, 23), the children of waterman Robert James and Roseana Wallace. By all accounts he was affable and well liked—and he had a streak of the devil. Afraid of nothing, they say. And he was ambitious. He’d set his sights on owning his own boat one day, come hell or high water.

Wallace worked on and around boats all his life. He was a jack-of-all-trades, and he’d captained plenty of boats—other people’s boats. His name shows up on the roster for the 1971 Chesapeake Appreciation Days skipjack races as the captain of the Ida May, owned by Elbert Gladden. When the Claud W. Somers came up for sale, Wallace was at last ready to buy. The boat was a sorry mess, to be sure. She leaked like a sieve and the engine on her yawl boat was unreliable at best. But she wasn’t that much worse off than some of the other boats in the Deal Island dredge fleet—a total of 35 vessels at the time. And there was nothing wrong with her that Wallace couldn’t fix.

The Somers came from good stock. She was built on Virginia’s Eastern Shore by Tom Young in 1911, commissioned by Thomas Edward Somers, a Crisfield businessman, and named for his son Claud Williams Somers. She was 461/2 feet long, with a 14-foot beam, and fast. With then-owner Captain Curwin Evans at the helm, she whipped the chines off the rest of the dredgeboats at the 1931 skipjack race—the last one before World War II. More than 30 years later, she whipped them all again, this time with Captain Linwood Benton at the wheel.

But by the time Wallace bought the boat from Jack Parkinson in the spring of 1976, her glory days were over. Wallace brought her around to Eldon Willing’s boatyard in Chance and set to work. By the start of the dredge season, he’d gotten her reasonably sound—by his standards at least, and he was no slouch at carpentry and boat repair. She’d be nearly sunk at the dock every morning, but he’d get the pump going and she’d be floating again soon enough. She wasn’t the only skipjack known to take on a little water overnight. Besides, water retention has always been the plague of old ladies.

Wallace took all her problems in stride, doing what he could for the boat when he had the time or the money—after paying her “mortgage,” there wasn’t a lot of cash left. He kept her together with sweat and prayers mostly. There were those on the island who told him to his face that he was a fool to run that decrepit old boat, that he was going to drown someone. But there were plenty of others who figured he knew what he was doing and would get by just as generations of oystermen before him had.

The winter of 1976–77 had been a bad season all round. There weren’t many oysters to begin with—MSX had begun to ravage the already dwindling oyster beds. And worse, the Bay had been frozen solid for two months, shrinking the number of days the watermen could even get to open water. The watermen of Deal Island were desperate to get back to work when the ice finally broke up at the end of February during a welcome warm spell. Within days the ice had melted, save for the big piles of broken slab ice that had been pushed up on shore by wind and tide. Even more welcome was the news that the DNR had extended the oyster season two weeks beyond the usual March 15 cut off.

It was gusty that Friday morning, March 4, with four-foot seas and 15 to 30 mph winds. In all likelihood, it was going to get worse. Boats from Wenona could “see” the wind, according to Art Daniels, captain of the skipjack City of Crisfield. They didn’t go out that day. But the Chance harbor is sheltered from a south blow, and 55-year-old Thompson Wallace went down to his boat in the wee hours and pumped it out as usual for the day’s run. His crew gathered: his older brother, “Big George” Wallace, age 64; his nephew Carter Wallace, age 20; his wife’s cousin Thomas James, age 20; his son Gerald Wallace, age 24 and home on leave from the Marines; and one non-relative, Levin Johnson, age 44. Another son, Kevin Wallace, age 15, was at the dock ready to go along when he was unexpectedly called home. “I was there at the dock when they left, but for some reason I can’t recall, I didn’t go out with them that day,” he says now. Another regular crew member, Earl White, who passed away recently, stayed home that day—”Didn’t even get out of bed,” he told me. He knew Gerald would be taking his place.

Captain Elsworth Hoffman, a Department of Natural Resources police officer from Chance, made the rounds of the harbor and advised Wallace not to go out that day. Reports indicated rough weather developing later in the afternoon. That wasn’t enough to deter Wallace. In the dim predawn light, he started up his yawl boat engine and eased the skipjack away from the dock. TheSomers pushed out of Chance harbor north into Tangier Sound, ran past Sharkfin Shoal and along the north shore of Bloodsworth Island, heading for the dredging ground off Hooper Island near the mouth of the Honga River. Any boat that was going out that day would have left the dock in darkness in order to be on the oyster “rock” when the sun came up, so as not to miss a single legal “lick” of the oyster bed. Like hunters, skipjacks can’t begin their harvest till sunrise, but begin at sunrise they do.

Wallace would have been ready for any breeze that smacked him as he left the shelter of the harbor. His crew would have reefed the mainsail the night before. This was standard practice for a skipjack; it’s always easier to shake a reef out than to put one in, especially on a cold winter morning. Wallace doubtless sniffed the breeze that morning and left his reefs in—three of them. A skipjack doesn’t require but so much wind in order to pull a dredge. If it builds up too much speed, the dredge will just bounce along the bottom. The captain will gauge the wind and raise what he needs of his mainsail to fit the conditions. Wallace didn’t need a lot of canvas that morning.

Then, as now, a skipjack was allowed to take 150 bushels of oysters in one day, but by the late 1970s, especially in the lower Bay, where MSX was more prevalent, nobody was pulling in 150 bushels a day. Half that would be a splendid haul for the Deal oysterman. When the wind really began to kick up at noon, Wallace had done reasonably well, but not well enough to quit. The other skipjack working that day headed in, while Wallace stayed on to get a few more “jags”—the waterman’s term for a full dredge. He got more than he bargained for. From all accounts the winds were ferocious that afternoon. Landsmen clocked them at 75 mph. Paul Holland, working as an oyster buyer in Wenona then, says it blew 80 to 85 at its peak. Long before the crest of the storm, Wallace started for home. That’s when hell took over. He started having trouble with that cranky yawl boat engine, and couldn’t make way.

Buddy Jones, aboard his tonging boat the Dana Matt, was hightailing it for Chance when he passed the Claud W. Somers bound for Hooper Strait, according to an account printed in the SalisburyDaily Times, March 7, 1977. Jones said it looked like Wallace was having trouble, so he pulled alongside and offered to help. Wallace took Jones’s spare battery hoping it would help get his yawl boat started. When that effort failed, Jones offered Wallace a tow. “I towed her about ten miles in the first two hours,” Jones told the newspaper. “When we hit Hooper Strait, we were really in trouble.” He said that by then the winds had reached 70 mph with 15-foot seas, and the towline broke loose from his cleats. Jones refastened it, but the line broke loose again. Fearful for his own safety, Jones donned his lifejacket and told Wallace and his crew to leave the boat and get aboard the Dana Matt. Wallace declined, saying “We’re going to try to save her!” Buddy Jones said he’d get help for them and motored away. Looking back, he saw that Thomas James had put on a life jacket and climbed into the skipjack’s yawl boat, probably in another effort to get the motor started.

Meanwhile, Art Daniels had seen the Somers go out, but he hadn’t seen it come back. He called the DNR to tell them Wallace might be in trouble. Corporal Walton Webster went out to look for the missing boat, but conditions were so rough, he turned back. When the Somers wasn’t back in port by 5 p.m., Elsworth Hoffman, the DNR officer in Chance, decided to go look for it himself. He went down to his boat, but couldn’t get the engine running. Conditions had deteriorated so much by that time, he recalls, that even if he had gotten the boat going, he wasn’t sure he could have managed open water. Back in his office, about sunset, he got a radio call from the tug Interstate, probably heading to Salisbury with a tow of coal. The tug reported seeing a boat in trouble in Hooper Strait. From his description, Hoffman figured it was probably the Somers, but he was helpless to do anything, and other DNR boats were too far away. He could only wait—and hope that the fearless and capable Wallace could ride it out or get his boat to sheltered water. Maybe he already had.

Word spread quickly that Wallace was in trouble. When the weather abated, those who could went to look for him, and the Coast Guard and DNR began an all-out search. Donald Mills of Bishops Head remembers that there was a thick fog that night. He came upon a 55-gallon drum floating in the water—the kind a skipjack captain would have used to carry gas for the winder motor. “I knew I was close, and I kept looking. Seeing that drum, I knew the boat was down, but I thought maybe some of those boys would be hanging on to the mast.” He found nothing.

According to some reports, searchers from Wingate, Md., saw the yawl boat around 9 p.m. It had broken away from the skipjack and had washed up on the beach at Bishops Head. A few hours later the body of Thomas James, still in a life jacket, was found floating between

Bishops Head and the Hooper Strait light, and would-be rescuers knew that chances of finding the skipjack or the rest of its crew were slim. Between the fog and the darkness visibility was nil. At that point, nearly midnight, they concentrated their efforts in the area where James’s body had been found, thinking that Wallace had left Hooper Strait, running before the wind toward the harbor at Wingate. Or maybe he had tried to run her deliberately into shallow water to keep her from submerging if she sank. Helicopters with searchlights swept the area but still found nothing.

Finally, shortly before midnight, Henry Gootee of Golden Hill detected the boat on his radar, west and north of where people had been looking. “You know an area well, you can see something on radar that doesn’t belong there,” he says from his office at Gootee’s Marine in Church Creek. He’d left his dock at 7:30 p.m. after hearing that a boat was in trouble. In the thick darkness he had his eyes peeled on his radar screen as much as on the water ahead. One by one the familiar markers came on his screen as he expected, but something unfamiliar showed up in the stretch of water above the Hooper Strait light. Sure enough, when he worked his way closer and could put a spotlight on it, he could see the top of the Somers’s mast, tilting out of the water about 300 yards off Norman Cove. There was no sign of life.

News of the discovery spread fast, and by morning as many as 50 boats had gathered at the site. Captain Ben Parks of Cambridge recalls heading out from Hooper Island with his dad aboard the family skiff. The Hooper Island volunteer fire company, he says, had the only “body drag” around, and they were always being called upon to use it. Not a pretty apparatus, to hear him describe it. It’s a long steel bar on rollers, with sharp, three-pronged hooks dangling from it. “It’ll snag anything,” Parks says. He climbed aboard the police boat to help Officer Harold Pritchett with the drag, but they weren’t having any luck. Back and forth, back and forth, they combed the whole area around the skipjack with no result. It wasn’t until Charles Abbott and a few of the men from Chance had shifted the skipjack slightly in order to hoist her off the bottom that the bodies of the four Wallace men and Levin Johnson were found below the boat’s mast. One by one the men were hauled aboard the police boat and taken to the Wingate public wharf.

“I remember seeing those boys lying there in the police boat like it was yesterday,” says Snooks Windsor, who was at the wharf when the boats came in. He still operates a marina and railway there. “It’s not something you’re likely to forget.”

Meanwhile, the Claud W. Somers was floated and towed back to Chance. Thirty-three bushels of oysters lay on her decks. Within a month she was sold to D. K. Bond, who ran her out of Chesapeake Beach, Md. Now she’s owned and sailed by the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum—one of only a few Virginia-built skipjacks left.

No one can say how or why the Somers ended up at the mouth of the Honga River when, by Buddy Jones’s account, the boat was nearly through Hooper Strait when he left her to get help. Captain Ed Farley of the skipjack H.M. Krentz out of Tilghman, speculates that the yawl boat, with Thomas James still aboard and trying to start the engine, must have broken free of the Somers. Wallace may have been trying to chase the boat down to retrieve the boy. The skipjack, laden with oysters and doubtless taking on water faster than anyone could pump her out, just foundered, settling to the bottom with her load of oysters still on deck.

Regardless of the hows and whys, the outcome remains the same. It’s part of the burden of working the water. Boats sink; people drown. Perhaps the story of the Claud W. Somers remains so deeply embedded in the communal memory precisely because no one can ever really know what happened. Or perhaps the telling and retelling of such a story is a community’s first line of defense, a warning to its children about the vagaries of nature and the dangers inherent in working the water. It is, after all, a cautionary tale, and anyone “coming up on the water,” as the islanders would put it, should heed the lesson.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Birds of a Feather

2009-08-13T14:27:00.002-04:00

[01.06 issue]

The annual Duck Drop in Havre de Grace, Md., turned out to be harmless enough. But the idea of dropping a duck . . . well, this author simply had to investigate.

by Jane Meneely

It was New Year’s Eve and I’d heard they’d be dropping a duck in Havre de Grace that night.Dropping a duck, they said. Can you imagine? They were going to take some innocent little duck to the top of some tall tower and drop it at the stroke of midnight. Unconscionable! Paul and I were outraged. Well, I was outraged, anyway. Paul was more nonchalant. “I thought ducks could fly,” he said. Men can be such dolts! I’m hardly what one would call an animal rights activist. Aside from a “Save the Whales” bumper sticker and an “I brake for moose” souvenir poster from the Yukon, I’m animal neutral. Still, the thought of some poor duck plummeting through the frigid midnight air just to satisfy the bloodlust of a bunch of insensitive and no doubt inebriated revelers was enough for me to want to gird my loins and head to the rescue. There was no time to lose!

I had already called to make dinner reservations in town—at the Crazy Swede, in fact, a white-linen-tablecloth establishment on Union Avenue. Very fancy. This would be a dressy sort of place where we would mingle with the Havre de Grace cognoscenti and perhaps glean some important information about the cruelty to come. Like where the duck was held prisoner, for example, and how many guards were on duty.

“And eat?” Paul asked. “We get to eat, too, right?” You’d think he didn’t care about that poor little duck. “We’re going to have to blend in with the crowd,” I said, and handed Paul a nifty little duck hat I’d found on sale. It looked like a mallard with outstretched wings that flapped when you pulled on the chin string. If you tugged on the bill it quacked. Paul balked at first. “You expect me to wearthat?” he said. “No way.”

“Way,” I said, as I donned my own stealth helmet—a ball cap studded with light-up duck pins. “We’re doing this for the duck,” I reminded him. Paul muttered something about the duck on the menu, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I handed him a pair of camouflage hunting pants I’d found at the Goodwill (nice touch, I thought). And I wore my L.L. Bean duck boots with my Sunday-go-to-meeting gold lamé skirt and sequined top. Into my hand bag went binoculars, duck calls, a street map of Havre de Grace, a couple of Jack Daniels minis, and an assortment of lock-picking tools—bobby pins, paper clips and a small silver butter knife.

We made the drive to Havre de Grace in broad daylight, the better to case the town. I’d made reservations at the Currier House B&B, a lovely place, decorated with all sorts of family memorabilia—hand-carved decoys, among other mementos from Havre de Grace’s past. I gave Paul a nudge. “I have a hunch,” I whispered. Then I smiled sweetly at our hostess, Jane Currier. “Havre de Grace sure is Duck City,” I said. “Where do you keep them all?”

“Folks that want to see the ducks generally take a stroll down our boardwalk,” she said. “It’s been rebuilt since Isabel. You can see all sorts of bird life from there.” The boardwalk was barely two blocks from the Currier House, and Paul and I were on our way faster than a duck can wag its tail. But it was a dead end. That Currier woman was one smart dame. She’d sent us on a wild-goose chase. Or whatever. I mean, the boardwalk was lovely. We could see clear across the Susquehanna Flats, and true enough, the place was quacking with ducks. But these were wild ducks, free as . . . birds.

“Where else would a person go to find ducks in Havre de Grace?” we asked a lady strolling by with a baby carriage. (My experience has led me to believe that ladies with baby carriages are inherently trustworthy.) “You want to go up the street to the Decoy Museum,” she said. “They’ve got all kinds of ducks up there.”

Aha!

We followed her directions and soon found ourselves outside the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum. Rats! It had just closed, but there didn’t seem to be any signs of live ducks around, so we decided to wander “aimlessly” down Havre de Grace’s streets to see what we could see. The map made it all easy enough, and plenty of shops were open. We almost got sidetracked by the lure of antiques, books and art on display. But a flock of geese winging overhead soon got us back on track.

“We’ve got to find that duck.” I said to Paul. “We’re running out of time.”

“I’m running out of energy,” Paul said. “Food. Give me food.”

I checked the time—we’d be a tad early for our dinner reservations, but perhaps Paul was right. A bit of nosh would do us both good, so we headed for the restaurant. Which was packed. A great spot for New Year’s Eve dining, we’d been told. A congenial lad named Dave led us to our table. “The duck,” he whispered to us. “Get the duck.”

How did he know?

“We most surely will,” I said to him, in equally low tones, “but . . .” He was gone before I could ask him where to find it. Still, I was dumbfounded. This was a secret mission—or so I’d thought.

“Maybe that Currier dame put two-and-two together,” Paul suggested. “Maybe she’s on your side.”

“Our side,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever,” Paul said, eyeing the menu.

A waitress appeared within minutes. “May I recommend the duck?” she said, pointing out several duck entrees on the menu.

The nerve! “No thank you,” I muttered tersely.

“The veal looks good,” Paul said.

I kicked him under the table. He ended up with the grouper topped with a wonderful crab imperial. I had lobster—real lobster, done beautifully. Aside from the waitress’s questionable culinary tastes, the service was excellent.

“Maybe Dave knows where they keep the duck,” I whispered to Paul as we were leaving. “Ask him.”

“You ask him,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face.”

I wasn’t sure what Paul meant by that, but I sidled up to Dave near the bar, where he was busily conversing with the bartender. He paused for a moment.

“How can I help you?” he said.

“I wondered about the duck,” I whispered. “Where would we find it? The duck for the . . . gulp . . . duck drop.”

Dave waved toward the door. “You’ll have to hurry. They’ll have taken the duck to the tower. It’s all set to drop in . . . “ he checked his watch, “twenty minutes.”

Good heavens! We’d more than dawdled over dinner—delicious as it was. Not much time to spare! That poor duck. We hustled out the door, and following Dave’s directions, headed for the Havre de Grace Middle School. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the action was. Everyone and his duck call were wending through the streets of Havre de Grace and descending on the school parking lot. Paul was right in style. “Thanks for the hat,” he said, pulling on the string and making it quack. The noise only added to the general cacophony of quacks and honks and phwwtts and boings emanating from the multitude of noisemaking devices. Paul got in a quacking duel with a nearby fellow—to distract him, I’m sure.

“So, where do they keep the duck?” I casually asked a matronly lady supervising a half-dozen rowdy teenaged kids. “It’s right up there,” she said pointing to the top of an extended fire engine ladder from a fire truck parked down behind the school. I craned my neck for a look, shuddering to think I was too late. But no. . . .

“That’s the duck?” I asked.

“None other,” she said.

“But it’s made of . . . lights!”

“And Styrofoam.”

Lights and Styrofoam? Well . . . silly me. And in a last final blast of noisemakers mixed with a touch of cannon fire—or maybe it was the first of the fireworks—the emblazoned duck did indeed drop to the ground. As the numerals of the old year, shining brightly and benevolently from the top of the ladder blinked out, the numerals of the new year flashed on to take their place. It was all very cute and perky. And so very appropriate for a place like Havre de Grace.

The fireworks were lovely. The cool night air was soft on my cheeks, like a feather. Paul quacked his duck hat a few more times. And finally, we turned to go, along with a wave of Havre de Grace humanity, blessed and fortified for the year to come.

“Hey,” Paul said. “How’s about a kiss for good luck?”

Sounded like a good idea to me.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Sailing with Pride

2009-08-13T10:11:00.003-04:00

[10.04 issue]

It was all hands on deck—even the blistered ones—aboard the Pride of Baltimore II
in last year’s Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race.

by Jane Meneely

It occurred to me that I might faint. Watching my only son climb the rigging onboard the Pride of Baltimore II as we sailed for Norfolk was so overwhelming I was afraid I’d swoon like a B movie diva and hit the deck hard. And if that happened, my son would be mortified, undoubtedly scarred for life. But this was a test for both of us. I looked away as Stewart scampered up the rigging after the crew to furl the main course. And I didn’t faint.

We were headed south full tilt, hoping to whip every other boat in the schooner fleet during the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race last October. Sixteen-year-old Stewart had grudgingly agreed to participate in what I at his age could only have dreamed about—there was no Pride of Baltimore then. But he’d gotten over the grumps and bent to with a will that was a joy to behold—well, except when he scurried up the mast. You see, I’m deathly afraid of heights. Deathly, knee-knockingly afraid of heights. Just looking at the masthead of a ship like the Pride gives me the willies. God forbid I should look up and see my baby perched there like he’s leaning against a corner lamppost. No matter, I told myself, studiously peering at the compass in front of me and keeping my hands hard on the helm. This was why I’d wanted him to come.

When Stewart was born, his father and I had promised him to Jan Miles, one of the Pride’s co-captains and a friend of mine from high school days. Jan could have him for a year, we’d said, before he goes off to college. Naturally, Stewart grew up detesting everything about traditional tall ships. He liked the mechanical advantage of winches, for starters, and he thrived on the fumes and roar of internal combustion. Sailing on the Pride of Baltimore, he announced as high school graduation approached, was for the birds. I tried to convince him that our signing aboard the Pride for the Great Schooner Race was the chance of a lifetime, but he didn’t believe me. He said he’d rather go to school; that missing his calculus test would be an unspeakable hardship; that considering what his father and I pay for tuition it was criminal to even suggest that he miss a few days (I’ll admit, this last argument was pretty convincing). But I played the Mom card and signed him up anyway. It was only four days, not a whole year, I said, and if he really didn’t like it, that would be the end of it. He could join the rat race like everyone else.

And so his father (who gets mortifyingly seasick and thus had begged off ) tumbled him onto the deck of the Pride of Baltimore way too early on the morning of the race. And Stewart sputtered and spit and fumed and generally poisoned the air around him: a child’s revenge, masterfully delivered (no slouch he). And I actually wondered if I’d made a mistake in “forcing” him to come along.

So began our voyage together.

My voyage had actually begun the day before, on Wednesday afternoon. Probably half the fun of the schooner race is the Parade of Sail and the dock party in Baltimore, so I arrived in time to climb aboard the Pride with the full contingent of the A.G. Edwards Baltimore office, Pride’s guests for the parade. (The Pride offices are in Baltimore’s World Trade Center and had been doused into oblivion by Hurricane Isabel. A.G. Edwards, a financial consulting firm, had graciously offered temporary office space, and now the ship was saying thank you.)

Unfortunately the wind was too blustery, so the Parade of Sail was cancelled. But Captain Jan set out anyway. After all, a boat like the Pride is built for wind. Whitecaps sparkled across the Inner Harbor. A bright sun slanted from behind Fort McHenry. The sky was a deep cobalt blue, with just a smudge or two of clouds. We motored past Fells Point and the crew wrestled the ship’s cannon into the gun port. “Fire in the hole!” We plugged our ears as a geyser of flame and sparks shot from what is, literally, a hole in the back end of the cannon. Then, kaboom! We’d just put a shot into the Spirit of Massachusetts’s bow—figuratively, of course. She was the Pride’s main competition in this race, and she’d been put on notice.

With such a breeze, the boat hardly needed sails to move through the water. The wind was abeam full bore as we slid past the green ramparts of Fort McHenry. I looked behind me and tried to imagine Baltimore’s harbor without the tall buildings, without the wharves stretching along the shoreline below the fort. I tried to picture the time when Fort McHenry stood at the harbor’s gate and effectively controlled the shipping up and down the Patapsco River. If I squinted just a little to make things fuzzy and out of focus, I could turn the slope rising from the Canton wharves into a hill of small houses where the laborers for the Fells Point shipyards lived. What a view they must have had from their dormer windows.

The crew had put up the jib and it was enough to pull us toward the Key Bridge. A tanker was coming in from the Bay, and the tugboat Maria Krause idled nearby in the channel. Now that we were at the bridge and looking back at Baltimore, the town seemed smaller, more to scale with my imagination. Steeples poked into the sky. The downtown skyscrapers were hidden.

Our afternoon sail done, the crew retired to the party held beneath Bohager’s giant canopy in Fells Point. A crowd of schooner crew, captains, support staff, assorted significant others and hungry strays had gathered here to eat great quantities of food and drink prodigious amounts of beer. To gain admittance, I was told, I had to wear my official Schooner Race shirt, a long-sleeved affair with a John Barber schooner scene printed on the front. It was cold enough, though, that I was wearing a sweatshirt over it, so coming through Bohager’s door, I was told to peel. Mind you, I hadn’t had any amount of beer yet, prodigious or otherwise, but—transported back to the days of my wayward youth—I felt highly flattered. It had been a long time since anyone had asked me to peel, and I said so. It was like being carded—at my age (a squinch past 50), always a compliment. Turns out they only meant that I had to lift up my sweatshirt so they could verify the shirt. Oh well, you take what you can get.

Sidling up to the bar, I ran into Bill Oliver, once a partner in the nefarious China Sea Marine Trading Company, formerly of Fells Point (where the Fells Point Maritime Museum is now), and now brewer of Oliver’s Ale and proprietor of the Wharf Rat pubs. Not surprisingly, the biggest spigot behind the bar tapped into a keg of his special Ironman Pale Ale. This was a good thing, because Oliver’s Ale is like mother’s milk. You’ve just gotta have it in order to live right. And tonight it was flowing free for the asking. It took me a while to get my first swallow—I wasn’t the only one in line.

Then I was on stage singing with Ship’s Company chanteyman Jim Rockwell (sea music, of course) and the evening took off. More music, more food. And finally the crowd broke up and we walked over to Lane Briggs’s tugantine, Norfolk Rebel, at the Broad Street pier and sang some more. A lot more. Then the sun came up and we staggered back to our boats, some to sleep it off, some to be greeted by surly teenage sons.

Breakfast this morning was a simple meal of strawberries and bagels. Laura Morrissey, the cook, was already about, and I’d offered to help out in the galley. One of my fantasies is to be cook aboard a tall ship. I wouldn’t mind being a deckhand, but hauling on halyards and braces and sheets in the wee hours of the morning could get tedious. And truth be known, I couldn’t, just couldn’t, climb the rigging. The heights thing. Cooks, on the other hand, get to work “normal” hours and aren’t expected to go clambering around on deck unless they particularly want to. At least that’s the drill aboard Pride, according to Laura, who was now supervising me as I put away groceries and generally made myself useful. I was trying to stay as far away from Stewart as possible. Let him fester.

Stewart and I weren’t the only guests onboard. The Pride keeps several guest cabins open for thems that are willing to pony up for the privilege of sailing the ship from here to there—generally speaking, the short legs between two ports of call on the Pride’s hectic agenda. The price of the guest ticket pays for room and board and chucks a little into the boat’s operating coffers. In return, guests are expected to join the crew and work their butts off before the mast. Fun, eh? For the schooner race, Stewart and I were joined by John MacIver and Mac MacIver (fast friends, but no relation), and Ron Shurie and John Menocal. All of them had sailed the Pride in the schooner race before. Nothing to it, they said. Gluttons for punishment, I thought.

As the Pride headed out to the starting line, Laura told me I could make the soup for lunch. Nothing to it! She had what I needed for five-finger lentil stew: an ingredient and a cup of liquid for each digit. In this case, one carrot, one onion, one celery stalk, one bay leaf, one cup of lentils and five cups of water. Saute the dry ingredients for a few minutes before adding the water, then. . . . Oops, I didn’t get it started early enough, so it was a bit chewy at eight bells. (Way to go, Mom.) But the crew was very kind—those that weren’t related to me, anyway. They made their own sandwiches, adding diplomatically that under cooked was usually better than burnt, and it would save Laura the trouble of making soup tomorrow.

I joined the port watch, with Stewart, to work the boat. Even though I was the cook’s helper, I wanted to work the deck when I could. Laura gave me an alarmed look. It’s a slippery slope, said she. Help them once, they’ll come to expect it. But I reminded her that I was here for the fun and the experience, so I wanted to help sometimes. We’ll see, she said ominously. Stewart’s surliness had washed off, thankfully, and he was jumping into the fray, hauling on lines and generally looking lively. I found it a lot easier to stay out of the way and watch, especially after I ripped off half my finger hauling on a wayward halyard. But alas, Laura was right. I was soon perceived as one of the grunts and put to learning the ropes with the rest of the “guests.” I could hear Captain Jan snigger from the helm.

It was like this: Three or four of us picked up a line about half the thickness of my wrist. When the mate (or whoever) yelled haul, we all hauled. Or maybe we yelled haul ourselves to get a rhythm going. Or maybe nobody yelled haul and we just bloody well hauled anyway. For all we were worth. And when we thought we’d hauled enough, the mate yelled haul again, and we bloody well hauled again. And so on, until someone said, “That’s well,” and we could make the line fast. I had blisters before we even got the damn sail up. Before my nervous system could even register the news, the blisters ripped open and any remaining surface skin abraded away. I was a hurting puppy. (Stewart had brought his sailing gloves, smarty-pants.)

It dawned on me that this was not going to be a Sunday sail. The Pride actually needed every muscle the crew could muster. There was a brisk wind, and it was on the nose from Norfolk. We would have to tack over the starting line, then beat down the Bay. So it was all hands on deck, just like in the songs I like to sing. And just because I gouged a big hole in my index finger at the get-go didn’t mean I could weenie out. Jan knew me too well for that. Cook’s helper, hah! I cradled my wound with a moleskin doughnut and wrapped it with black electrical tape. My black badge of courage. I was a real deckhand now. It was like having a tattoo. If only I’d had a knife strapped on my belt.

I headed down below to wash up the pots and pans in the short stints between tacks, but I ran up on deck at the “Ready about!” to haul on lines. And I reminded myself that I’d withstood the rigors of childbirth twice, so a dinky little blister wasn’t going to get me down. Besides, how long could it possibly take us to get to Norfolk? Were we there yet? The warning gun went off—five minutes to start—and all hell broke loose aboard the Pride.

I’ve known Jan Miles for most of my life. In fact, he was my first crush. I met him when we were both in high school. He’d just returned from his first major ocean voyage—to Tierra del Fuego and back—and he carried the swell of the ocean like a sea chest slung across his shoulders. My mother said a girl could go anywhere with Jan. And I thought, first Tierra del Fuego, then . . .

My crush went the way of Clearasil, but Jan went on to crew and captain some of the finest tall ships in America. He’s one of the most laid-back people you could ever know. Years of sailing tall ships has honed his instincts and built a rock-solid confidence. But out there at the start of the schooner race, a change came over my mild-mannered friend. When that warning gun fired and all the schooners pirouetted into position, his eyes blazed, his cheeks flushed and he became absolutely focused on the task at hand. “All right, you sons of whores, get that jib in!” he bellowed (he’s a big guy, and can he ever bellow). And we sons of whores hopped to and tried with all our might—which, in this instance, wasn’t quite enough—to get that jib in. And Captain Jan noted our efforts and allowed as how we were a bunch of lily-livered lumps of lard—or words to that effect—and we did our damnedest to show him that by golly we weren’t. And so it went as the Pride flew across the starting line and the race began with the final bang of the starting gun. This was to be no sedate around-the-buoys affair. This race would be won on the windward leg (aren’t they all?), but with the wind screaming from the south, it would be a long windward leg. And Captain Jan suggested that this pack of puckered prunes had better shape up and get with the program. Which meant getting the blinking jib in when the captain said “in.” Or else. At the rate we were going, if the British had been on our tail instead of the Spirit of Massachusetts, we’d have been toast. But we got better, and by the seventh or eighth tack, we’d gotten a lot better, and the mild-mannered Jan Miles came back and we were making good time. At least, at this point, there weren’t any other schooners nearby, so the competition wasn’t exactly lapping up our bow waves. And the Spirit of Massachusetts had fallen behind.

It’s hard work tacking a topsail schooner. At the moment, running down the Western Shore opposite the mouth of the Choptank River, we had eight sails up: the jib topsail, jib, fore-staysail, foresail, fore topsail, topgallant, mainsail and main gaff-topsail. And they all needed some kind of major adjustment at every tack—releasing sheets, taking in sheets, slacking braces, tightening braces. The only sail we didn’t have to manhandle was the mainsail, which behaved like any proper mainsail and obediently tacked itself. The only sails that weren’t up were the studding sails (stunsails) and the ring tail. But stay tuned. At this very moment one of the studding sails was being checked and patched and readied for rigging in the event the wind came around and we could bear off. The ring tail, I was told, wasn’t worth the bother. Too much work for too little oomph. And oomph counted for a lot in this race.

Night came on with winks and nods, like a fawning deckhand unsure just where to go. The sun blazed down, leaving a puff of color in the crease between land and water. The stars switched on against the dark of the sky. No moon yet. Stewart and I sat companionably on the deckhouse, breathing it all in. He’d worked the kinks out of his system and was ready to acknowledge that I was a fellow traveler. (This is pretty cool, Mom.) I showed him how to find Polaris, the North Star, and we monitored our progress through time by the turn of the other stars around it, and we checked our progress down the Bay by the way it hung astern. The half moon rose like a golden whale’s eye, defining the leviathan sky. We were moving along at eight knots, creaming through the water. There was no phosphorus, but the bow waves spilled away like milk, and moonlight paved the Bay with golden flagstones leading east. It was dark on deck. Even in the glimmer of moonlight, it was hard to see underfoot. It was easy to trip on lines and tackle that in daylight are relatively benign but at night behaved like rambunctious puppies nipping at our heels. At midnight Stewart and I were off watch and the boat had just slipped below the Patuxent River.

We were awakened at 5:30 a.m. to get the studding sail up. The wind had dropped and we were ghosting along on a whisper. Two of the crew were already up on the course yard setting the studding sail boom—running it out from where it normally lies against the yardarm. Moonlight poured down behind them, silhouetting them in a golden haze. The studding sail sat on the foredeck; someone had already carried it up from below. We rigged the halyard and the sheets and hoisted the spar up to the windward yardarm. Sail set, we could go back to our bunks. It was close to 7 a.m. now, and Friday morning was easing up on one elbow with a smudge of cheap rouge smeared across her cheeks. She, like me, had been too long at the fair. Laura was up, though, so I hastily brushed my teeth, washed my face, took off my woolie underwear, smeared on another layer of deodorant and grabbed a cup of coffee.

We were back on deck at 8 a.m. and down came the studding sail—gravity helped. And morning came to the Chesapeake. We could see Gwynn’s Island and Wolf Trap Light, which put us well below the Potomac. And there was no wind to speak of. The morning doldrums had us ambling along with plenty of time to look around and see—no one! We were as solitary on this Bay as Wolf Trap.

The finish was an imaginary line extending east from Thimble Shoal. The wind had picked up and Jan gave me the helm to take the boat across. I was honored. I could feel the boat surging under my hands. The helm was surprising. When the boat was balanced, she sailed a straight line, and for a moment or two I thought that Jan had switched on the autopilot and only pretended to give me the wheel. She didn’t deviate a hair from her compass course. But then we crossed the finish line and Jan told me to bear off, and I stayed on the helm as we tacked and began to work our way west. Full and by, Jan said. Just sail her. And I felt the wind across my cheek and looked at the sails, and I turned the wheel and the boat responded. To me! It doesn’t get any better than this. And then Stewart went up the rigging to furl something and I thought I was going to faint.

The race was over and Jan did some quick calculations. In 21:20 hours we raced a total of 139 nautical miles, at an average speed of 6.53 knots on a rhumb line of 127 miles. We hauled 12 long tons per person. (No wonder I was stiff.) We finished at 10:59:58 a.m. First in class. The Spirit of Massachusetts couldn’t touch us.

Stewart was back on deck and I asked him if sailing tall ships might be in his future. No way, Mom. Yes, he’d remember this sail for as long as he lives. But think about it, said he: He’s spent every minute of his waking life trying to invent his way to easy street. Without getting out of bed, he can turn on his bedroom light, switch on his radio, adjust the window fan, even close his door, using clever labor-saving devices of his own design. He understands the concept of mechanical advantage. Sail a traditional tall ship without winches? Why?

He is my son with whom I am well pleased, and I told him so. When he grows up (sometime next week) he’ll build fast engines for race cars, or maybe engineer the breakthrough for a mainstream hydrogen fuel cell. His house will be wired with buttons and switches that make things open, shut or turn off. Exerting minimum effort he will effect maximum change. If it weren’t for brains like his, we’d all be sailing tall ships—and not for the fun of it. Meanwhile, we headed for the party: roasted pig, awards, more singing. Then home to study calculus.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Oldies but Woodies

2009-08-13T10:10:00.001-04:00

[11.07 issue]

There’s plenty of life left in these wooden thoroughbreds of the waterways, and plenty of people happy to keep them in their stable.

by Jody Argo Schroath

I walked past the covered slips of a certain marina on the Northern Neck of Virginia, and this is what I saw, not skipping anything. Minnow, a lapstrake Chris-Craft cruiser; an old wood Citation;Ole Chris, an old Chris of about 30 feet; Therapy IV, an old Chris cruiser; a wooden Carver; a Chris-Craft Cavalier; a big wood something; an old Egg Harbor; and a 1965 57-foot Chris Constellation named Good Spirits. This latter is the marina’s unofficial clubhouse, and, with its awning, soft chairs and wicker settees, its flybridge deck feels like the veranda of an old pillared plantation. Moving on, there was Encore, a 58-foot Elco that once was named Do-Ho and belonged to Howard Johnson; an empty space usually filled by a 55-foot Chris Constellation that is currently out for repairs (always a word with dangerous overtones when used in reference to an old wood boat); and a 1949 46-foot Chris-Craft Double Cabin Flying Bridge listing slightly to port. This one’s mine. With some work she could be a real beauty, I said to myself yet again. This has been my mantra for the past five years. And indeed the long soaring curve of her cabin is pure Art Deco, by way of the Jetsons. Inside she has a large mahogany saloon and aft cabin, a full kitchen and a nifty turquoise linoleum bathroom—not that it actually works, of course. The bilge pump clicked on and water began to gush out the starboard through-hull. I smiled ruefully, remembering that my husband Rick calls her our $2,000-a-year decorative fountain.

I looked back up the dock. Nobody. All these lovely old boats and nobody to talk to. I turned back to my own boat, leaning quietly and gathering dust, and I was overtaken by a wave of helplessness. Frustration. Loneliness. I needed to talk. I needed to talk Chris-Craft. What I needed was to find owners who actually come down to their old Chris cruisers, who take them out of the slip and out onto the Bay. I needed to sit in their saloons and feel like a glamorous Chris-Craft owner of the past—Katherine Hepburn or Eleanor Roosevelt, for example. I needed to see the brightwork at the end of the tunnel.

Over the spring and summer that followed I pursued my resolve. I attended every antique and classic boat show and rendezvous I could find on the Bay. I chatted up the owners. I oohed and aahed over restorations that left me avocado with envy and fairly popping my rivets with resolution. And I insinuated myself into boatyards where old cruisers were likely to be under the saw and fine china brush. Finally, I contacted the Mecca for old-Chris owners, the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Va., which houses the 200,000-piece Chris-Craft collection, and I talked with Jerry Conrad, who curates the collection and is himself the author of Chris-Craft, The Essential Guide.

What did I learn? For one thing, the word “people” in the phrase “people who own old Chris-Craft cruisers” almost always refers to couples—Mr. and Mrs. Owner. Guys may own and love old Chris-Craft speedboats and utilities, but couples own and love cruisers. Women are as enamored of them as the men are, and they are in on the process from the beginning, from helping to choose the style of cruiser, to renovating and decorating it. Yes, decorating: one of the most compelling advantages of an old cruiser over a modern boat. You can make the interior your own the same way that you would in a period house. And you can make it just as warm and welcoming. On top of that, there’s room for the children and friends and the children’s friends.

Why a Chris-Craft rather than an Elco, Trumpy, Trojan, Egg Harbor or one of dozens of other fine boat manufacturers of the past? Chris-Craft was the largest pleasure boat manufacturer in the world during the 1950s and 1960s, so there are a lot of them still around. And Chris-Craft made a lot of different styles and sizes—60 to 70 varieties in some years—so there was, and is, something for everyone. After World War II, the words “cabin cruiser” and “Chris-Craft” became synonymous. Every time you opened a magazine, from Motor Boating to the Saturday Evening Post, you’d be greeted by advertising that featured Chris-Craft “girls” waving merrily from the front deck of a new Express Cruiser or lounging about the saloon of a Commander or Cavalier. “Here is beauty beyond belief and comfort with a capital ‘C’,” enthused the advertising booklet Chris-Craft for 1950, referring to the 30-foot Express Cruiser. “See it and you’ll sell yourself.” Chris-Crafts were everywhere, and people tend to buy what they remember in the happy past.

In June, when I attended the Antique and Classic Boat Society’s boat show in St. Michaels, Md., that’s just what Russ Gray of Oxford, Md., told me. “Growing up, I knew Chris-Craft, so that’s what I wanted.” Russ and his wife Pat decided two years ago to buy themselves an old boat. “We didn’t have any other hobbies,” Pat shrugged. The couple—he’s an executive recruiter and she’s an antiques dealer with a shop in Florida—had spied Mary and Ned Crabbe’s 1955 33-foot Commander Express Cruiser Sweet at the cardboard boat races in Oxford and fallen in love with it. They resolved then and there to get one of their own, and soon afterward they did—a 1950 36-foot Double Stateroom. This is their first boat, and they consider the choice practically preordained. They first saw the boat at a show in South Carolina on July 21, 2005. They made an offer, and, when the purchase had been concluded, the owners gave the Grays the boat’s original sales letter. That’s when they figured it was all preordained. “It was dated July 21, 1950!” Pat says happily.

She said they are thrilled to be owners of an old Chris cruiser and to be at the boat show. But it didn’t come easy. As so often happens with old boats, their new purchase turned out to have a few problems; notably the transom needed to be replaced. “At first you think it just needs a little paint . . .” Pat’s voice trailed off, and I nodded with complete understanding. She’s so right, I mused. First, it’s “let’s replace a few boards,” and then it’s “let’s refasten the entire hull,” and pretty soon it’s five years later. In the Grays’ case, they had the boat pulled right away and put Campbell’s Boatyard at Jack’s Point in Oxford to work on it. “We were still working on it up to the moment of last year’s show.” And to good effect. Their boat, One & Only, won Best Cruiser in Show its first year out. Well, I thought to myself, this is just the kind of happy ending I am after.

Ned and Mary Crabbe’s story is a felicitous one, as well. They bought Sweet as a wedding present to themselves. “Instead of having a big wedding, we thought, why not buy a big boat?” Mary told me as we sat in the stern deck seats enjoying the early summer sun at the St. Michaels show. (Their boat was two slips from the Grays’.) As the purchase of their chosen boat was proceeding—it was slowed by the fact that it was not actually for sale—they lost their house and workshop to Hurricane Isabel. But they went ahead and closed the deal. “Little did we know we’d spend five years working out the bugs.” (Are you beginning to see a theme here?) Sweet has its original refrigerator, decking, interior and engine, but the hull has now been completely refastened. (Yep, I hear you.) The first year, Mary changed the bottom color and boot stripe. After that, the Crabbes realized that as small business owners (they have a renovation, design and building company in Oxford), they were just too busy to do the boat work themselves. “We’re wood fanatics and Ned loves to restore, but he’s so busy. We trust the boatyard.” Like the Grays, the Crabbes had Daryl Frey at Campbells do the work.

Why did the Crabbes choose an old Chris-Craft? Searching the internet, they fell in love with the look of 1950s Chris-Crafts. And while Ned is the woodworker, Mary has experience with wood boats. As a teenager she worked at Thompson Boatyard in Chester, Md., where she learned how to varnish and paint and do other wood boat maintenance. “So I wasn’t afraid of them.” (Hmm, perhaps that is my problem: epifobia, the fear of Epifanes.)

Many buyers of old cruisers decide to eschew restoration—whether the do-it-yourself or the leave-it-to-the-experts variety—and instead find a boat already in tip-top condition. John and June Beschenbossel, for example, purchased their 1966 38-foot Tri-Cabin Constellation in 2005 from the boat’s third owner, a nuclear scientist who had maintained Blue Moon in excellent condition during his 30 years of ownership, winning prizes and helping to found the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club. Now the Beschenbossels pretty much sit back and enjoy the fruits of the former owner’s labors, including Blue Moon’s wine cellar and flat-panel television (well hidden from view, of course). They have also coated Blue Moon’s deck with the same rubberized paint that is used on tug boats, so that takes care of that maintenance problem. Still, John has plenty to tinker with. In addition toBlue Moon, he owns 14 classic cars, including Rolls Royce, Bentley, Jaguar and MG. The Beschenbossels had cruised over to St. Michaels from Mayo, Md., for the boat show, but also managed to bring a Rolls for the Rolls Royce show being held simultaneously. I forgot to ask how.

Back on the Northern Neck, I asked Jim Hillier, owner of Good Spirits, about his approach to old boat ownership. “I’ve restored more than a dozen pre-Civil War homes in Petersburg, Va., so I don’t feel daunted by wooden boats,” he told me as I settled comfortably into the wicker settee on the “veranda” of Good Spirits one Sunday morning. This is his third Chris cruiser. But all three were in pretty good to excellent shape when he bought them, he said, which has allowed him to spend more time enjoying them than working on them. No arguing with that, I thought, as two other marina denizens came onboard for Hillier’s scrambled eggs and coffee.

Both the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club and the Chesapeake Bay Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society are great resources for getting to know old boats in general and Chris-Crafts in particular, but how about a yacht club devoted entirely to antique and classic boats, you ask. That would be the Classic Yacht Club, based on the Chesapeake Bay. Its members’ classic boats must be at least 25 years old and at least 50 percent restored. Each year they hold several social events, a judging event and several rendezvous at various locations on the Bay.

It was at the Classic Yacht Club’s July rendezvous at North East Yacht Club that I met David and Clara Ochipinti and first saw their 1966 57-foot aluminum Chris Roamer Bella Navé. Immediately, I decided to apply for membership in their family so they would invite me back on a regular basis. I was enchanted with the Ochipintis because they represent both the do-it-yourself school of Chris-Craft ownership and the forget-that-buy-it-Bristol graduate school, and because they use their boat all the time—every weekend during the boating season, which for them runs into November. “We use the heck out of it,” Clara told me. I loved that.

Their first boat, a 1955 37-foot Commander, was a baptism by fire, as in the first time they took it out the engines failed and they had to figure out how to get back without them. (A tow.) Their second boat was a 1967 45-foot Constellation, which they purchased near its birthplace in Michigan and brought back through the Erie Canal, tossing out things like old bedding at stops along the way. “We worked on the Constellation all four years we owned her,” Clara said. “We did all the work ourselves. Finally, we said, ‘What are we doing?’ “ This time they decided to find a boat in really good shape—and one that was even bigger since their two daughters kept inviting more and more friends onboard for family weekends. This time too they found their boat in Michigan, within a few miles of the factory where it had been built. But, instead of having to tie new bedding on top of the car (giving a good impression of the Clampetts on their way to Beverly Hills), this time they enjoyed a maintenance-free cruise down the waterways. “It was like night and day.”

A fresh-water environment and ongoing maintenance have been kind to Bella Navé. All of the stainless and chrome are original. The aluminum hull has had an anticorrosion coating applied to protect it. “I hadn’t intended to move away from wood until I saw this,” David told me as we toured the boat. From the hull up everything is mahogany—except for the decks, which are teak. A previous owner had installed a wet bar and restored the instruments. The Ochipinitis have replaced the galley floor, which was linoleum. The guest cabins are remarkably spacious, with a hallway and closets opposite the door and three closets inside. There is a Jack and Jill shower (two entrances). The master stateroom has its own bathroom and about half-a-dozen closets. Because this boat is aluminum, it has more storage than a wood boat because the frames are thinner and storage space can go right up against the hull, David explained. Bella Navé also has new Cummins turbo diesels and zoned heat and air conditioning. She cruises 16 to 18 knots and is easy to handle, Clara said. At 63,000 pounds, the hardest thing to do is stop.

Several weeks later, although my application for membership in the Ochipinti family was still pending, they agreed to take me out on the Sassafras River for a quick spin. Although they live in West Chester, Pa., they keep their boat at Skipjack Cove in Georgetown, Md. In fact, their second boat, the 45-foot Constellation, is just a couple of slips down; its new owners are now members of the Classic Yacht Club as well.

They made it look so easy. As David started the engines, Clara began the casting-off process. She stood at the bow and gave hand gestures as David put Bella Navé into reverse. Slowly, the boat eased out of the covered slip, which seemed to have room for no more than a saltine cracker or two between hull and posts. No rush, no panic, no bumps. They’ve done this a few times before. “We need 60 feet. The fairway is 90,” David said as he pivoted the boat to port. There are three 90-degree turns just to get out of the marina. “Lots of people don’t take their big boats out because they think it’s more trouble. But it’s not true.” Out on the Sassafras, David kept the speed down until we passed the end-of-speed-limit sign downriver. We might as well have been aboard theQueen Mary the ride was so solid. David opened the throttle, and we picked up speed. The big aluminum hull went up onto a semi-plane. Onboard, it was quiet and still steady enough to play pick-up sticks. Wow! So this is what it’s like, I thought to myself. I took a deep breath as if I could store all this enthusiasm in my bloodstream.

I’m going to need it. I don’t have digits sufficient to count the major systems that need to be overhauled on my boat before the thrill is mine. But now I had a support group as big as the Bay, and that was a great start. And for the work I can’t do myself, I know that there are a surprising number of boatyards on the Bay that still work on wood boats. Krentz Marine in Callao, Va., Campbell’s Boatyard in Oxford, Md., Sarles and Petrini boatyards in Annapolis, and Hartge Yacht Yard in Galesville, Md., to name just a few. And there are classic boat restorers like Michael Haines in West Chester, Pa., Howard P. Johnson of Old Time World in southern Maryland and George Hazzard’s Wooden Boat Restoration in Millington, Md. This is the lesson I have learned about dealing with boatyard craftsmen: When you bring your boat to them and they look at you as if you probably need help to turn the faucet on in the morning, don’t let it bother you. The people who work on wood boats for a living are a militant lot. They love wood and wood boats and they hate to see them deteriorate. I am told that Doug Daiss, owner of Krentz Marine (that certain marina on the Northern Neck) turns purple when an owner tells him that he doesn’t plan to keep his old Chris cruiser under cover. It’s a source of deep frustration for all those who work on wood boats that neglect dooms hundreds of them every year.

Finally, I turned my attention to the southern Bay and the Mariner’s Museum’s amazing Chris-Craft collection. This was just great! I sent them my boat’s hull number, and they sent me a fat packet of nifty stuff like the hull card for my very boat, which gives all the options it came with and even the color of the Simmons Hide-a-Bed sofa (green and white). They also sent me sales literature for my model, photographs and technical drawings suitable for framing. Believe me, this is the cheapest stuff I am ever going to buy for my boat. According to Jerry Conrad, since the museum took possession of the Chris-Craft archives in the mid-1980s, they have been contacted almost 40,000 times by phone, e-mail, fax and walk-ins. Since 1988, they have put together about 7,500 research packages. And they are still working their way through the 200,000-piece collection.

So that’s how I spent my summer. Now it’s fall, and once again I am walking out the dock to my boat. I have just come from the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum’s Antique and Classic Boat Show, and I am thinking, heck, with all those resources, why was I ever worried? Then it suddenly dawns on me that with all this research, I haven’t done a lick of work on my boat all season!

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Beating The Inner Bimbo

2009-08-13T10:06:00.003-04:00

[03.03 issue]

by Jane Meneely

When Clint brought Escort, a 42-foot Kadey-Krogen trawler, home one day, I knew it was way too big a boat for me to handle. Ever. I couldn't even imagine being a capable first mate. There was just no way I could decipher a boat like that. "Clint, my love," I said. "You're going to have to take that boat back to the store and get your money back." "Fat chance," said Clint. And the boat stayed. So we made a deal, Clint and I. He could keep the boat if I could be the boat princess. He would do all the work and I would do my nails and eat bonbons. And that worked out just fine. For about three days. Then I started to get antsy. I was antsy because deep down inside, I really didn't like being so completely dependent on someone who isn't me. And that's when I began to look long and hard at the idea of running that trawler. Why in the world couldn't I?

Because I was a powerboat bimbo.

There's simply no other way to say it. I could have taken our 38-foot sailboat to the moon and back, but put me on a powerboat and I'd turn into a complete moron. Sure I could drive it from point A to point B, but never through a bridge or, heaven forbid, into a slip. I was a real wuss about it, but I wasn't alone. In spite of the fact that more women than ever are buying their own boats, taking the helm and applying for their captain's license, I know plenty of seasoned seagoing ladies who still feel completely upwinded by a powerboat. It's as if we smack our heads on a glass hatch at the very thought of running an engine. We're perfectly capable of handling a powerboat. And most of us agree that we should learn how to operate at least our own boat. We just don't want to. We suffer the agonies of Reluctant Captain Syndrome. Something holds us back from actually taking control and being captain of our ship. It could be a girl thing. It could be a cultural thing. It could be a fear thing. . . .

In my case, it could have been the image of my mother, god bless her, who never once docked our family boat or did anything beyond the occasional stint at the wheel. I have three much older brothers who were ready, willing, able and, moreover, expected to do all the "real" work of running the boat. I was only expected to keep myself from falling overboard. Besides, when I was growing up, I never once saw a woman captain - not on a powerboat, anyway. I never even saw a picture of a woman captain. In my school books the captains had names like Christopher Columbus or Long John Silver. And they didn't wear skirts. Subliminal messages are powerful. They get way deep in our psyches and can be awfully hard to shake.

Beating that inner bimbo is no picnic, but it is doable and I did it. Not all at once, mind you. But then again, it's not an overnight sort of task. The first thing I had to do was try to define exactly what it was that intimidated me so much about Clint's new pride and joy - and that wasn't too hard. The boat was much bigger than anything I had ever run before. It contained panel after panel of switches that seemingly worked by some dark juju. It had a great big diesel that lurked in the engine room and needed to be fed periodically - by hand, no less. And it would always have to be backed into its slip.

Pretty intimidating, all right. By comparison, boat princess looked okay. So for a while I made excuses. I disguised myself as Mrs. Noah: "I have so many guests to take care of, I couldn't possibly operate the boat. I have to feed them, clean up after them and keep them from killing each other." Sometimes I was Cleopatra: "Why should I operate the boat? If I'm on the boat, I'm on vacation." Or I'd just plain rebel: "I do my share of running the boat. I read the cruise guides, chart our course, update the logbook, find out where the really good restaurants are . . . I don't need to learn how to drive the damn thing, too." If I felt like Mrs. Bligh, I'd point out that I'd been watching and helping my husband for years. Crossing my fingers I'd say: "I know that I can get myself home if I have to." And if I were feeling totally delusional, I'd make like Mrs. Descartes: "I think therefore I can." Scary!

Unfortunately, excuses are just that. They got me no closer to being able to run my boat myself, and on close examination, they made me sound pretty silly. So I thought about the learning process itself. Once upon a time I'd taught school. If I could convince high school kids that Shakespeare was the bees knees, I should be able to develop a learning strategy that would make me so excited about powerboats I'd even do homework.

As any good teacher knows, the first principle of teaching is this: If students ain't happy, they ain't gonna learn. Teachers who smile a lot at their students are able to get and keep their students' attention far more than teachers who scowl. Happy students are happy learners. Ergo, I had to make my boat a happy classroom, and that meant two things:

A) I couldn't wait until I had no other choice. An emergency situation is simply not a good learning environment. No one is smiling.

B) I would not, under any circumstances, want my true love to teach me the ropes. No one would be smiling then, either.

I'd have to take control of when I'd do my learning - preferably on a calm, sunshiny day when I had nothing better to do. And I'd have to pick someone to be my instructor - someone who would make me feel relaxed and comfortable. Once I figured out the when and who, I'd be on my way.

Finding someone to come onboard and teach me Boat Handling 101 was easy. There are plenty of professional captains out there for hire, most of them extremely good-looking and easygoing. Who wouldn't want to spend a day alone afloat with one of them! But being married to a PC kind of guy (a parsimonious curmudgeon), I did the next best thing - I asked some friends if they wanted to go for a ride on my Krogen. They said, golly gee, would they ever! And I said, okay but you have to teach me how to operate it. And they said, golly gee, so you mean a really long ride! Big joke.

I generously gave Clint veto power over the list of would-be teachers, and he eliminated one of my ex-boyfriends and the really buff aerobics instructor named Ramon. Mel Gibson never wrote back. That left me with Jan Miles, who just happens to be captain of the Pride of Baltimore II, and Marcus Thomas, who just happens to be captain of the workboat Endurance.

Finding the when was harder. Jan and I compared calendars and finally found a Monday when we both were free. Wonder of wonders, it turned out to be a lovely, calm, sunshiny day - very auspicious, I thought; the gods were smiling. Jan was very thorough. He showed me around the engine room and pointed to things with funny names, none of which I can remember without my notes. He showed me how to check the oil and the coolant. Then he introduced me to our batteries and the generator, and he showed me what switches to switch and in what order. And he said that whether you call it a thingamabob or a generator switch, it still works when you push the button. Eureka! And it can set other thingamabobs in motion. It's a matter of sequence, not terminology, and has nothing to do with juju (well, maybe a little bit of juju). He showed me how to operate the anchor windlass - how to whack it just so with a winch handle, for example. And with the anchor up we went for a ride.

Once under way he had me maneuver up to imaginary lines or position myself off a clam line or buoy. "Come to within three feet of that daymarker so I can see it out the side door, and hold her dead in the water there until I count to fifteen," Jan said, without even looking up from the magazine he was reading. It reminded me of when I had my learner's permit and my father would sit in the back seat, barking instructions between chapters of his Perry Mason mystery.

Wonder of wonders, I was having fun and I was smiling. I was comfortable, relaxed and learning. And there were more Eureka moments. Like when Jan was watching me handle the wheel, and he pointed out that I was driving the boat like I was sailing. I was using the wheel gently and slowly, as if I was afraid of spilling the wind out of the sails if I moved too quickly (creature of habit, I guess). So it was quite liberating to spend a few minutes just turning the boat this way and that, palming the wheel like I was driving a race boat. I couldn't hit anything out on the wide open river (no one was around to hit), so I was willing to experiment and take risks. Jan made me mindful of the wind and current, and he made me maneuver with headwinds and beam winds. I got lots of practice.

Finally we headed for the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, where we pulled in and out of the bulkhead, like at a gas dock. Several times Jan reminded me that being aboard a boat is hardly new to me. I knew where the boat needed to go, and I knew intuitively how to get it there. He suggested that I allow myself to "feel the Force" and stop trying to think myself out of good instincts. That's really hard to do. It probably requires some juju, or at least an ample libation of rum.

By the time Marcus came onboard, a few weeks later, I could get under way and out into the river by myself (I'd been practicing). It was like a test. He crossed his arms and watched as I checked the oil and engine coolant. He gave a thumbs up when I started the generator and then started the engine. He gave me a knowing smile when I whacked the anchor windlass just so. And he watched the creek go by as I followed the unmarked channel through the Oak Creek Bridge and into the Miles River. "What do you need me for?" he asked. Plenty, I told him as I aimed for the museum docks.

Marcus is a waterman, and I've always marveled at the way watermen can roar in and out of docks unscathed. I wanted him to show me how to do that aboard my single-screw trawler.

Marcus was more hands on than Jan. "Watch me," he said, and he swept up to the bulkhead and goosed the gears and the throttle until Escort shimmied neatly into place. He had barely touched the wheel. "Your turn." I sidled the boat into position and tentatively tried to edge her into the dock. I was still about six feet away. "Try again," Marcus said. "Use a little more speed so you can build momentum."

Momentum? Was he crazy? I had 21 tons of boat moving through the water and she wasn't going to stop on a dime. I got back into position to make another run and eased the throttle the eensiest bit forward. "Use your engine, honey," Marcus said. "Do it like I showed you." And he showed me again. In one fluid motion he jammed the throttle forward, then back, goosing the boat ahead. With his other hand he flipped the gearshift into neutral, then reverse, and goosed the throttle again. The boat stopped in her tracks, as if she'd cocked an ear and was listening. Marcus flipped the sticks again and the boat began swinging her hips into the dock.

My turn again. I got the boat into position. Then with Marcus chanting, "Forward. Power. Neutral. Reverse. Power. Neutral . . ." I had Escort doing the sideways shimmy. (Okay, I stripped the gears a few times. Not pretty.) I was still a little ways from the dock, but not so far that I couldn't have tossed a line to someone. I was as good as in.

Marcus made me do it again. And again. And again. Until finally, I could work the sticks and feel the boat move where I wanted her. "Use your engine, honey," Marcus repeated. Why not? She's got one, after all - a big one. And it likes to kick up a froth.

My lessons were over, at least for a while. Clint and I had places to go, people to see, and we'd be using the boat. That was a good thing, because I was able to keep practicing. The more I ran the boat, the more confident I became. Then came the final exam: I had to bring the boat back to our brand new slip on Oak Creek all by myself. I wouldn't just be anchoring in the middle of a soft-shouldered and forgiving cove. I'd be backing up between parallel pilings and making her fast - bow lines, spring lines, the works. And I'd be alone.

I was glad no one was watching, but as it happened, I pulled the boat in without any trouble at all. I felt the Force. I used the engine. I was home free. Beginner's luck, I'm sure. And nice flat calm at that. But I did it. And it wasn't such a big deal after all. I know I can do it again. And if there's a crosswind, well, it will probably just take me longer.

In all honesty, I'd rather not operate my own boat. It's still a pretty big bear, and I'd just as soon leave things to Captain Clint, who likes to drive (thrills at the very thought of it). But now when it's raining, I can be prissy and make Clint go out and raise the anchor or handle the dock lines while I stay cozy in the pilothouse. And if I'm in a hurry to get somewhere (and I usually am) I can get the boat under way before he has even rolled out of bed in the morning. I consider myself a Basically Independent Motor Boat Operator - a bimbo of the better sort. I can't begin to name the parts of the engine without my crib sheet. I'd prefer not to change the oil. When we have friends on board, I still slide into my Mrs. Noah routine. But sometimes when we're alone, just the two of us, I turn into Janie the Pirate Queen and I can handle that boat with the best of them.

How does Clint feel about all this? Not long after I'd had these sessions with Jan and Marcus, Clint and I were tootling along somewhere. I was at the wheel, and I heard the engine make a funny sound. "What's that noise?" I said. Well, by the way Clint reacted, you'd think I'd lost 50 pounds and slipped on something from Victoria's Secret. It was certainly the first time I'd ever heard the engine ping, because it was the first time I'd actually been listening. And Clint says that was the moment when he knew I was truly in the captain's seat.

That made him a very happy camper. Me too.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Aye Aye Skipper

2009-08-13T10:02:00.003-04:00

[05.08 issue]

Season One in the life of a new ship’s dog.

by Jody Argo Schroath

It was six o’clock on a steamroller-hot Saturday evening at the tail end of August, and Skipper the ship’s dog was eating bait hotdog pieces as fast as the seven-year-old fisherman-trainee on the dock could pull them out of his ziplock bag. Clutching his fishing rod in his left hand, the young angler, clearly enjoying the interaction, would reach into the baggie with his right and bring out a new piece of bait, ready for the hook. Skipper would wait until it was halfway to the hook, then snatch the hunk of wiener out of the boy’s fingers and gulp it down faster than you could say Oscar Mayer. Not that I approved of this, but while Skipper was concentrating his every fiber on putting a dent in the catch of the day, I was still aboard Snipp finishing up the dock lines.

The ship’s dog and I had just returned from a sail on the Potomac that had become a motor back from the Potomac after the wind began its late-summer offshore-to-onshore do-si-do and the long, windless intermission had settled over us like a heating pad. Skipper had sought permission to debark as soon as we caromed gently off the finger pier. I didn’t really mind. He had been aboard all the long lazy day, dozing on the relative cool of the cabin sole or trying to stay within the dodger’s shifting Band-Aid of shade. Besides, he wasn’t much good yet at stowing things away and he was completely hopeless at tying a half hitch. Then too I thought he might have, you know, “business” ashore. Instead he simply returned to his everyday job as dockmeister/doofus, consulting briefly with Molly and Blacky the boatyard dogs—who were themselves busy supervising a do-it-yourselfer’s rudder repair—then running off to escort a mildly apprehensive visitor down A dock. He paused on the way back to clean up after a powerboat Westie, who had unwisely chosen to save a little bit of his dinner for later, before streaking back out B dock, and finally braking hard at the sight of young Izaak Walton and his bait baggie. I smiled indulgently from the foredeck and called him back onto the boat. Hey, I’m no Captain Bligh.

Six months earlier I would have reveled in such a happy outcome—grand theft hotdog not included, of course. From a winter of repairs on the hard through an early spring splash and recommissioning, I had watched enviously as other boat pups came and went, mingling amiably or passing each other in quiet disdain. Not so Skipper. While he was content to wait meekly in the open rear end of the station wagon while I worked for hours aboard, up the inaccessible ladder, he transmogrified into a snapping, snarling Baskerville hound at the first sight of another dog. Whoa, I thought as I struggled to bring him under control, this is going to make cruising—not to mention life in general—pretty tough!

Skippy is a 60-pound ibizi-benji-dor—just kidding, but he is some kind of hound mix—the color of a butterscotch sundae, with vanilla ice cream feet, multipositional ears and a curly tail. I had brought Skippy—aged maybe one year, maybe not—home in January from an ASPCA in Virginia. He was cute, didn’t chew things up, loved the water and adored people. But dogs? Holy Return of Chucky, Batman! So Skippy and I immediately went into therapy. He was diagnosed with fear aggression and I with pathetic-weak-sister syndrome. Under the guidance of trainer Ira Hartwell in Annapolis, who specializes in aggressive dogs, I learned to act more like the alpha female and Skippy learned that very few dogs actually wanted to bite his head off. And eventually, Skipper was invited to join Jack the Pomeranian’s dockside coffee-klatch at our marina—which admittedly is heavily weighted in the direction of dogs the size and aspect of oven mitts, but also includes a sprinkling of fairly amiable Refrigerator Perry-size canines. Now hanging out with his buds and competitive peeing on the dinghy rack have become the highlight of his days. Ah, the good life. But for me, the good life is sailing, and sailing with Skippy is what this story is all about.

When Snipp went back in the water late last March, Skipper hopped aboard and loped from deck to cockpit to cabin as if he had been born in the starboard lazarette. I was overjoyed. Overjoyed, that is, until he had a revelation at 5:30 one morning that great blue herons were actually funny looking dogs. He acted on the information immediately, barking maniacally as he scrambled up the cabin steps and into the early dawn cockpit to get to the one perched on a nearby slip post. He was just about to launch himself off the stern like a clay skeet target when I managed to propel myself up into the cockpit and lay the meaty hand of the law on him before he went extra-vehicular. For the next several weeks, mornings aboard Snipp took on a new and nerve-shattering dimension. Yes, we lost a lot of Good Neighbor points during that period. Finally, Skipper began to lose the chip on his shoulder and I developed a coping technique that is a cross between Mr. Rogers and Mr. T and goes something like this: “Look at the nice dog/bird, Skippy. Isn’t he cute? He just wants to be our friend. So stop barking or I’ll wring your neck!” Oddly enough, it usually works.

But Skippy wouldn’t remain a yard dog forever, as eventually I tired of working on the boat and we had to go sailing. At first, coming and going from the slip, I put Skipper down below. Mainly it was to keep him out of the way, but also, like making sausage, I figured the fewer witnesses the better. As soon as the sails were up I’d take out the drop boards and he would spill out into the cockpit, take a look at the water, water, everywhere, give me a “Jeez, you people are nuts!” look and start climbing up to his favorite Snoopy-on-the-doghouse perch. The Snoopy perch is obviously out of the question, not to mention dangerous, when you are headed upwind, and downwind, while not out of the question, is merely dangerous. So we compromised on a ban on the former and a tether for the latter circumstance. Otherwise, Skipper slowly worked out the best places to settle for various points of sail and weather conditions and, other than an unfortunate propensity to follow me up on deck for every sail change, seemed to settle pretty well into his new occupation of ship’s dog. Each time out, I would add a half-hour or so to the sail until I gauged he was ready for a whole-day excursion.

As it turned out, Skipper’s first extended trip was not by sail but power, aboard a friend’s 17-foot cuddy, on an excursion across the Bay from the lower Potomac River to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Skipper, wearing his bright orange life jacket, happily soaked up the new experience of speed and spray until a nasty chop sent him into the cabin, where he lay, pressed flat against the cushions and exuding a distinct aura of general condemnation of bipeds, until we reached the relative calm of Tangier Sound, where he reemerged and deigned to enjoy himself once again.

Skipper’s first all-day sailing trip was not a big success. In fact, if he were keeping a log (and I sincerely hope he’s not), it probably would read: “Breakfast late again. Large biped with beard (this would be my husband Rick, who happened to be along) put me below again. No wind.Insufferably hot. Then a ravenous pack of biting flies. Wanted to jump into dinghy and row ashore. Oh, if only I had opposable thumbs!” There would have been a lot more, but you get the gist and it’s tiresome writing like a dog—even a smart one like Skippy. Happily, later trips—sometimes with friends and family and sometimes alone—would get better reviews. All in all, it was a big year for Skippy . . . and for me. Skipper’s first season also included lessons on getting in and out of the inflatable, what to do when you unexpectedly fall off the dock, and the singular pleasures of lunch on the hook. For my part, I talked with dozens of people who have cruised with dogs (and from a few who haven’t) and got plenty of advice. I read the blogs and read the books. We’ve both had a lot to learn, and I know we still have a long way to go. We have yet to join the fleet of dog dinghies that puts out from anchored boats each morning and each evening. And we’ve yet to take an extended cruise together.

Here are a few of the things that Skippy and I have learned this year—by ourselves and with the help of others.

Does Skippy fit on a 27-foot boat? Well, yes and no.

“He’s grown!” my husband Rick, the serial alarmist, exclaims each time he hasn’t seen Skipper for a while—say six to eight hours. “No, he hasn’t!” I counter. (Godzilla’s mother probably used to say the same thing.) Okay, so maybe a 60-pound tall skinny dog isn’t the ideal size and shape for a sailboat under 30 feet. On the other hand, you always know where he is—which turns out to be right behind me, particularly when I go forward to change the head sail or complete some other crucial task in a brisk wind and stiff chop. So we installed sturdy netting on the lifelines suitable for quiet water walks and a tether in the cockpit suitable for heavy weather. And we use the heavy-duty bright orange doggy life vest with a jolly strong handle on top, or in good weather the padded three-section harness with jolly strong handle on top. We also worked out a DOB plan, which currently is to hook the vest/harness with a boathook, then use the main halyard to help bring him back aboard, or alternatively using the inflatable, which is closer to the water, to get him back aboard. This year, however, we’re adding a floating doggy ramp so he can climb back up himself. And then we’re going to practice, practice, practice.

All dogs seem to fall overboard sooner or later, I’ve been told, even short ones with a low center of gravity and no spirit of adventure. So far, Skipper has only fallen overboard trying to get from the boat to the dock. It happened early one morning. As Skipper was stepping off the boat and onto the dock, the gap suddenly widened and he went vertically where he meant to go horizontally. Splash! I heard the noise and dashed up on deck to find Skipper looking up at me rather frantically. Since ours is a militantly third-world boatyard, there is no ladder up the dock, but there is a low work barge in a nearby slip. I walked over there, then called him in as perfectly-normal-happens-everyday a tone as I could muster, and soon afterward pulled him aboard. In the future, this will be a fine application for the floating doggy ramp. On the whole, I feel this experience has made Skippy a more cautious and perhaps overly introspective dog.

My husband makes another appearance and asks “Where does Skipper sleep?”

“V-berth, Skippy!” I shout. It’s his favorite training command. And if it is bedtime, anyway, Skippy is usually happy to oblige. He tucks himself between the sailbags and the tub of spare line and is generally not heard from again until 6 a.m., which—in the absence of blue herons—is the hour when everyone should wake up and start drinking coffee, which he knows is a prerequisite to his breakfast and a walk. Anyway, animals onboard like to find secure spots in which to insert themselves, and the V-berth with its nice cushy sailbags works just fine—except that every time we make a headsail change everyone downwind with pet-dander issues has a sudden allergy attack they are at a loss to explain.

Where does Skipper “go”? The short answer is that he doesn’t. So far, our cruises—by sailboat and motorboat—have been made in short enough increments to make onboard elimination a moot point. And I haven’t pushed it. After all, this was his first season on the ship’s roster and I wanted to make sure he was cool with this whole boating business before presenting him with a square yard of AstroTurf and the suggestion that this would be his best bet for the next few days. But this is not going to last forever. Doing the “doo” is a favorite topic among cruisers with pets and the source of nearly endless discussion. One evening, during a boatyard sundowner gathering, I brought up the question myself. Among this small group were sailors with thousands of miles of cruising experience, as well as two dogs, one cat and a parrot. One of the dogs was of the oven-mitt variety, living on a boat the size of a smallish aircraft carrier, so I zeroed in on the other, a Refrigerator Perry-size black Lab and his owners, who together sail on a Westsail 32. Yes, the Lab’s dad replied, he had put their tame galoot into the dink in all kinds of weather to go ashore on business. And, yes, he and the Lab mom admitted, they had tried getting their dog to go on the boat using a plot of artificial turf. It didn’t work. “We tried everything we could think of. Why, we even peed on it ourselves!” Now, readers, this may strike you as an amusing but isolated act, but the dark secret of boating is that at any given time somewhere in the world there is at least one man desperately peeing on a piece of bright green plastic as his dog looks on in horror.

But let’s hurry past this disconcerting, yet strangely fascinating image. There are other methods that may or may not work and among them is the one that I am currently trying with an eye toward the future: Teach the dog to pee on command. There is a whole book about it, which I haven’t read yet, but the gist as I understand it is that over the course of several weeks each time the dog starts to pee, you quietly say some word that will become his pee-on-demand command. I have chosen the word “pee” because it’s easy to remember, which is important to me. (So if you pass a woman quietly saying “pee” every time her dog lifts his leg, that will be me.) The theory is, of course, that eventually the dog will associate the word with the action so that you will be able to get the desired response whenever or wherever you want to. The downside is that you won’t be able to say things like “peanut butter” anymore—at least within earshot of the dog.

Does Skipper like boating? This is the famous quality of life question to which the answer always seems to be yes and no. Skipper, as I have indicated, is only one season into this project and so far the answer is yes and no. Yes, he would be totally put out if he didn’t get to come along, no matter what the destination or the mode of transportation. No, he doesn’t like hitting his head on things in a roughed-up sea. Yes, he likes being able to get up on all the “furniture” and he adores sleeping onboard and being the dock-meister/doofus of the boatyard. He thinks sometimes it gets too hot out on the water, and he absolutely hates bitey flies (like who doesn’t?). Also, he’s not yet comfortable transitioning between boat and dink, and he completely misses the point of sailing to weather.

Finally, do I like sailing with Skipper? Same answer. The drawbacks are pretty self-evident; I think I’ve already mentioned several of them. On the other side, I’ll make just this one point: When I’m single-handing and on a long reach and Skipper jumps up on the cockpit seat and stretches out with his head in my lap and goes soundly and ecstatically to sleep, the drawbacks seem hardly worth mentioning. There is only the goofy and heartwarming companionship that is the payoff of the pet/person relationship. I sigh happily and wish I had a plastic baggie full of bait hotdogs sitting next to me. I’d willingly give him half. In other words, I can’t wait for another season on the water with Skippy.

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net

Oak Harbor Marina: It's Good to Be Down Home

2009-08-10T16:00:00.003-04:00

At Oak Harbor Marina, the atmosphere and the service are served up family style.

by Wendy Mitman Clarke

When we returned to the Chesapeake briefly in late May 2009 to do some work on Osprey, we thought long and hard about where we wanted to endure a month spent on the hard. So many possibilities. But in the end, we sailed to Oak Harbor Marina in Pasadena, Md. For one thing, we knew that owners Ken and Barbara Broman would welcome us with open arms—and not just because my husband Johnny had worked for them in the boatyard business for something like 15 years, and they've known our kids since they were born. The Bromans treat pretty much everybody like family, which is one reason they have such a loyal base of slipholders and customers. Also, we knew their son Chris would be a good man up the mast when the time came to replace our standing rigging. And last but not least, because the marina is tucked into a shady enclave on Rock Creek off the Patapsco River, we knew the kids would have fun and be safe riding their bikes around the pleasant neighborhood.

The Bromans purchased Oak Harbor in 2002 after running a boat repair business for 22 years out of White Rocks Marina, just up the creek. With 95 slips and 10-foot depths, Oak Harbor sits on nearly five tree-enveloped acres. It's primarily a sailboat marina, although Ken, an inveterate gearhead, has been known to soup up the most inauspicious vessels with engines they never deserved, mostly just for the fun of it. He's also a longtime sailboat racer and has brought the same mags-on-a-station-wagon enthusiasm to his 1977 Columbia 30 Krisde. It must be working, since he and his crew of AARP members regularly bring home the silver in the Rock Creek Racing Association's various regattas and Wednesday night series.

The marina itself is an eclectic amalgam of weekend sailors, a few serious deep-water cruisers, and a liveaboard or two. It's not unusual to see the three big propane grills on the deck fired up after a Wednesday night race, or for a group of friends to be hanging out up at the picnic tables on the deck into the wee hours.

The service operation can handle projects from Awlgrip topcoat jobs to rigging and electrical work, and on site is Hugh Snively, who specializes in joinery, and Nelson Anderson's diesel repair shop. With 30 years in the business, if the Bromans don't know someone who can help with any issue or problem, nobody does. Nor are they averse to letting boatowners do their own work, freely doling out advice (and even sometimes a tool or two) where needed.

We stayed at Oak Harbor for a month to complete our various projects, and when it was time to go, we left with new standing rigging, a new nav station, and—best of all—the knowledge that we had reinvigorated old friendships and made new ones.

Visit the Oak Harbor Marina marina spotlight page

For more great articles and photos on boating, sailing, fishing, and cruising, visit http://www.ChesapeakeBoating.net