Chesapeake Bay

Havre de Grace is the gateway to the Chesapeake Bay, and sits just past the west end of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. It is a popular stopover for people heading in either direction to refuel and recharge, and we did both before slipping the mooring and heading for South. Our plan was to make it to the Annapolis Boat Show, but there was also the small matter of our 5 year anniversary. We decided to shoot for Baltimore where there was a marina for us to leave the boat for a long weekend, but our first stop was at one of the thousands of creeks which comprise the west and eastern shores of the bay. It was a bit warmer, and we donned swimwear for the first time since Maine to have a beach day and cookout with a boat we had met back in NYC (and their dogs).

Five years seems to have flown by, and we struggled to think of what to do for our anniversary in light of COVID. Everything is made a bit more complicated when it comes to travel, even when you're vaccinated. Flights were also thrown into disarray and many direct routes were cancelled and replaced with ones that connected through faraway hubs. About the only place we could escape to easily was Las Vegas. It wouldn't be our first choice, but we had never been there together and we're a fan of playing table games. So, we made the jump to Baltimore and tied up at a marina and flew out to the city of sin. It's always a good idea to set aside a day to get out of the casinos and check out the Hoover Dam, which is one of the coolest pieces of classic art deco architecture and an awesome work of engineering. I also suggest making the trip in a lime green AMG GTR if you're into that sort of thing.

On return from Vegas we shipped out from Baltimore and continued south to Annapolis for the boat show. We anchored in Weems Creek to meet another young couple we'd been talking to on Instagram for a while, and spent about a week walking around town and checking out the flashy new boats at the show. We're not in the market for one but it's fun to see what modern designers are doing with their interiors, and it confirms our belief that Shiloh's was far ahead of its time. We thundered out of Annapolis and had an overnight stop in St Michaels, MD which had been suggested to us by several folks. It's another charming little Chesapeake town, but the wind was right for us to make a longer sail and we took that chance to tear down to the Potomac River, running at 9+ knots much of the way, to an even more secluded creek near the town of Callao, VA.

My parents were on their way down to Florida and made a stop to visit, it was good to see them after a few months on the lam and we enjoyed some surprisingly great Mexican food at one of the only restaurants in the tiny town. We planned to stop in to Deltaville, VA for our next maintenance break, where we'd once again pay some attention to the masts to address our noisy rig. Deltaville is known mostly for marinas as a stopover point for southbound boats, and there really is not much else to do. In town people wore T-shirts with the motto "Deltaville: More boats than people", we had no reason to doubt them. We spent a week or so getting some boat jobs done and the marathon continued. The weather was holding out for us with warm enough temperatures to be comfortable in shorts! We had decided on staying inshore along the ICW rather than sail around Cape Hatteras. By now it was evident that we wouldn't have all the safety equipment we needed to make the jump directly to the Caribbean, and we lacked the confidence in the rig that we needed to do some 10 days offshore. We would make for Beaufort NC and depart from there, or so we thought...

Cold weather was closing in fast, so it was time to make the trip to Norfolk where we'd enter "The Ditch" for some 200 miles. Stay tuned...

-Shiloh Crew