Chris & Irina's Excellent Adventure: Annapolis to the Potomac

Russian Submarine Rising!!

We weighed anchor (about 90lbs without chain) at 0715 and departed our relatively quiet anchorage headed for Smith Creek, an inlet off the north side of the Potomac estuary. The weather was fine with a beautiful sunrise. Headed back into the Chesapeake, we passed a USN destroyer and a small submarine off to our port. The a few more large freighters and a Carnival cruise ship heading north.

By the way for those who have any interest whatsoever, a snubber is a stretchy element attached to the end of the anchor chain to minimize sharp anchor forces impacting the windlass, helping the anchor to remain set better, and allowing the vessels’ occupants a better chance of getting a good night’s sleep by reducing anchor noise (we have 3 different types and last night just used a 35ft ¾ inch nylon line attached with a rolling hitch attached to 100ft of 3/8 chain).

The weather remained fine all day with a light breeze from the north that helped us with about ½ kt of push. We also got a push from the tidal ebb down the Chesapeake, so that despite running at relatively low engine speed (1500rpm) we achieved speeds in excess of 8kt – a satisfactory speed for our type of full displacement trawler.

As you can probably guess by now, the most exciting part of today’s cruise was a 10ft miss on a Chesapeake crab pot!! It was a perfect day on the water – sunny bright and warm with next to no motion. In fact, Irina was seriously considering bikini sunbathing on the upper deck (aka boaters hood ornament!!). But even down here it is clearly near the end of the season – there were very few sailboats or fishermen out on the water on this beautiful Sunday, and so far as we could tell, very few boats headed south.

Just before reaching our destination we passed by the “Forbidden Zone”, a circular area defined by buoys with some sort of transmitter/receiver erected at the center -probably for alien communication???

The Potomac estuary is simply immense – it is much larger than Buzzards Bay. Our anchorage for the night is to the north side just around past Lookout Point in a small wooded cove. We are anchored in 13ft of water but still playing it safe with plenty of chain. When we were last in the Chesapeake several years ago, we experienced the mother of all thunderstorms while cruising in a chartered trawler. Quite a blow!!

I realized that we have not talked about distances. Typically we run at 7.5kt, so the trip from Block to Cape May took 30 hours to cover about 220 nm (250 statute miles). We think we did pretty good to do this speed considering how poor conditions were for that leg. Today we did about 70nm in 9 hours. Not as fast as flying but better than most “blow boats”. We figure we are like a sailboat that goes in straight line (but burns more fuel!).

That’s it for today, folks. Enjoy the pretty pictures!!