Travel Tips

After we left Eastern Bay, I fixed lunch, but a bounce of the boat knocked over Bob's tea and I had to fix it again. Saw a cabin cruiser towing TWO small sailboats. Wonder how they stop. A dragonfly flew through the cockpit, but we couldn't find any flies for him to eat.

We passed R84 in the channel at 3:15. The wind has dropped to 18-19 knots with 2 to 5 foot waves, but there are low lying clouds and we can't see the western shore because of the haze. I suggest a couple of times that we should go through Knapps Narrows, as I am sure we are in for a storm, but Bob doesn't want to try it. He also doesn't want to hear the thunder that I am hearing, although I am not seeing any lightening yet. He later admits that Knapps Narrows would have been a good idea.

We finally spotted Sharp's Island light at about 4:30. By this time, I am seeing lightening on the western shore, and we got a chance to see what a rain storm looked like on the radar. We are not going to make it into the Choptank before the storm.

There is a lot of lightening and thunder, and the wind and waves have both picked up. I see gusts of up to 38 knots twice on the wind gauge. It is very dark and hard to see anything. I have turned the computer and the charting system and the GPS hooked to it off and disconnected them, but the other GPS and the radar are still on. We have all the bimini curtains down and are pretty dry in the cockpit.

Bob motors around sort of in a circle by Sharps Island for about a half an hour while the worst of the storm passes. A bolt of lightening comes pretty close to us (the thunder is almost simultaneous), but everything keeps working. We finally make it into the Choptank and anchor just outside Cook Cove (we are afraid to go in any closer, although we have done so in the past) about 7 pm. It's taken us over 9 hours to go 34 miles.

We are only protected from the south at this location, and hardly at all from the west, north or east.

Next: Oxford revisited