The Chesapeake Bay was so kind…Thanks!
We woke up on the boat at anchor in Chesapeake City, Maryland. We boiled water, we ground coffee by hand, we started our infernalcombustion engine, we hoisted our mainsail and we left our world behind.
Goodbye world…
We sailed to a strange anchorage across from a nuclear power plant where the Delaware River and Bay become hard to differentiate. We slept underway in the 3 knot current of that very same Rio.
We sailed, oh yeah we sailed, 5.9 knots down that rapid river with the wind and the current with us…until…it…wasn’t.
1.9 knots…sounds surprisingly like 2.5 knots when you’re motorsailing against a current that will… not…relent…until it does.
Cape May Canal in the dark is a bit scary, really!
Four days of us,
of us,
of us…
…of us, location specific…
…And then we went sailing in the North Atlantic Ocean, finally!
.
Which moved from surreal photos of the crisp glories…
The waxing crescent chased by Venus.
To human oddities at the edges of perception…
To crisp photos of surreal glories…
And through the salt-shaker of mostly-downwind but not quite down-swell…
To just offshore of the Hamptons…
And thence, again in the dark, into the narrow channel leading into Block Island’s Great Salt Pond.
The weather ebbed and flowed like the tide. Two boats dragged past us and were saved by the harbormaster’s crew. One didn’t, but only because it T-boned the cool ketch with the hard dodger and a home port of Annapolis (which already feels far enough away to be affectionate about).
And the players kept playing…
And we walked…
And walked…
And walked…
And back on the boat, the kids were still summer-camping and we started rowing…
And then walked…
To see the things we were so excited by…
No, the gorgeous Fresnel lens was a bonus.
We came for the brunch buffet and for the…
Yep. Megawatts worth of wind generators, 5 huge installations that run an island that used to run on a huge diesel generator plus…plus…
Much as it seems distant and unlikely most of the time, we do something cool, sometimes.







Dedicated to Laurie Anderson. Listen to “Oh, Superman” as you’re reading.