Off of the shore

Local Star

The Chesapeake Bay was so kind…Thanks!

Not ugly...

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.

S/V S.N. Nomad in Chesapeake City

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.

Sailing down the Delaware Bay

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,

Cape May walking

of us,

After the rain

of us…

Bursting

…of us, location specific…

The Cape...

…And then we went sailing in the North Atlantic Ocean, finally!

James on the Atlantic

.

Which moved from surreal photos of the crisp glories…

Moon and Venus

The waxing crescent chased by Venus.

To human oddities at the edges of perception…

Sunset behind Atlantic City

To crisp photos of surreal glories…

Monitor by sternlight

And through the salt-shaker of mostly-downwind but not quite down-swell…

Atlantic Ocean sunrise

To just offshore of the Hamptons…

And thence, again in the dark, into the narrow channel leading into Block Island’s Great Salt Pond.

Nomad from the Block Island launch

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…

BIRacesII

And we walked…

The Hog Pen...

And walked…

Top of the Block

And walked…

BIKids

And back on the boat, the kids were still summer-camping and we started rowing…

Dinghy Beach, Block Island

And then walked…

Block Island

To see the things we were so excited by…

South East Point Lighthouse. Block Island, RI.

No, the gorgeous Fresnel lens was a bonus.

We came for the brunch buffet and for the…

Megawatts

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.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

One comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.