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July 7-9, 2014  Days 71-73  North End of the Chesapeake Bay!

North East River Yacht Club
North East River, MD

Chesapeake Bay Bridge

North East River Yacht Club
- our home for two weeks

We departed Annapolis early Monday morning to head to our destination of the North East River Yacht Club in North East, MD.  An hour later we were passing under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a bridge we have driven across, motored under, and once even walked across as part of an annual Bay Bridge Walk! We had a steady wind behind us and we saw relatively little boat traffic!

Sailing Camp!

Carried Away on the end of the transient dock

C & D Canal Museum

We arrived at the Yacht Club at 3:00 and this “steady wind” at 20 mph is now on our starboard side. This was one of our most difficult docking experiences, but thanks to Bill’s skills, and the good help of a yacht club member, we were able to get tied up on their transient face dock.  The Yacht Club runs a weekly summer sailing camp for kids 7-18 and we have enjoyed watching them each day in their small sailboats. The youngest are in boats called “Optimus”.

On Tuesday, we arranged to have Enterprise bring us a rental car which we will keep for the two weeks we are here.  We made a big provisioning trip to Walmart that afternoon! Tuesday evening brought a strong windstorm that seemed to appear out of nowhere.  Weather reports that the wind was gusting to 50 mph.  It was coming directly at our stern and caused the upper window at the stern of the flybridge to become unsnapped and unzipped!  At the end of the storm we found two people standing at our dock looking further up river for their sailboat. It had been on a mooring ball across the river but the storm had other ideas for it. We do not know where they found it or the condition it was in.

Steam engine

On Wednesday we drove into Chesapeake City and took a tour of the small but well done C & D Canal 

 

C& D Canal Museum

Museum. It features the history of the old



Chesapeake and Delaware narrow canal, the locks and the progress to the current wide canal.  It was very interesting and we had the whole place to ourselves.  Next we treated ourselves to a nice lunch at the Chesapeake Inn which faces the C & D Canal. We walked through a few of the small shops in Chesapeake City, and yes stopped for ice cream.  We drove around the town of Elkton before heading back to the boat. An hour after we returned, another storm approached. We were much luckier this time with rain and wind. We are sure some people had it worse that we did. The forecast was wide spread and included 60 mph winds with hail.  We had dinner on board and discussed plans for the remainder of our stay here.

We will continue to update the blog every few days during our two week stay here.



Sunset on Wednesday