Rhodes River

We were awakened at 6am, rudely one might say, by the incessant chanting of the Naval Academy drill sergeant as he ran the plebes through their early morning PT exercises -- a combination of cadenced chanting, loud dance music and morale-building call-response is just plain hard to sleep through.

Our goal for this week is to get to Solomon's Island, Md -- perhaps 60 miles due south of Annapolis. There we planned to pick up Kerry (my daughter) and Jennifer (my niece) for a day sail on Saturday.  The journey to Solomon's would be complicated by two factors -- a cold front bringing rainy weather makes Thursday a preferable "down day" and a 30 mile stretch of the Annapolis side of the Chesapeake with no friendly anchorages for sailboats.

After reluctantly extracting ourselves from bed and having some breakfast, we debated our options for the day -- we could either take a long run over to the Choptank River on the Eastern Shore or we could take a short run down the Annapolis side of the Bay to the West river. The Choptank route would offer more scenery and quiet anchorages, but would require two long day trips to get to Solomon's; the West River route had just one long day to get to Solomon's, a distinct advantage given the predictions for crappy weather later in the week -- it won the debate.

Having settled on a plan, we called for the pump-out boat to clean out our holding tank and then pulled up the anchor and motored to the gas dock to fill our diesel and water tanks --  from initial call to leaving the gas dock, it was probably 1.5 hours before we were finally heading to the West River, a couple of hours south.

It was a sunny and coolish morning, with the wind out of the SE at about 10 knots -- this made the trip very pleasant, almost effortless. As we approached the entrance to the West River, it dawned on us that we would be better positioned to head South the next morning by anchoring in a bight just inside the entrance of the closer Rhodes River. So, we changed course and after carefully weaving our way through a mine field of crab pots that were "in our way", we dropped anchor in the bight at around 1:30pm.

The bight itself was very secluded and roomy -- you could have easily fit 10-15 boats in it, but it was just us and one other boat. We were surrounded by pristine wooded shores within the bight -- across the channel were a few stately homes. Very nice place for the evening.

Our only neighbor in the bight, framed by its undeveloped woodlands

A couple of "cottages" across the channel from our bight

Since it was still early in the day, I took the opportunity to look at our shower sump pump -- it had stopped working in Baltimore. Interestingly enough, the pump that was clearly marked "sump" was actually our bilge pump, a fact I discovered only after I disassembled and re-assembled it in an attempt to diagnose our sump problem. Oh well :-( Not to defeated by a little misdirection, I then disassembled the "real" sump pump, only to discover that 3 of 4 of the pump's diaphragms were clearly bad -- well, at least I found the "real" problem. Not having a rebuild kit on board, completing the repair was deferred until we could get one.

It was still sunny and nice out, so we decided to take a pre-dinner swim in the bight -- the water was the clearest we had seen on thus far, and the swim was so delightful that Susie forsook her usual "life jacket" float and did a swimming circuit around the boat. All in all, a refreshing and relaxing bit of exercise, something really appreciated when you spend a lot of time in the limited space of a boat.

Dinner, reading and blogging rounded out the day -- oh, and I spent some time on deck about 10pm -- for the first time since we left NJ, the sky was clear and the stars very visible -- fantastic -- I even saw a shooting star; afterwards while listening to the water quietly lapping on My Weigh's hull and gazing at the stars above, I marveled at our insignificance in the grand scheme of things.