Frankenstorm

We left Annapolis Monday for a leisurely sail back down the Chesapeake to the York River in Virginia. The plan was to take 4 or 5 days and stop at some of the nooks and crannies of the Chesapeake. We got out of Annapolis late and only made it a few miles south to Galesville. It was good to have a short day as Chris had picked up some crud, aka the flu, with all her public exposure at the boat show and wasn’t feeling great. Next day we headed over to the Eastern Shore to Saint Michaels. This is a cute, old sailing port that is now fairly touristy. We were lucky to be hitting it in late fall. No people and the weather was a way unusual 75* and sunny.
The town was into full Halloween decorum, probably in honor of the coming Frankenstorm. Here’s a couple of pics of Chris cruising town.

“Are  you a good witch, or a bad witch?”

Lots of old and historic houses. This one had a couple of start dates based on which bricks you were looking at. Gives a whole new meaning to home remodeling.

Many of the old homes are setup as B&B’s now. This one had a German saying on its fence, conveniently translated into English just below it. Protect this house from weather and wind and don’t let boring people in.

A Skipjack working tourists on the Bay, after years of working oysters.

The waterman Marissa Paige still working the Bay for Chesapeake crab.

And the waterman Elfie headed out in the early morning to set crab pots.

After listening to the weather and seeing the exodus of boats getting out of town, we decided we needed to get down to the York River and get our storm preparations going. So much for a leisurely sail down the Chesapeake.

As we were heading south under sail Chris and I were talking about it was cool that you see dolphins in the Chesapeake, but you only see them alone or in pairs. Never the big schools that we see out at sea. 3 minutes later a school of 20 or so dolphins came to play with our bow wake and make liars out of us.

We made it to York River Yacht Haven last night and took the slip they saved for us. Georgia is now cris-crossed with almost a dozen dock lines. Here I am on our slip neighbors boat adding some chafe protection to a line we have from our boat to theirs. The name of the game is to keep everyone just off the floating docks.
We don’t expect hurricane force winds here. The bigger problem is that instead of the normally high wind and rain situation where you get maybe 8 hours of a good blow, they are expecting we will see gale force winds for 2 1/2 days. So the key is to make sure our dock lines do not chafe through.
We took off the head sails to reduce windage, wrapped the main with a long line, pulled the bimini that covers the cockpit, and removed the dorade vents. We are pretty ready. If we expected a direct hit, we’d probably head off to some where inland, but as we are on the edge of the likely storm path, we will stay on the boat.

The bigger problem with Hurricane Sandy’s track is that it is about to merge with the large cold front you see going from the upper right to the lower left of this weather chart. That’s Sandy’s circles in the mid lower left. This is going to make ugly and cold conditions. Our kinda luck. The first tropical storm we get caught up in and it is friggin going to be cold!!!!

As long as we have an Internet connection we’ll post blog updates, i.e. Radio Free Seattle broadcasting from the historical York River. Currently the worst of the storm is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

Paul