Comfort in Solomons

Day 2  |  Little Bay to Solomons, MD  |  50 Miles  |  7.5 Hours

We slept well and awoke to a nice sunrise in Little Bay. We had named the crabpots we had been dancing with the Blues Brothers, and were happy to see that they were still floating and lurking a short distance off each side our swim platform.

We raised the anchor and Barry took us out of the anchorage toward the Chesapeake Bay. Washing down the anchor proved to be a messy proposition and it took about five minutes of scraping with the boat hook and using our pressure wand to spray off the caked-on mud. Thinking I had done a pretty good job of cleaning up the mess, I returned to the pilot house where Barry told me the boat look good, but I was sporting a "mud-stache" from the splatter. (Sorry, no pictures of this.) Time to head downstairs and clean up.

The trip to Solomons, MD is one we've made many times in our 25 years of cruising the Bay. It is a comfortable trip with lots of open water and a pretty direct route. We passed in close proximity to two lighhouses (Smith Point, below left, and Point No Point, below right) and could see two others in the distance. As we neared the Patuxent River, we were entertained by a variety of aircraft coming and going from the Naval Air Station.

We had originally planned to anchor out and I had already removed the safety pin and snubber in preparation for lowering it. The weather forecast and a lack of desired spots, however, led us to pick up a mooring ball. A quick change of plans had me grabbing the boat hook and preparing to pick up a pendant for the first time ever aboard Crossroads. Barry placed us right alongside the ball and I grabbed the pendant on the first shot ... whew. We were secure and quickly prepared to go ashore to pay our bill, get in a little walk, and some ice cream. Mission accomplished, we returned to Crossroads, got the dinghy back on the upper deck, and cleaned up just in time for the thunderstorm to roll through.

All is calm now and pretty soon we'll have to decide what we'll do tomorrow. It is so weird to have no real plan and no real schedule.