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Change of Plans, Honey. We're
Aground!
9/5/00
Blaine Parks
It’s
Tuesday, September 05, 2000. We’ve just finished spending the weekend at the Spring Cove
Marina in Rock Hall, MD for the annual Island Packet Rendezvous.
We left the marina late yesterday afternoon and have anchored just
outside of the marina. Our
plans were to head for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor today.
Looks like we’ll stay a little while longer.
We’re hard aground at anchor.
All
weekend long, friends would ask, “Where to next?”.
Our answer was always the same, “Yep”.
We’d then concede that we couldn’t decide between heading up
the Chester River or heading across the bay and into Baltimore’s inner
harbor area. Truth be told,
we hadn’t even looked at charts or done any research on either spot.
By early Tuesday morning we decided to make our way to Baltimore.
Or so we thought.
Strong
northeast winds have an interesting effect in most of the Chesapeake Bay.
When the winds blow hard out of that direction the water levels
drop significantly, making high tides seem more like the normal lows.
That’s our dilemma today. Strong
NE winds (15-20 kts) and we’ve found ourselves leaning slightly to
starboard, gently aground. It’s
not just us. All four boats
anchored with us are also firmly planted on the muddy bottom.
We’ll all spend another night in Rock Hall.
There was
a time in our lives when this type of schedule change would drive us nuts.
We were busy people with busy jobs and short weekends.
Always racing from work to home to shopping to dinners.
This type of unplanned delay would cause great frustration and the
usual string of uncomplimentary words.
Our response today was much more graceful.
We laughed at our predicament, decided to wait out the tides for
however long it takes, and have organized a pot-luck dinner with all our
other “stuck” friends. What
better way to use the newly found time than to spend it with friends?
So, as I
write this little commentary to remind you that cruising is usually more
relaxing when you have no schedule constraints, Janet is in the galley
whipping up some of her wonderful banana bread for our pot luck dinner and
the dogs are lying comfortably at my feet.
I think we’ll take a mid-day nap when Janet gets her bread in the
oven. Maybe we’ll get to
Baltimore tomorrow – or the day after that.
See
you on the water (or aground)! |
