Goodbye, Fernandina

We've moved on to Jacksonville, FL and are headed to St. Augustine, the oldest settled city in the US.  Til then, here are some more pics of our time in Fernandina Beach.

 
We walked to the beach then went in search of a certain bike rental shop. That walk, along what is surely the most desolate proof that the nation's housing bubble is *still* not over, at least in FL, felt like a 40-day desert test. No shade, no bench, no eye candy. If anything, every 500 feet, crappy and mcmansion-y houses were for sale, starting prices a hallucinogenic $700K.

But then we finally got there, signed the rental papers, and zipped off on an electric bike-scooter. The rest of the afternoon was fun in Fort Clinch State Park, where we ran around the fort (thankfully hands-off in its tourist philosophy) and then stalked armadillos and bobcats in the lush forest nearby.

Here's the full slideshow:

Fernandina Beach, FL

Our Hitchhiker Friend

Before we left Charleston, a young stranger approached the boat in the marina. He introduced himself and said that he was looking to crew on a sailboat going south. He had just come in from Virginia on a catamaran, but that boat had crew lined up for the next leg. Neither Evan nor I was inclined to invite a stranger to spend days and nights with us on the boat, helpful though it always is to have extra hands on deck. Apparently, this kind of arrangement is common enough, but we politely declined and set out on our second off-shore overnight trip.

Twenty-nine hours later, we'd motor-sailed 175 nautical miles (or 200 "statute" aka land miles) from Charleston, SC to Fernandina Beach, Amelia Island, FL.

It was perfect weather for motor-sailing: very light wind, calm water with the occasional swell from a distant weather system. Evan and I listened to the soft hiss of the boat's wake spreading out ripples of quick-dying froth across the sea. The sound resembled a snake's hissing, its flickering tasting and smelling exploration of something unidentifiable in the air. We sailed past blooms of mushroom jellyfish that really did look like baby portabellas.

We saw at least four or five dolphins too, a few of which surfaced so close to the boat out of the blue that I yelped. They didn't hang out much after that, even though I apologized for the rude welcome.

Along with terns and pelicans, we noticed a small bird fluttering in crazy swoops. It was clearly not a seafaring bird--it looked like a swallow, or some other bird that should be hanging out in bushes and shrubs, hopping around on the ground for seeds or something. We worried that the poor thing was somehow lost and would just wear itself out if it didn't find someplace to land. It flew close to the boat a few times but didn't land, and we eventually outpaced it.

Lo and behold, not long before sunset, almost an hour after we first spotted it, the small swallow-like bird landed on the stern rail! Then it hopped onto the covered fender, which was easier to keep hold of than the slippery metal rail.

It explored that section of the cockpit before taking off in a mad flutter behind the boat, up into the sky, and then back onto the boat! This happened over and over again, each time its stay on the boat a little longer than the last. Finally, the bird hopped over to Evan and me and onto our feet, our knees, our arms. Even though it weighed no more than a couple of ounces, I could feel its weight where it perched on me. It flew away again.

Next time, it walked around us like we'd known each other since land--"hey, got anything to eat?"--and hung out on the floor of the cockpit, pecking at whatever uncleaned mess dwelled down there and the fresh water we'd put out. Then, as the sun went down, Otto (we named him after the seventh visit or so) hopped into the cabin and, after checking out different areas a couple times, settled down next to a wadded-up fleece blanket on the settee, and, puffing his feathers, went to sleep.

He stayed asleep the whole night, even with our comings and goings and the constant crackle of the radio. At first light, while I was napping, Otto woke up and paid Evan a visit in the cockpit, did a couple of his usual swoops off and on the boat, then didn't come back. We missed him during the day and hoped that the rest he'd had would at least give him some juice for the six mile flight back to land. Later in the afternoon, we were glad to hear a woman on the radio announce that a yellow-breasted bird had come into her cabin. I hope it was Otto!

Besides the excitement of making friends with Otto (who, as internet research reveals, was probably a female Carolina wren), Evan and I fell into a smooth rhythm for the night watch. Once the moon set a little bit before 9pm, we took turns standing watch, one person keeping an eye for other boats in the night, listening to the VHF radio, and monitoring the autopilot for deviations from our plotted course. We found it easy to stay awake during our turns at watch, easy to fall asleep when our turn was over, and easy to wake up on our own when it was time to switch. Thankfully, the night wasn't as cold as I'd feared, and I was warm and toasty in my layers. Also, my Kindle with its built-in cover light came in very handy for keeping me alert: every 5-7 minutes or so, I'd read a few pages, cover the light (to get back my night vision), scan the horizon, check the GPS, and resume reading, ears pricked for radio communication. It was fun.

Now we're on a mooring in Fernandina Beach, FL. The sun has just set, so I'm going to go to bed soon. My head feels like a cracked bronze bell that's been stuffed with wool and packed away in a dusty crate.

Charleston, or Beauty isn't Everything

Charleston is the equivalent of a very beautiful, lazy, spoiled heir who never worked a day in his whole life. The very beautiful and graceful mansions, homes, and churches in their charming alleys and streets attest to the leisure and privilege of colonists-turned-planter millionaires who owed their wealth to the exploitation of slave labor, or "enslaved people" (more on this below).

(After the Civil War, Charleston's wealth came from banking and the stock market. But it was still dirty money. After all, it takes money to grow money, and most of Charleston's money that went into banking was old planter money.)

So, as beautiful as the city is, I can't help but feel some revolt, like when I visited the Vatican several years ago. The Vatican was the richest and most opulent place I had ever seen--it made Versailles look like a barn in comparison--and the Sistine Chapel was indeed breathtaking. But it was also a gross display of the wealth that the Roman Catholic Church could only amass by manipulating tenant-nobles and exploiting uneducated peasants.

To return to the term "enslaved people," I found it somewhat odd that our tour guide at Drayton Hall plantation was using this to describe slaves. She also used the term "enslaved laborers." A little digging around on the internet later, it appears that the terms she used are the current politically correct terms. I had no idea. I understand the intention and motivation behind "enslaved people;" namely, to emphasize that the slaves were, first and foremost, people, who, circumstantially, happened to be enslaved. There is a fair amount of debate, though--"enslaved people" versus "slaves."

For me, the question is, which term better accurately describes the injustice experienced? My first instinct is "slaves." No mention of the word "people" drives home the point that at that time, slaves were not considered people at all. They were chattel, or personal property like a chair or a horse. As a word, "slaves" leaves no room for euphemism or illusion.

That said, there is an argument against using the word "slaves" because it is grounded in the perspective of the slaveowner. That is, just because slave traffickers and owners didn't consider slaves to be people doesn't mean the word we now use to refer to slaves should reflect that too. "Enslaved people" restores humanity--and linguistic neutrality--where "slaves" does not.

I think I don't like "enslaved people" simply because it is incomplete. People who are enslaved are enslaved by somebody. Who? But perhaps this is the point: using "enslaved people" begins a dialogue, one that covers not only white planters and traders in the South, African traffickers in Africa, but also the slaves themselves and their lives before they were slaves. As long as this was a dialogue that was opened by African-Americans, cool. Otherwise, it would be like a convicted grand larcenist who had made off with hundreds of millions pointing his finger at the bank employee he'd paid a couple of million dollars to give him the account numbers and passwords he stole from. Ok, but, in the total scheme of the crime, it doesn't make him that much less culpable, does it?

Like a snowball turns into an avalanche, the day I really started to be bothered by all this, I also had a Hispanic tour guide in the Calhoun Mansion ask me if I could read Chinese. I said, nope. I'm not Chinese. He replied, "So you can't read Chinese? Where are you from?" I was going to say "New York,  Korean by ethnicity," but he cut me off and said, "So you don't read Asian? Fine, I thought you could help by reading Asian but nevermind." !!!!! THE STUPIDITY!!!!!!

On a happier note, the food here has been amazing, the sky has been crisp and blue, and we ran into friends we'd made back in the Dismal Swamp Canal. We'll stay for another day or two, then off to Florida.

Slideshow.

Easy morning, anti-swamping

I woke up this morning to birds chattering and squawking (crows) and tooting (the one pictured above) right outside the open hatch. I opened my eyes and saw the belly of a blackbird fly over. Evan came over from the computer, where he was checking the weather conditions for the day, and told me that there would be strong winds today, 20-25 knots (10-15 is fine, 20 iffy, 25 gale-like). We could go out and have an uncomfortable six hours going through marsh stretches of the ICW, which are completely exposed to the wind without any real treeline barriers, hoping that the wind wouldn't blow us, despite our best efforts at the helm, out of the channel and into some shoals.

That's the worst-case scenario, of course. Actually, that's just the tip of the worst-case scenario iceberg. The rest of the worst-case scenario is swamping: one gets grounded in a shoal at high tide, the water level falls as the tide goes out, leaving you stranded like the bird in my picture, the boat's keel gets wedged deeper into the mud bottom at a strange angle, and by the time the tide turns again, the boat is so stuck that it lacks the buoyancy to float back upright with the rising water, which instead floods the boat and causes extensive damage.

Swamping would have been unlikely today, but we're still going to wait out the windy day. The next two days are forecasted to be cold and rainy, and we'd prefer to arrive in Charleston in good weather, hop off the boat, fresh as daisies, and stroll around town all day. So we'll be here in McClellanville for a few days more. Corn muffins, huevos rancheros, lots of reading and writing, full seasons of Weeds and the Wire...I'm pretty happy.

This is home for the next couple of days.

Entering South Carolina

Turkey vulture

Since my last post, Evan and I have traipsed on south out of North Carolina and into South Carolina, a truly charming place with salt marshes, palms, huge live oaks covered in Spanish moss, and, so far, nothing but balmy breezes. There are ospreys and egrets and blue herons, the latter of which are graceful and beautiful until they open their mouths and let out an incredibly loud "RAAAAAWK!!!"

There is also mini-golf in North Myrtle Beach, which hosts the pro mini-golf Masters. Highway 17 is where it's at, and we couldn't help but get sucked into...the Molten Mountain. We were, after all, getting some lettuce at the supermarket just across the street!

http://www.cancunlagoongolf.com/mmhome.html

Surveying the lay of the land

We played a round, which was moderately fun despite the astro-turf funk and occasional retrieval of a golf ball from dry ice-steaming Kool-Aid blue streams. As we left Molten Mountain, the building-volcano erupted in a pyrotechnic blaze. So much flash for a mediocre mini-golf course! Oh well.

Onwards to the Waccamaw River, where the highlight was a joke from the former "male dancer" cab driver who took us from the Wacca Wache Marina to CVS:

"So there's this drunk. He's married but goes out drinking with his buddies every night. One night, he comes home carrying a chicken under his arm. His wife opens the door, and he says, "This is the pig I've been fucking." She looks at him scornfully and says, "You idiot, that's a chicken" to which he replies, "I was talking to the chicken."

Today, we arrived in McClellanville, SC, a tiny southern shrimping town with a population of 516, as of July 2009. This is how we spent the afternoon:

I climbed a great live oak.

Where'd she go?

In the treetop..

I swung on a tire-swing.

We walked around town: trees and houses, two restaurants, and a couple of shops.

Driftwood sculpture and art gallery

The main drag.

Perfect for Halloween

Spanish moss grows on *everything.*

And Evan found another tire-swing.

Tomorrow, we head to Charleston! We'll spend at least 4 days there, soaking in some southern Creole style.

Last images of NC

Driving

Evan and I were in Wilmington, NC a few days ago. We stayed two nights, hoping to rest up and recharge after the day-in, day-out motoring from Oriental, NC. Alas, we did not get much rest. It turns out that when back on land, and in a city, we relapse into pre-cruising mentality and go about from one thing to the next to the next.

These things in Wilmington being: catching up with a Wilmingtonian friend I had met in NY this past spring; going to the movies; shopping for shorts (impossible to find at this time of year!) and a puffy jacket (I'll be meeting the family for Thanksgiving in a cold place); grocery shopping; doing laundry; boat stuff shopping; restaurant sampling.

Then we got on the boat and spent 7 hours glued to some task or another: spying confusing channel markers (whose brilliant idea was it to paint the marker number nearly the same color as the signboard itself?); keeping an eyeball glued to the depth sounder; steering against very choppy waters in Snow's Cut and Cape Fear River; making lunch without sustaining too many bruises. It wasn't the worst sailing we've seen by a stretch--it was actually fun at times in the way that driving over a really gravelly road at high speed can be fun--but it was not relaxing. 

So, once we arrived here in Southport, we decided to take a few days off. We were tired, plus the weather forecast for boating wasn't great for the next few days anyway. Now I don't want to sound like cruising isn't as amazing as most people think it is--how can you complain about taking off on a sailboat, you ask--but driving a boat through shallows and currents and traffic requires all the same concentration and undivided attention as driving a car, if not more. Do that 7 hours a day for a few days in a row, and one's bound to be a little tired.

Oh, for wide easy waters where we can use our auto-pilot...

In the meantime, I am perfecting my banana bread and asparagus/portobello risotto, and getting some writing done. (It turns out that the forward berth doubles quite nicely as a private place to write too.) I am also stalking the giant blue heron that hangs out in this marina sometimes. And, of course, listening to snapping shrimp (Evan explains).

Oriental, NC

My surprise birthday brownie may belie it, but I turned 33. 

I spent my birthday a few days ago in a friendly town called Oriental, NC. It was a very pleasant town, and we ran into a whole bunch of fellow cruisers we've met along the way. There were plenty of jarring moments, though, as I walked around, for every other billboard or store sign has the word Oriental in it.

See, starting from when I was in high school, the word "oriental" became a big no-no. "Oriental" was an adjective to be used to describe objects from "the Orient" (which, confusingly in British English, included pretty much everything east of Europe) like vases or rugs, not people. I cringed if someone said, "My son married an Oriental." As people started using the term "Asian" to describe people from Asian countries, anyone who used "Oriental" to refer to an Asian person was obviously either really old (too old to get with the PC program), lived nowhere near Asian people, or was racist. 

Thing is, there is nothing Oriental, or Asian, or east of European, about Oriental, NC or any of the establishments there! Weird and a little hilarious! (Why the name Oriental then? Apparently, the town was originally Smith Creek, but was renamed after the USS Oriental shipwreck nearby in 1899. Perhaps the ship was headed East?) I turned off the PC-radar, which was going haywire.

I went to get a haircut at the local salon Studio 55 and fell to chatting with my hairdresser, the septuagenarian customer next to me, her hairdresser, and the nails and facial lady, too, who was, by the way, the only Asian I've seen in NC so far. We talked about hair, bronzing a pair of 15-year old boots, cruising, and teeth.

Septuagenarian Catherine: "I may be old, but I have perfect teeth. My dentist asked me the other day if I'd been drinking tea again."

Her stylist, Mary: "What? Tell me, 'Am I a Southern woman?'!"

My haircut, which you can see in the picture above, cost me just $18 plus tip.

After Oriental, we moved on to Morehead City, just across from Beaufort, then on to a beautiful anchorage in the Marine base Camp Lejeune. Now we are in Masonboro, just outside Wilmington, NC, for a few days before going into South Carolina. Here are some recent pics:

Being American--the South

We crossed the Mason-Dixon line over a week ago, right before entering the Dismal Swamp Canal, and it marked my first time in the South. (I don't count the visits to my sister in Sarasota, FL, since only 33% of Floridians are native-born, according to the state's 2005 census.) Menus are dominated by meat (including alligator, at a gas station grill on the Alligator River), which has me craving gigantic fresh salads. Looks-wise, the pines and cypresses of VA and northern NC have given way here in southern NC to yellow-green marsh grass, oaks, and small palms.

In one of my recent posts, I mentioned that I had had dinner with two war vets, and that it got me thinking about history and race. Not because I thought they were racist--they weren't at all--but because hearing them talk with Robert, the lockmaster in the Dismal Swamp, about their fathers and grandfathers who had served in WWI and WWII made me realize something: I am not as American as they are.

I know this sounds controversial but bear with me.

Growing up in the Los Angeles suburbs that I did until the age of 13, I was usually one of two or three Asian kids in my class. (Yes, in a city that is as diverse as Los Angeles--technically speaking--there were still places in it during the 80s where a Korean kid got nothing but "You know kung fu?" or "Ching chang chong.") It wasn't until I moved to the New York City area in my high school years that I knew what it felt like to blend in. There were so many ethnicities, subcultures, and a real sense of pride in being New Yorkers, i.e. different from the rest of America, that I felt right at home. The myth of America as quick melting pot seemed real in New York, and I could really believe that I was just as American as any other person--white, black, Asian or whatever ethnicity you like.

But all of America is not New York, where the present reigns supreme, and identity is whatever you want (or choose) it to be--and in as little time as you need. As I listened to these guys swapping stories about their fathers and grandfathers who served in this and that division of this and that branch of the U.S. military, I realized that a part of their identities were fashioned for them a long ways back, and that they shared common roots that I could never share. If I were to compare ancestral notes with them, we'd discover that we were either on opposite sides of history, or, as a Cat Power songline goes, "I'm on the same side as you, I'm just a little bit behind."

Just a few decades ago, South Koreans (and, in a more complicated relationship, perhaps, South Vietnamese) were dependent on the U.N./U.S. for military aid and economic aid. To most GIs, South Koreans of that post-Japanese colonialism and Korean War era resembled backwards peasants, emaciated refugees, charity cases. So even though Americans and South Koreans were never enemies, their first acquaintance wasn't exactly as equals. But then, the years go by, and Asian-Americans become "the model minority," entering Ivy League schools and the professional class, and even mainstream pop culture, and that first impression become obsolete, right?

I think the answer in 2010 for most is yes. However, I don't think that was the case with my parents' generation that immigrated in the 1970s. How could it be? If I were an American who had never known anything of Koreans but what I saw in the Korean War, wouldn't it take time to reconcile that primary experience with some new presentment? A Korean-American friend of mine who served in Afghanistan was aided and attacked by Afghans; how could he not have complicated feelings were he to come across an Afghan here in the U.S.? I imagine that his rational mind would differentiate between an Afghan in Afghanistan and an Afghan here, but could there also be an involuntary and immediate association with the only other time he encountered Afghans? If so, would the old association only lose primacy with time and continued dilution with more modern experiences?

But do the modern experiences--Asian-Americans who speak the same slang in the same accent as white Americans, play suburban high school football, work the same job in the next office, marry outside their ethnicities--really erase the first perception? After all, as much as Americans take pride in defining Americanness in terms of the democratic pioneer spirit--if you're entrepreneurial and build something from nothing in the U.S., you've earned the right to call yourself a true American--there remains an aspect to American identity that runs much deeper and holds greater value as a common denominator with Americans than education, common lifestyle, or even money and affluence. It's what my new cruiser friends and Robert the lockmaster shared. It's the reason that most U.S. presidents have trouble winning over Americans if they never served in the military, or no one in their family did. There's something about having spilled blood for the U.S., (voluntarily or not), that takes American-ness deep down to its roots. It's what perhaps drove Japanese-Americans during WWII to enlist--how else and more clearly to prove their American-ness? (Sadly, one generation's sacrifice wasn't enough: Japanese-Americans were still perceived to have their roots elsewhere, in Japan not the U.S., and divided loyalties.)

Maybe it's appropriate that I'm thinking about all this in the South, where the country's history is etched all around me, where the question of what an American is was most deeply tested, and where the common denominator of military service by two ancestral Americans may very well have divided them on opposite sides of a battlefield before time and new fights brought them back together.

(Please see my comment below, too.)

Dolphin on the ICW!

Dolphins ran right next to us today in the ICW, between Camp Lejeune and the Wrightsville bascule bridge!! The waterway is not more than 1000 meters away from the Atlantic in places, and the dolphins come up through the inlets and play in the bow waves of sailboats. We had heard of this for a while, and they finally showed up today!

Truth be told, though, if I hadn't ever seen a dolphin before, been indoctrinated by Flipper and popular culture to regard dolphins as highly intelligent, human-friendly, wonderful creatures, and alert to the fact that we would be spotting dolphins, I might have been a little bit scared. After all, I was until very recently an urban landlubber, one who grew up on JAWS and for whom a dorsal fin poking out of the water and coming at you is normally not a happy squeal-inducing sight. 

But I am now a sailor, and so after the initial, irrational eek! I spent the next two minutes cooing, "Hello dolphin! Hello! Hello!" 

(And thinking that I was so glad to be seeing the dolphins in the wild and not in some giant SeaWorld tank or Cancun "swim with the dolphins" cove. For reasons on that, click here and here.)

Pungo

Evan and I anchored for the first time the other night, just off the Pungo River. After seven hours of traveling, it was a wonder to sit on the water for this sunset.

The Kindness of Strangers

In Elizabeth City, I noticed a few stray black cats hanging out in a tranquil parking lot. I snapped some pictures, since I miss having a furry pet around.

Just as Evan and I started to cross the street to continue on our way, a woman in a teal sweatshirt crossed diagonally from an apartment building and entered the parking lot. Just like that, black shadows emerged out of bushes and I don't know where.

The lady feeds the cats every day and was fine with me taking pictures, "as long as you're not with the newspapers." She had already been told off by cops, so she was quick about it. I asked whether the town had a catch-and-release program (the cats get fixed), and she said "No way, this town won't spend the money for that." Oh well.

Dismal Swamp to Pasquotank River

Dismal Swamp Canal

Artesian water

A few facts about where we were up til this afternoon: Dismal Swamp water is supposedly so clean (because it is so acidic, no bacteria can grow in it) that it was barreled as drinking water for ocean passages. It was even slated to serve as drinking water for astronauts until, alas, reverse osmosis technology came along. The water is red and foamy, thanks to tannins from the cypress and juniper forests. The evening around it smells like honeysuckle. The Dismal Swamp was part of the Underground Railroad: it is only just that the swamp should have sheltered the slaves passing through it, considering that it was the slaves who dug the Dismal Swamp Canal for US Army Corps of Engineers in the first place.

A slideshow will be up as soon as we get 3G or faster Wi-fi than this coffeeshop in Elizabeth City has.

Out of the Rain and Into the Potluck

We left Hampton, VA, for the Dismal Swamp Canal, knowing that there would be rain. We got loads of it, plus a very brief thunderstorm, so we just crossed the bay to Portsmouth and tied up to a dock there until the storm passed. The rain backed off just enough to get going again, and we made all the bridges, which have very strict opening times. Norfolk, VA was one big industrial site, scenic in its own fascinating way.

Once we passed out of Norfolk and entered the Deep Creek River, however, the water narrowed, and we passed through bucolic woodland. The rain stopped just as we entered the river.

A few hours later, we arrived at the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, which was created in the early 1800s. We just barely made it in time to get through the first lock, which is run by a fantastic guy named Robert. His pitt-sharpei mix, U-Turn, stood watch while we got lines in order.

Once we got to the other side, we coasted in to the last slip on the free dock, and the sun broke out. We sat enjoying the first real dry moments of the day.

Finally, we went to our first cruisers potluck, an induction of sorts into the community of long-time cruisers. Dinner and drinks were fun, and the company was great. Still, as I washed up that night, I realized with some vague wonder that I'd just been in a boat with two men who had, serving in different decades, fought for the U.S. against Asian enemies. They had been nothing but warm and funny with me, and I liked them a lot. But there is a part of me that wonders how they would have greeted me decades ago, before I opened my mouth and spoke the same English that their daughters and grand-daughters speak. I don't know many senior war vets, or even American seniors of the WWII or Korean War age, so I am curious.

Time and places are becoming a blur...

I can't believe my last post was on Sunday and in Reedville! Just now, tracing our steps from Reedville took many more moments than it should have. Is my recall memory going to mush, or is the cruising life so mellow that even my brain wrinkles are relaxing? Early this morning, in attempting to figure out whether we should go over to the marina lounge for a complimentary weekend breakfast, Evan and I realized that we had no idea what day of the week it was!

Well, it is Thursday, and poor Deltaville was the town that had completely slipped from memory. And what a strange one for my memory to lose hold of, since that was the marina with a swimming pool!  We went swimming in temperatures of the upper 80s--in October! Of course, the water was so cold that one icy plunge cooled us off for hours. 

Besides the pool, though, I have fond (though apparently fleeting) memories of Deltaville for the fragrant  fir trees, the great dollar store in town, ubiquitous birdsong, my first successful carrot cake, and the discovery of Carl Hiaasen's entertaining and very warm "Nature Girl."

After Deltaville, we moved on to Hampton, VA, which I was excited about because that's where I had had an Amazon Kindle shipped. Now I am a die-hard book lover, and I will never ever forsake paper books, but the Kindle is fantastic for when I can't find a bookstore or am not around long enough to get a library card. So now I have stocked up with a whole bunch of classics that have entered the public domain: a bunch of Russians (Chekhov short stories, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace," Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot"), Proust, Melville's "Moby Dick," and--at Evan's request--P.G. Wodehouse's "My Man Jeeves."

Next up, we leave Hampton to finally enter the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (the ICW), which will take us to the Great Dismal Swamp Canal and beyond.

Fly in the Ointment - Solomons, MD to Reedville, VA

Our cruising guidebook warns of the abundance of flies and no-see-ums in the Chesapeake Bay in autumn. Apparently, they try to take refuge on your warm boat since it's getting colder outside. We finally encountered this phenomenon today.

No more than an hour into our Solomons Island --> Deltaville leg, the cockpit became infested with flies of all kinds: tiny, translucent amber flies that camouflaged themselves on the wooden companionway; thick black flies with oversized, bulbous red eyes that resembled flower pistils; smaller hump-backed cousins--bison of the flies; and long black flies with a white spot near the head and a single thin white stripe on both long twitching antennae.

It got to the point where I would inadvertently smoosh one by sitting in a different position, or putting my water bottle down. Or a larger variety would buzz millimeters from my nose, making me leap up and bump into something. It was completely gross and annoying. I still can't figure out what business these flies have miles away from the shore. Some of the tiny flies looked like they could barely make it from one side of the boat to the other. A few flies died not long after arriving-- too spent, I suppose, to enjoy the free ride. Well, they didn't enjoy it, and neither did I, until their numbers thinned out and we hit some gorgeous water.

Since we were running short on time before nightfall, we decided to stop in Reedville, where the entire town stinks like the fish processing plant upwind. I'm looking forward to the short hop to Deltaville tomorrow.

Solomons Island, MD

We left Annapolis yesterday and unfurled the sails (yay!) down the Chesapeake to Solomon's Island, a small island full of beautiful trees, picnic tables, dogs, touring motorcycles (you know, the ones with radios and cupholders), and, of course, boats. We arrived just before sunset and biked the length of the island, stopping off for some bbq at an outdoor stall blasting Arrested Development Gob's magic theme song (Europe's "The Final Countdown," thanks Shazam) on a radio station called Hair FM. Then we got  some really delicious key lime pie at a far less screechy, laid-back place called Kim's. A pass on a bingo evening, and we tucked in early for a peaceful evening on a mooring, since we'd gotten up at 6:30am and were going to have to again. Not the most exciting day of our trip, but definitely one of the most pleasant so far.