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.