At the advice of a couple I met (Don and Maryann on the 45' Gulfstar "Straight from the Heart") Tuesday night while sitting in my dinghy in the dark listening to a ZZ Top concert at Solomons Island (yes, they were there!), I have decided to stay here through Saturday night and depart Sunday, weather permitting. The distance isn't much farther to the airport (vs. Baltimore) to pick up Nikki, and Annapolis is such an interesting place, much more so than Baltimore.

I pulled into Annapolis as scheduled at 1500 and picked up a mooring in Spa Creek, right near the center of where you want to be. Yesterday was a beautiful day, cooler with low humidity, and mostly WNW winds in the 10 - 15 kt range. But it was variable in the afternoon and the winds would shift more northerly at times, and go from calm to a quick gust to 20 kts, and then back to 10 - 15. All of that meant I had to stay on my toes for the day, but it was SAILING and not motoring, and it had to be one of my top 10 sailing days ever in my relatively brief sailing career - fabulous! Don and Maryann were behind me a couple miles during the morning before pulling off to the Choptank River on the east shore and we chatted on the radio some. They are both very experienced sailors and I learned a few things from them during the concert. Maryann has actually spent 25 years sailing the Chesapeake and she said she thought yesterday was as good as it gets out here. How lucky to experience that? They are on their way to Nova Scotia and we will more than likely bump into one another this summer.

One of today's pictures is of one of my life vests that automatically inflate when it gets wet. It went over the side (I wasn't in that one, but did have one on) when I got hit by one of those gusts and Kristinly heeled over hard. It proves they work!

The other pictures were of the Wednesday night sailboat races that took place in Annapolis last night. I saw some of the most impressive displays of seamanship ever. There were Solings (light weight 27' boats designed strictly for racing, just like the ones at ISS on Lake Champlain, Robin!), J-boats (very fast pure racers as well as some cruising boats), and then all kinds of other boats. There is a handicapping system used in these races to account for the various abilities of the different sizes, hull shapes, sail plans, etc. Anyway, I was very impressed by the sheer number of boats (easily over 100, maybe 150) parading slowly out to the harbor to begin the races. But when they returned to the finish line just west of me, they were flying. The first boats in were the fastest of course, and they were beating into the wind and tacking back in forth right through the mooring field, which is very tight! I could not believe the skill and coordination of the teams. They were heeled over so far in some cases that they not only had to avoid their hulls hitting moored boats like me, but also had to watch the top of their masts because they were pushed over so far horizontally. The best stuff went through before I gathered myself and finally grabbed the camera and took a few shots, which I included. I would love to crew on one of those boats sometime. I actually learned a lot just watching, totally amazed. I would have paid lots of money to watch this show, and it was free. Indeed, there were a lot of spectators, both ashore and on boats. How cool that was? A real treat.