We spent almost 10 days in the Annapolis area doing a variety of tasks and activities.
We arrived on Thursday the 27th and anchored in the South Anchorage, in sight of the naval academy and just off town. It's a great spot, but there are lots of boat wakes on the weekend. Our first couple of days there we toured the town, re-discovered Starbucks coffee, and organized to have the main saloon windows resealed. We explored having them replaced, but no-one in the area has a big enough oven to make the large curved perspex panels. So on the advice of the local plastics guy, we reamed out the edge of the old caulking and he re-caulked it for us the next Monday in a a nearby marina in Edgewater.
After one night at a marina (and hot showers) we motored over to Crab Creek where the OCC (Ocean Cruising Club) was having its annual Annapolis get together. As always happens at these OCC gatherings we met a bunch of interesting cruisers, though for the first time we were not the youngest cruisers there - even counting Alec and Roan. We met a couple of boats with kids who are also heading south so we hope to meet up with them some more along the way.
From Crab Creek, we went back to Annapolis for the boat show, but this time we anchored in Weems Creek which is much quieter. A great place to anchor, the only challenge being the bridge we had to go under that publishes a 75' clearance, which is awkward given we have a 76' mast. We waited for a low tide, and made it under without the VHF antenna even touching!
The boat show was expensive. We finally bit the bullet on updating our Satellite Phone infrastructure so that when we leave the US with its plentiful wifi we'll still be able to keep in touch. Roan had prepared a list of boats for us to tour so we had fun looking at all the different boats, including a $2.6million dollar gunboat and a really interesting Neel 45 trimaran.
The last day of the show it turned cold and wet - reminding us that it really is time for us to move south. More on that in the next posts.
Mark.