Our bad luck with winds on the Chesapeake returned after our great sail to Deltaville. When we awoke Thursday morning the bay was like a mill pond as we struck off for Solomons Island where we would spend our last night at anchor on this trip. Despite the lack of wind we enjoyed a relaxing 9 hour motor under sunny skies and arrived at our anchorage late in the afternoon. There are numerous areas to anchor at Solomons but we decided to return to Mill Creek and drop the hook in one of our favourite spots. It's a little further off the beaten track but the effort was worth it. We relaxed over a cocktail while watching a pair of ospreys building a new nest on a recently constructed platform. It was amusing to see the male return with a branch and show it to his partner for approval before adding it to the nest.

We wanted to be at Herrington Harbour by early afternoon on Friday in order to get checked in and hopefully confirm our haul out date. We awoke to a promising forecast of a 10-15 knot southerly breeze for our last day, but alas that wasn't the case. You guessed it, not a breath of air as we headed out for the run up to the marina, but once again we were graced with nice sunny skies. As mentioned in our last post we will be storing Dagny here for 2 months before continuing on to Nova Scotia. We have been on board since late September and we wanted to give Dagny a thourogh cleaning inside and outside before we headed home for a couple of months.

The marina we're in is huge and has a great reputation, there are 1000 boats here, they have 5 travel lifts and the contractors based here cover all required services. The only hick is they don't give specific haul out appointments, we are scheduled to come out the week of the 24th, which means anytime between Monday and Thursday. We find this a bit of a pain, however we are taking advantage of the delay to get all our work done before haulout. Cupboards have been emptied and cleaned, interior woodwork cleaned, bilge storage cleaned, engine serviced, exterior stainless polished, lots of laundry done and various other chores as we await our turn in the lift. Once Dagny is on the hard and the hull cleaned we'll be on our way home.

We had a great winter and as always made new friends along the way while rekindling old friendships. We were blessed with good weather in the Bahamas this winter and only had to ride out one bad westerly blow. Although Dagny had performed well in our previous trips we made numerous changes for the better. We added a new and bigger inverter, new Surrette AGM house batteries, a bigger anchor and increased the anchor chain from 125' to 175'. Our new radar works well but I need more practice with it before we hit fog in the maritimes, but it did pick up 4 high speed seadoos in pea soup fog in Florida. We didn't get to use our new staysail very much but I'm sure it will get lots of use in Atlantic Canada this summer.

As we prepare to head home shortly we are satisfied to know Dagny performed well and will be ready for her next test this summer. To all who have followed our blog, I hope you've enjoyed it and we'll be back on the air around July 1st.

Today's picture is of yours truly keeping watch on the last day.