Passage - Old Point Comfort Marina - Hudgins Horn Harbor Marina, Port Haywood, VA
29 Miles

Last day of this cruise. We are heading back to our home marina, Hudgins Horn Harbor Marina.

Beautiful day with very calm conditions are forecasted for today and tomorrow doesn’t look so good. We’d like to stay one more day at Fort Monroe. But, we elect to head back to home port.

We get underway about 9:40AM and I set the throttle for a leisurely 5.6 knots of speed. As we round Fort Monroe we feel ocean swells lifting Liquid Therapy. These swells are very gentle and are different from the normal Chesapeake Bay chop which is non existent today. We will feel the ocean swells until we get in the shelter of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, somewhere near the York River.

Up ahead I see a destroyer headed north and will be turning west crossing our bow to head up the York River to Cheatham Annex Naval Weapons Supply. I remember going there on the destroyer I served on to pick up and unload 5” shells and powder. The crew would pass each 70 lb shell from one person to the next, up and down stairs on the ship over to a weapons barge. That was grueling work and we would get tired. And, every once in a while someone would drop a shell - Close your eyes and hold your breath until the shell stopped bouncing around. I’m here to tell you that the dropped shell didn’t explode. Yep, it didn’t.
We did that every time the ship was deployed from our home port of Norfolk. An unloaded ship at the dock cannot explode destroying other ships tied next to it. Pearl Harbor may have been some of the thinking of having the ship unloaded in port. Of course when we were deployed for 6 months we would have to go load the ship with ammunition. I ponder is the destroyer I am watching going to Yorktown to load to deploy, or, unload and returning to Norfolk.

While Liquid Therapy is on one long course and the autopilot is steering Susan and I straightened up and put away extra lines and things that would no longer needed at our home slip. Tomorrow we will be cleaning Liquid Therapy and packing up stuff to go home.

After docking we visited some friends that had been on their boat cruising in several of the same ports we were visiting. However, our ports and theirs never coincided the entire trip. The four of us rode into Mathews to eat at Richardson’s Restaurant.

We have lots of maintenance and repairs to do. Mostly around leaks from rain and some air-conditioning issues. There are always things to do on a boat.

Today’s picture is The Chamberlin Hotel, now apartments for the over 55 crowd.