Stardate: 07022011.0630
It's 0630 Saturday morning and Mary and I can now say we have begun our Anniversary cruise. Our plan was to depart at 0600 for St. Michaels in hope to make it there in five hours and get a good anchoring spot to watch the July 4th fireworks that were scheduled to take place at 2110 hours. Well, we were a little late taking off, only by 30 minutes. Not bad! We did make it in 5 hours but had to motor sail the whole way. We were able to squeeze out 7 knots with the main up, only 4.5 without it. Weatherbug was calling for light winds all day then thunder storms at night for the next three days. We arrived at St Michaels at 11:30am, picked our spot to give us enough room to put down 100 feet of chain in 15 feet of water and some room to spare just in case we or someone else drags. Mary did a great job with the anchoring and we hooked it on the first try. Ahhhh! Enough room and solidly hooked and we are not looking into someone's portal. At least it was that way for three hours. And just like before someone comes along drops their hook right next to us, so that when the wind changed we were no more than 30 feet from their ass end. Why the hell does anyone have to get so dam close. It's not like the anchorage was crowded. We were anchored outside of the harbor just so we could have space. It never fails! No respect for your neighbors at all. Mary and I decided that we were not going into town until tomorrow so we set around getting some chores done and took a swim. The temperature got over 90 degrees. Since this was our first time out on Midnight Breeze for more than one night I decided to go down below and take a look at how much fuel we used on the trip over and take a battery reading. I know we filled up last week so we should have only used about one eighth of a tank. When I checked, the gauge was showing only half full. Something was definitely wrong. I checked with Mary since she was the one watching the gauge when I was filling up and she agreed that it was full. Houston we have a problem! It was too late to call anyone and since it was a holiday weekend we would have to wait until Tuesday before getting a hold of our representative at Annapolis Yacht Sales. That was ok since we were not going to leave for Solomon's Island until Tuesday anyway. So I put the problem in the back of my head until later. The fireworks display was one of the best I have seen in a long time. They started at 2130 hours and lasted for about 20 minutes. There was a mass exodus afterwards. I would guess there were about two hundred boats that showed up for the festivities and 70 percent made a dash for home when the fire works were finished. No, my next door neighbor was not one of them. It was around 1:00am when the thunder and lightning woke me up. I went top side to watch the show. I didn't realize that I was going to get a second fireworks show! It all seemed to be moving all around us but not hitting us so around 2:00am I hit the sack. All we got was a sprinkle. What a perfect way to end a perfect day!
Until tomorrow, Be Safe!
Dave