Saturday, October 14, 2006
I got up about 6 am to make coffee and turn the generator on so we could heat the boat up a bit. I am certainly taking advantage of the luxury of heat and air conditioning! I never would have believed it. However, I am glad that I stowed a hot water bottle. We don't let the generator run all night, so it gets pretty cold pretty quick once the heat is off.

The wind was light and there were no seas as we set out from Cape Henlopen; NOAA forecasts warned of a blustery afternoon and we wanted to get as far as possible before we had to take shelter, and with such good conditions we made the Ocean City, MD inlet by 10:30. We discussed continuing outside down to Chincoteague Inlet, but decided instead to continue down to Chincoteague on the inside. Not because we were concerned about the weather, but because we had never been there before and this was the perfect opportunity to sightsee. The water gets quite thin in places, down to less than 4 feet, so it's not a place for most sailboats to venture. Just outside of Ocean City there were some extremely large and lovely homes on the water, and later we got to see the famous Chincoteague ponies ??" wild ponies that live on the barrier islands. It's quite lovely, though the effort to stay in the sometimes very narrow channel demanded a lot of concentration. My mantra through the shallowest patch was, "we're on a rising tide, so there's little to worry about." Even I got tired of hearing myself chant it whenever we saw less than a foot beneath our hulls.

Even considering how often we had to slow down for this 45-mile inside trip, we were settled at anchor by 3 in the afternoon. Peter's a bit disappointed that we couldn't go further, but it was pretty questionable whether we could have made the next inlet before sunset, and there's really no reason to push it when we're not familiar with the area.

We anchored out of the channel just alongside the marshes, with not another anchored boat to be seen. I'm not sure that we're the typical cruising couple around here. Ken Winter expressed surprise when I told him we had anchored in the Hudson River in Jersey City. I thought it was surprise that we hadn't been able to make Sandy Hook, but after thinking about it for a while, I think he was surprised that we anchored rather than going into a marina. We just don't think of a marina as a first option. Oh, well, another area where we just aren't supporting the economy sufficiently, I guess.

Sunday morning we got a very early start because we had over 80 miles to go and conflicting weather reports as to what to expect. Chincoteague is noted on the charts as a Harbor of Refuge, though I cannot imagine entering the harbor in easterly winds and high seas. The entrance is marked with nuns and cans which get moved around as the shoals shift, there are no nav. aids noted on the chart, just the notation that the channel shifts frequently. There are lots of shoals and one makes quite a few 180-degree turns to get out into the ocean. Although it wasn't difficult it did require concentration. The morning was absolutely dead calm with almost glassy seas and a couple dolphins at the harbor entrance. A beautiful trip out.

We made Norfolk, VA by a little after 3:30. We bought fuel at Tidewater Marina at the lowest price we've seen so far, $2.09 per gallon. It seems to be going down as we head south. I don't know if it's location or if it's going down everywhere. October 10 we paid $2.53 per gallon in Mantoloking; $2.29 in Wildwood, and now $2.09 in Norfolk. Diesel is less refined than gasoline, so for gasoline to be cheaper than diesel as it has been the past few months strikes me as so unusual that I'm suspicious. Is this an attempt by the oil companies to take the heat off the current Republican administration in an effort to prevent the voters from voting out their majority control of both houses of Congress?

I am still more confortable on a sailboat that can't get above 7 or 8 knots. This humming along at 14 knots, and the engine noise that accompanies it, is exhausting. Peter would have liked to push harder and gone farther today, but I wanted to stop and let my soul catch up with my body.

Tomorrow, into the "real" ICW, and continue the push south.