The push to get to the forecasted southeast wind on Wednesday was worth it; we had a beautiful down wind sail up the Chesapeake Bay to Deltaville. Chesapeake Bay is quite large and there is lots of commercial and naval ship traffic to navigate around. Thankfully we were able to stick close to the shipping channels and did not have to deal with any crab pots so the going was easy.

In most places we’ve been on this trip the chatter on the radio is usually to communicate details around passing or being passed by another vessel or someone yelling at the turkey in some type of fast power boat to “slow down, you are in a no wake zone! You are responsible for any damage that your wake causes” (or course there are more colorful versions of that too). Today we heard something we had not heard for a while … ’this is war ship #So and So, vessel BLAH you are closer than 1000 feet, move away immediately or we are authorized to use lethal force’. Apparently, the other vessel headed the threat since the warship did not need to issue their threat another time! Or did they open fire?

We took a much-needed day off from travel in Deltaville while the winds went north. It is a lovely harbor and the folks at the Deltaville marina were nice. We caught up with Nuvo, a Montreal-based sailboat that we have been playing leapfrog with since leaving the Chesapeake and finally got to meet the crew. They are not going to head on as fast as us, in his words “you know, it’s still cold on the lake”. We got to take showers, do laundry and get a little bit of shopping done. Best of all we enjoyed some delicious scallops and Rock fish for dinner with a new boating acquaintance. Oh, and we got a nice long bike ride in using loaner bikes from the Marina.

After our day off, we had another good down wind sail up the bay and anchored just south of the Solomons with 4 other boats then moved out at first light on Thursday to use the flood tide heading to Annapolis. Once again, we would be under sail. The last two days of sailing had us in a very deep reach which was made easier thanks to our newest rigging set up which Roger devised. We call it the “bisker pole” (boom+whisker=bisker), it’s shown in the picture with this post. For you non-sailors, a whisker pole is a long metal pole which has one end attached to the front of your mast and the other attached to the sheets of the front sail (the sheets are the ropes that attach to the back bottom corner of the sail triangle). This allows you to keep the sail out to the side of the boat and stops it from flopping around if the winds lighten or the water is very bumpy. We used a whisker coming across from the Bahamas, but currently our pole is being used to secure our spare water and diesel jugs. So, Roger devised the bisker by putting a snatch block on the end of the boom to catch the sheets, moving the boom as far out to the side as possible and securing it there with a preventer. Though not as good as a whisker, the bisker works well enough and we have used it several times this trip.