ARRIVAL
May 30, 2012
We are indeed fortunate first to be living our dream and secondly to be sailing in an area entirely new to us. Most sailors sail in the “home waters” for most of their lives. Some occasionally charter in the islands for new adventures and some get to stretch the cruise into areas they have never visited. That would be us. We sailed our home waters for so long that we knew almost, if not all of the little nooks and special places. Newcomers enjoyed hearing about places which looked interesting but not enough to attempt the approach. Flato Cut comes to mind. Only the locals ventured there. For over 20 years we stayed in the same area. Now that we are actually using charts to find new places, as opposed to sailing to the Hole in the Wall, take a left and head to this or that, we have come to enjoy something many, if not most sailors never see. We look at the charts armed with someone’s suggestion about a place and sail there. We don’t know what we will actually see since charts do not show scenery or the ambiance of a place. Where once we would sail ten miles to an anchorage or out the harbor to what we think is one of the most beautiful anchorages we’ve seen, Lydia Ann Channel, we now look at three or four times that distance for a daily passage to unknown places. What it must have been to those Europeans sailing this bay for the first time. They had little idea that the anchorages and backwaters would offer protection and bountiful foods. So, there is a slight, very slight similarity with us as we look at the charts and guess. We know the water will let us enter or not. We know currents and tides. What we don’t know is just how much we will be rewarded by the visit.
As we rounded the Patuxent River headlands, we started to view the place as slightly different. They are all different but this place offered a warm surprise given the weather of the day. It is nice to arrive on a sunny, mild breeze day as opposed to blowing like stink and raining. It was not just a river but a wide one, like most on the Bay. It had nice trees blended with houses, most of which date back a many decades. It offered up an inviting approach to the harbor and the channel was marked well. Once in the harbor the surprise was that sailboats outnumber motor vessels by a wide margin. This boys and girls is a sailor’s harbor.