Trendy

I have noticed a trend. In much the same way that boat chores always take twice as long to finish as I think they will, it always takes twice as long to get somewhere as I think it will. The trip from Monday’s Solomons Island anchorage to last night’s St. Marys River anchorage in the Potomac River = 9 hours! Now, that was 9 hours of awesome sailing, with a portion of the time under reefed main sail, in winds up to 20 knots. We were tired but I can’t think of too many things we would rather have been doing. 🙂

Today was the forth day in a row of sailing with a Small Craft Advisory in effect. For the non-mariners that means winds in excess of 20 knots (I think). Sailing like that can be exhilarating but it does take some work. Shortly after exiting the St. Mary’s River this morning, we decided that we had had enough of taking waves in the face and thus it was time to reinstall our dodger. Doing this in 20 knots of wind and big waves was a tad tricky. We decided to try our hand at Heaving To to see if it would make it any easier. To heave to one simply needs to tack the boat without releasing the sheet on the headsail. There’s only one problem… we had our self-tacking jib rigged. To make this work I needed to go forward and secure it so that it wouldn’t tack. Believe me, I definitely had my harness clipped on to the jacklines while doing this. I enjoy living way too much to risk falling overboard in those conditions.

The excitement behind us, we are now anchored in the lee of a small spit of land in St. Clement’s Bay (with free Wi-Fi). At this rate I don’t think we’ll make it to Washington until Friday.