All good things come to an end

We had an excellent time cruising these past 5 weeks.  The Chesapeake Bay is just filled with nice rivers to cruise, tucked-away places to anchor, quaint towns to visit, crab traps everywhere in the water to dodge, and thousands of blue crab to eat!

Another quiet anchorage in a beautiful cove

We’re back at Colonial Beach VA at the same marina we stayed 2 months ago.  We’ll put the boat in the slip for 2-3 weeks while we become landlubbers again, driving first to Chattanooga, then to New Orleans, then back to Chattanooga, then back to New Orleans, then back again to Chattanooga, and finally back to the boat.  By mid-October, we’ll be ready to start heading south to our winter home.

A few miscellaneous thoughts and observations for the past 2 months.  Since the weather this month has finally turned cool, we can shut down the air conditioning and genset when we anchor for the night.  We’ve refined our electrical load management on the boat to extend our battery life and the use of our inverter, and found that we can go about 6-7 days on our own before we need to head to a marina.  The overall weather this summer on the Bay has been relatively cool, with only 4-5 days over 90 degrees.  Quite a difference from our past couple summers in Florida and in New Orleans.

When we were in Baltimore Harbor, the wakes from all the boats were serious.  Anchoring, as well as traveling, was uncomfortable.  Many Loopers complain about the same problem when transiting New York Harbor.  Something we can look forward to next year.  I was reminded of the song by the group Kiss, “I-I-I want to rock and roll, all night…”

Another hard day at work!

We thoroughly enjoyed learning all the history along the Chesapeake, especially that of the War of 1812.  But I found it interesting that the park ranger at Ft McHenry said that nearly every British tourist visiting the area had never heard of “The War of 1812” and did not know that Britain was fighting those pesky Americans!  Thinking it through, it makes sense that British history students don’t bother with a trivial war on the other side of the world, when Britain was fighting the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 to about 1814 in Europe (remember that short Frenchman named Mr Bonaparte?).  Remember also (as I’m sure you do) that the composer Tchaikovsky wrote the “1812 Overture” to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon on the eastern European front.  So in the light of world events, our “War of 1812” in America and Canada was almost a non-event.

All in all, it was a very memorable summer.  But isn’t that what cruising is all about – “Making Memories”.