The Travels of "Fruition": The Quiet Eastern Shore

Sandy Point Lighthouse, just north of Annapolis. The
Bay is full of these abandoned lighthouses.

We departed Maryland Yacht Club on Tuesday September 2 for a week of quiet anchoring along the Eastern Shore. We’ve found that we can anchor out for about 6-7 nights before we need to get to a marina for a pumpout and fresh water.

One of our sunsets at anchor on the Wye River

We headed over to the Wye River, which we had heard so much about. The sea stories turned out to be true (which doesn’t happen often) that the river was filled with small quiet coves to spend a night or to ride out a storm. Sue found a cove nearly at the end of the river, where we spent three nights watching a gorgeous sunset followed by a huge lightening show as the cold front approached. The next day, with a cool northerly breeze, we opened up the boat to enjoy the weather. Having been in Florida and New Orleans the past few years, we never had the chance to turn off the air conditioning and open up the boat to the breeze.

After a couple days here, watching the fish jump, watching the sea nettles (jellyfish) float by, and observing the watermen setting their crab trot lines, we moved north to the next river, the Chester River. To get there, we had to “run the gauntlet” through Kent Island Narrows. We tried to time our passage for high slack tide, but still found that narrows to be the trickiest, most hazardous path that we’ve ever encountered. With the high current reversing every 6 hours, and the narrow single-lane waterway under the draw bridge (which you have to wait to open), I just cringe to think about passing here on a holiday weekend with hundreds of boaters (half of them drunk and the other half stupid) trying to make some order out of the mayhem.

Once on the Chester River, the afternoon temps went to about 94F, and the temps in my engine room went to 125F. My poor little Caterpillars down there had a hard time breathing! We found our anchorage on the Corsica River, got the hook to set the first try, shut down the engines & jumped into the water to cool off.

We stayed at this anchorage for two nights, so we went swimming the next day with a scrub brush to clean the waterline of the boat. We found a nice ¼” thick rug of algae all along the transom and on the trim tabs. Surprised me that so much algae would grow in this salt water, only 6 weeks since I had the bottom cleaned by a diver.

"Winning Drive" at anchor

We were greeted the second day by one of the “big boys” of motor yachts – a 130’ Westport “Winning Drive” owned by the owner of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team, with a net worth of $2.0+ billion (with a "B"). We did an internet search to find this out, using the yacht name, and also found that he was here because his son was getting married that evening (it’s amazing what information you can find on the internet!) After the wedding, the yacht anchored for the night close to us, showing a couple purple night lights (the Ravens color).

At Rock Hall, this is what we found as we walked back
from eating more crab

So now we’re spending 3 nights at a marina in Rock Hall MD, a quiet waterman community due east of Baltimore. Sue was having withdrawal symptoms & needed to eat some more crab. Rock Hall is the type of place where the church bells sound every 15 minutes. It has no taxi service, so we took a tram to the grocery store. We’ll leave tomorrow to go back to the Baltimore area. If the weather holds for us, we’re planning to stick our noses right into the thick of things this weekend as Baltimore holds a huge celebration of the end of the War of 1812.