The Chesapeake Bay, Virginia
June 9, 2024
Eleven states! Add Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey to our list. We are nearly halfway through our Great Loop adventure.
We are currently on the NJ Intracoastal Waterway, planning our hop into the Atlantic to NYC. Our apologies for the delayed update as work and life events have kept us occupied.
The Chesapeake Bay was a true test of our sailing skills and we definitely learned some things while enjoying some excellent days using wind alone to cross the bay. We had a mix of beautiful, serene summer days mixed with plenty of times when the conditions required our full attention.
We hopped from tiny town to tiny town, walking often, and scouting new ice cream shops and museums. In Deltaville, we sampled local oysters at affordable prices. We attempted to leave the next day on a downwind sail in 25 knots with our largest genoa and were quickly overpowered (duh!). The captain pulled his shoulder in the recovery so we sheepishly limped back in and found a marina at only $1 a foot.
The next day we crossed the bay to Tangier Island, a fascinating and incredibly isolated community rich with history and literally being washed away by the day. The island is so detached from the rest of the US that they have their own dialect developed over the centuries. We were able to overhear some local fishermen chatting and it may as well have been a foreign language. We couldn’t make out a single word between these gentlemen. Tangier is so small we could walk the entire island in 45 minutes. No businesses were open during our visit so our attempts to dine out or see their museum were denied, and it gave the island an eerie, deserted aura. Even the “marina” was devoid of humanity. At $25 a night, it was a steal, with surprisingly nice bathrooms stilted above the channel. We never saw a soul there. Out of cash and with the island’s only ATM out of service, we wrote a check and dropped it in the mailbox.
The next morning we saw a tiny weather window and rode 3’ waves into Crisfield under dark clouds. Arriving on a Monday, this town was nearly as vacant as Tangier and we found little to keep us occupied on shore. The weather turned nasty and we were rained in on our tiny boat for nearly the whole week. Bored to tears, the weather finally improved enough for us to attempt a crossing to Solomons Island. We were crashing into oncoming waves for the first half of the day, but the afternoon improved and we celebrated our arrival at the local tiki bar.
Solomons is a tourist hotspot and its amenities provided a welcome stop after where we had just been. A rental car was about the same price as a Lyft to and from the grocery store and once we realized we were only 1.5 hours from D.C., our minds were set. In the capital, we toured two museums we missed on our last visit and had some Michelin Star Ethiopian cuisine with a friend from Iowa. Back in Solomons, we used the car to complete some extreme restocking of the boat and then enjoyed a membership perk of the Looper Association to stay at a local yacht club for cheap. We were probably the grungiest visitors they’ve ever seen, but we cleaned up the boat and ourselves before donning our best attire (which isn’t saying much) and joined their seasonal kickoff festivities. Tildy was like a celebrity, the people were so kind to us, and we made some new Looper friends in the process.
Next, we made our way to St. Michaels, a lovely historic town with shops that could quickly consume our entire trip budget. Annapolis was a perfect place to stop and explore for the captain’s birthday and showed that the water belongs to everyone. Whether you have $1,000 or $10,000,000 to spend on your vessel, they both get you on the water.
Before long we had left the Chesapeake and traversed the C&D Canal. The marina in Delaware City offers a weather briefing every night for those attempting to cross the Delaware Bay, which has been called an “unholy body of water”. With strong currents, few hiding spots, and a wide opening to the Atlantic, it is imperative to leave under the right circumstances. The many shipwrecks here are a testament to such.
Safely tucked behind New Jersey, we are now navigating the toughest part of the Atlantic ICW, where our mast barely clears a number of bridges at low tide and swift currents rip through the shallows we must cross.
We are behind schedule for an optimal crossing into Canada, so we hope to make up some time after a brief stop in NYC.
