Our Plans

 It has been a while since I have written in this blog. It has been a hot summer on the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia. We have had many days in a row over 90 degrees and some with heat indexes over 100. That is really not news, it has been hot all over the US. When it gets hot we do just like everyone else and turn on the Air Conditioning and hunker down. 

We have been doing a walk almost every morning. Kim is up early and prefers to walk before breakfast. I wait until a bit later and try to walk a bit over 3 miles. We have also been swimming in the pool here at the marina and taking advantage of the very nice workout gym. This place has worked out well for us. 

My walks from the marina are through the local neighborhoods. It is a beautiful time of year with lots of beautiful flowering trees and other flowers. 

One of the places I walk to is a quiet little cemetery that has graves that date back to the late 1800's. 

If you zoom in on the picture you can see what I wanted to capture. A doe and her two spotted fawns.

We thought that we would cruise around the bay while we are here, but that has not happened. It has been too hot and stormy. The bay can be treacherous during the hot summer months and anchoring out can be very unpleasant. We prefer the protection and electricity in the marina. 

We did take one day trip out on the bay and had a good time in winds ranging from 15 to 20 knots. 

It was fun to get out the sails and just sail to the wind. We did not have a plan other than to return to the marina in the evening.

It is hard to see in this shot, but there were about 20 ocean going cargo ships at anchor waiting to go into Baltimore.

We saw this huge cargo ship coming into the bay. It was 1000 feet long and going over 15 knots.

This is the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. It is a tunnel between the two terminals. They built this to ensure that the Navy ships in Norfolk could get to sea if the bridge in Norfolk was blown and blocked the harbor. 

The yellow line is our track. We ended up sailing 40 nm in about 8 hours. We did have to make a couple of tacks to get back to the marina, but that just made the day interesting. We also encountered some strong currents as indicated by the red arrows. We at one point were going over 9 knots SOG and then we turned and were going less than 3 knots with good wind and full sails. 

We had our friends Dave and Diane offer to take us to the Mariners Museum in Newport News. It is a famous museum because they have parts of the "Monitor", which is one of the first ironclads that fought a famous battle during the civil war here in Hampton Roads. 

This is a recreation of the inside of the turret on Monitor. They did an amazing job telling the story of the building and the battle with the CS Virginia.

They even built a full size replica of Monitor

Here I am with the original propeller that was pulled from the sea floor off the Virginia shore.

The museum also has the 2013 US Americas Cup winning boat. They came back from a huge deficit to win the cup in San Francisco Bay.

They also have the Fresnel lens from the old lighthouse at Cape Charles

We have had the opportunity to get out of the marina, but we have spent most of our time relaxing and enjoying our quiet time. That quiet time is about to end. 

We are now getting ready to move SHIFT to the boatyard. We will have her hauled out of the water this coming Friday (8/19). We will spend the weekend doing some work on the boat to get her ready to rest about 6 weeks. We will then get a ride up to Richmond to fly out on the 23rd back to Missouri. We will stay in Missouri for about 5 weeks and then take a driving trip to Colorado and Texas to see our parents and as many family members as possible. We are looking forward to seeing the family and spending some time on land. I expect to spend some time riding motorcycles, playing golf and watching the grandkids activities. We will have the bottom of the boat soda blasted while we are gone to prepare it for a new barrier coat and fresh bottom paint. We will arrive back in Virginia on October 10th and then get to work getting the boat ready to splash. Once we are back in the water, we may spend some time cruising around the bay or we will head south. The ultimate goal this next season will be to finally make it to the Bahamas. We will see how that goes. 

I will end this entry with this shot I took from the dock in the marina. We have had some awesome sunsets while we have been here.