We were anchored last night near a river entrance so although it was a calm anchorage, around 5am the boat started rolling with the wake from fishing boats heading out. It rained overnight and continued pretty heavily for a while right after we left this morning. We somehow missed the forecast that predicted rain for today or we might have continued to Solomons yesterday.
The winds were forecast to be around 5 knots but as has been the case most days in the Chesapeake, they were higher and we were able to sail. We were doing the usual dodging of crab pots when all of a sudden the prop started making nasty noises – the engine was not on! Bob quickly realized we had snagged a crab pot – the air was not blue, it was purple for a few moments 🙂
Nothing else to do but put out the anchor and Bob had to go diving to remove the pot. Luckily the water temperature was 76F and also luckily Bob was able to quickly remove the pot & rope which were wrapped around the prop, without cutting the rope. He said the water was pretty murky. We hope not to repeat this exercise. We’ve been looking out for the pots which mostly have a float, the odd ones a flag on a float to mark them but they can easily get hidden by waves. We were hyper vigilant after this.
It didn’t rain much the rest of the day but winds and waves kept increasing. We got to Spring Cove Marina at 1:45 and then had the fun task of trying to “dock”. It’s a narrow harbour with pilings and stupid med mooring style docks, they are a bit longer than the med docks at KYC. We almost made it in but the wind caught us and we had to back out to avoid hitting the boat on our port side. We intentionally had no fenders out because of this dumb piling system, can you tell – I’m impressed. We made it in on the second try, not easily but we got in. There was help on the “dock” but because it’s not a real dock we had to get really far in before I could toss them a line. Getting on and off the the boat is like at KYC med moorings – only worse as pulling the boat close enough to climb off is not easy – grumble, grumble.
The marina is a couple of miles from shopping – we needed a grocery store – so they have a courtesy car you can book, which we did. Dinner on board tonight, with real vegetables – yea!