We were busy in Baltimore last Thursday through Saturday, so I didn't take the time to post on the blog. Our next destination was Tangier Island, where I thought I'd have plenty of time to write. While I did have lots of time, we had no cell service or Internet connection there. Although we didn't expect this, it was good preparation for when we leave the States. Next year, connectivety will be spotty.
I thoroughly enjoyed wearing t-shirts, capris and flip flops last Thursday and Friday in Baltimore; the temperature was in the mid-70's and the wind was below a breeze. On Thursday, I rented a car to get provisions for the boat. I filled up a platform truck at Costco with paper goods, canned food, cleaning supplies and other stuff. We filled two dock carts to overflowing to transport the purchases from the car to the boat. Later in the day, I visited Target to get smaller items. I was too tired from all this shopping to face the challenge of finding places to stow everything, so I left it all out for the next day.
Instead, Peter and I went to dinner at another great place in Canton, Dangerously Delicious. Mondays through Thursdays there is a date night special: two pieces of savory pie (quiche) plus a salad, two drinks and two slices of pie for only $22. The walls are lined with posters, art work and quite a few signed photographs of rock 'n roll performers by Baltimore photographer Sam Holden, who died young four years ago. Through Internet research and talking to a waitress, we learned that he was prolific and well-known for his rapport with musicians. Some of his photographs became album covers.
On Friday, I tackled the job of unpackaging and stowing the provisions. Items in cardboard boxes, particulary corrugated cardboard, have to be unpacked and the boxes discarded because cockroaches may have laid eggs in the glue. No one wants to be surprised by a hoard of young cucarachas while at sea.
In order to make everything fit and to maintain some kind of system, I pulled out all the items stored in the galley lockers and the refrigerator and started from scratch. Now, there is a shelf for snack items, one for lunch and dinner provisions and another for breakfast and hot drinks in the main pantry locker. The food that won't be used for a while is far in the back in the galley lockers or under the more perishable stuff in the refrigerator.
Part way through my tasks, I suddenly remembered that I had to return the rental car. Changing from my stained work clothes, I rushed to get there in time, and then I took a leisurely stroll on a longer route back to the marina, stopping in a couple of boutiques near the waterfront in historic Fell's Point. The architecture from the 18th and 19th centuries has been well preserved. Dockside workshops and warehouses and bordellos have repurposed as restaurants, retail stores and inns, and the atmosphere is lively and appealing.
Back on the boat, after my excursion, I pulled up all the seat cushions in the saloon and found space for paper towels, toilet paper, napkins and shop towels in the compartments under them. With items still left over, I pulled up the boards under the bottom bunk in the aft cabin where I was able to jam in the rest of the stuff. There actually is an amazing amount of room on a boat.
Occasionally, my work was interrupted by Peter, who was busy repairing the standing rigging on the foredeck. I had to help with unbolting the stainless steel plate that attaches the forestay to the deck. The bolt heads are on the top and the nuts are underneath, accessible from the forepeak, so it is not a one-person job. In addition, all the anchor chain had to be hauled out of the anchor locker in the forepeak to access all the rigging. My easy task was operating the toggle switch for the electric windlass while Peter hauled out the chain, keeping tension on it, and ran it up and down the dock. It's always good to inspect the chain occassionally, so we accomplished that task while learning that we have about 95 meters of chain and also that the attachment of the bitter end, the piece of heavy rope that connects the end of the chain to the fastener inside the bow, needed to be redone since it would have not released properly if, heaven forbid, we ever found ourselves in a situation when we needed to abandon anchor.
Peter had hoped to finish the repair of the part of the stay under the deck in one day, but that didn't happen. Luckily, he had secured the above-deck part of the rigging with lines since the wind picked up that evening.
After I finished the second round of laundry in the late afternoon, just as it started to rain, we walked to Fell's Point, about fifteen minutes away from Anchorage Marina, where we met Steve and Susanne for dinner at an Irish pub. We enjoyed the food and swapping sailing and repair stories.
It rained hard in the night and the wind was strong. By morning, the skies had cleared to a brilliant blue, but the wind persisted. At 9 a.m., Enis picked us up at the marina and drove us to their condo where Ula was busy preparing us a superb breakfast of eggs Benedict served with steamed asparagus and fresh strawberries, followed by homemade crepes. After eating entirely too much food, we bundled up and went for a walk in their neighborhood, Homeland, which is a lovely residential community. Finally, we found the fall foliage! Alive with color, the reds, oranges and yellows of the deciduous trees vied for attention as we passed stately brick and stone homes.
In the afternoon, I finished getting everything properly stowed and cleaned below deck, made a final run for food at Safeway across the street, offloaded the trash and all the discarded boxes and helped Peter reattach the base plate on the deck. Later than we had hoped, at 8 p.m. on Saturday evening, we cast off the dock at Anchorage Marina and motored down the Patapsco River toward the Chesapeake. In the early part of the night, the wind was too light for true sailing, so we motor-sailed south. At 1:30 a.m., Peter went below to sleep and I stood watch for four hours. There was little traffic but I was not totally bored as I usually am at sea, where there is nothing to see in any direction.
During my watch, the wind had picked up to 16 knots, and Peter immediately cut the engine when he took over and put out the jib. It wasn't long before I needed Peter's assistance to put up the lee sheet on the starboard side of our bed to keep me from rolling on to the floor.
Having maneuvered through the shallow shoals to the entrance of Oyster Creek on Tangier Island, Virginia, we tied on to the posts on the little dock of Parks Marina with the help of the owner and sole dockhand, Wilton Parks, who is 88 years old. Friendly and talkative, he welcomed us to the little island inhabited by fewer than a thousand people, most of whom an descendents of early settlers.
Always a small piece of land composed of three parallel sandy ridges surrounded by tidal salt marshes and cut by small streams, Tangier Island has lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850. It is now about one square mile in size and what is left is expected to be underwater within the next 50 years. Already, a much smaller island to the north has become a marsh, and some its original houses were moved to the ridges of Tangier Island, where the highest elevation is four feet above sea level.
We strolled along the few narrow streets of the town, occassionally being passed by a golf cart or a bicycle, the primary means of transportation on the island. There are only a few cars and trucks. Access to the island is by private boat or ferry from Maryland or by private plane. Verizon does not have service on Tangier Island, so we were incommunicado for our stay there. Since it is not tourist season, the four tiny gift shops and the town museum were closed.
The wooden houses are small and quaint. Two churches--Swain Memorial Methodist Church (1835) and the New Testament Congregation (1946)--appear to be the predominant buildings in town, both physically and socially. Many of the houses as well as the two churches and the medical clinic have small signs posted by the street explaining their significance. Since it was Sunday morning, there were few pedestrians or carts on Main Ridge Road as everyone was either in church or staying quietly at home.
We learned from one of the signs that there is a long tradition of quiet Sunday mornings in Tangier, dating back to the early 19th century and the rise of Methodism. In the early 20th century, the law required everyone to be either in church or indoors at home on Sundays. On one Sunday morning in the 1930's, 17-year-old Roland Parks ventured outside to get ice cream for his mother (although the stores were all closed), according to his testimony, and he was shot and wounded by deputy sheriff Bud Connorton. Connorton served a year in prison but returned to become sheriff. Shortly after that, he was fatally shot through a window and his assailant was never identified. Obviously, there's more to this story, but the residents weren't talking then nor are they now.
There are cemeteries by and near the churches where most of the island's deceased are buried, but some homes have graves in their front yards. This tradition is not unique to Tangier, but it is quite noticeable. Why did families bury deceased family members in their yards? It may be because of limited availability of land above sea level or the family wanting to have the graves nearby in order to care for them and protect them from vermin.
A few family names predominate the inscriptions on the headstones and tombs: Crockett, Parks, Pruitt, Eskridge, Shores, Thomas, Marshall and Dise. Crockett was the surname of the first permanent Anglo-American settler in the late 18th century. The descendents of the early settlers who stayed on the isolated island have intermarried and carried on traditions.
One of the reasons Peter wanted to visit this relatively isolated island is that is noted for its distinctive dialect. Some linguists believe that it has its roots in British English from over 200 years ago, perhaps from the area of Cornwall. We actually did not perceive a striking accent among the many people we talked with or listened to. Peter thought that he may have detected a western British accent, but mostly people sounded as if they were from Appalachia or the near South. But, then, we are not linguists.
In any case, the lineage of the inhabitants, if not their speech patterns, goes back to the early settlers. Although the first white people came to farm, the focus of production quickly changed from the soil to the sea. There is a long tradition of watermen. Oystering was the first major industry but was later largely replaced by crabbing, and Tangier Island is now proclaimed the soft-shell clam capital of the world (although there was no soft shell crab available that day in the only restaurant open in town, Lorraine's). North of the island are many free-standing docks not connected to land which watermen use to hold crabs while they moult.
The island is proud of its waterman heritage and also takes note of a significant part of the island's history, its use as a base by the British military during the War of 1812. Under the command of Rear Admiral George Cockburn, soldiers built Fort Albion (long gone) in 1813, and the island hosted up to 1200 British troops. It was the base for the attacks of the Battle of Brandenburg, the burning of Washington and the assault on Baltimore (which inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner"). The islanders seem to take pride not in the British occupation of their island but in the pronouncement of the lay preacher Joshua Thomas, the famed itinerate "parson of the islands," who led services for the troops. He predicted during his sermon to the soldiers before the Battle of Baltimore that they would not succeed.
Having acquired as surprisingly large amount of information in a short period of time in a very small place, we decided to leave the next morning on our journey south, despite a small craft advisory issued by the Coast Guard. (As Matthew will attest, such warnings have not deterred Peter in the past, so it is no surprise that he disregards them in the present.) With a gusty easterly wind blowing at 23 knots and a strong current in the creek, with old Mr. Parks' assistance, we cast off from the dock on Tangier Island around 9 a.m. Out in the bay, we hoisted the main with 3 reefs as the wind increased to 27 knots (no longer a breeze, but near gale) and gusted up to 32. The 1 to 2 foot waves became 6 to 8 feet waves as we sailed south with the reefed main and a partially set jib on a close reach for a few hours. Sustained winds reached 30 knots.
I was coping with the choppy seas and howling wind by half-sleeping in the pilot house. Suddenly, the wind shifted from the east to the northwest and dropped to 5 knots; the abrupt change in conditions and movement immediately awakened me. The seas calmed and we turned on the engine to motorsail for the remaining three hours until we reached Mobjack Bay. We were planning to head up the Severn River to find a protected anchorage as squalls were predicted for Tuesday. We were hailed on the VHF by another vessel, Crazy Horse, which turned out to be another Sundeer similar to ours. After the captains chatted for a while, we went our separate ways in Mobjack Bay. Then, Peter decided to hail them again to find out where they were anchoring and it was decided that we would follow them to the mouth of the East River.
We anchored off their starboard side, tidied up and lowered the dinghy. Our little engine wouldn't start, so we didn't bother to take it off its mount on the stern, and we didn't want to haul the heavy outboard up from the forepeak, so we chose to paddle across. The water was placid and the paddling was easy. We joined Bill and Rosemary on their boat for drinks and hors d'ouevre and conversation. They have owned their boat for years and sailed her around the world in 18 months as part of a rally about a decade ago. Of course, Peter and Bill discussed sails, engines, batteries, refrigeration and other systems. Peter was delighted to see Crazy Horse's battery configuration, and Bill was pleased to learn that we had a spare part that he could use in his refrigeration system. After a pleasant evening, we paddled back to Mantra, retreived the refrigeration motor that was just taking up storage space on our boat and returned to their boat to deliver it.
Maybe because of the intense sailing conditions in the morning, we were both really tired and went to bed quite early after a light dinner. Actually, it was too early for me, so I got back up, made hot cocoa and played a couple solitary games of Anagram before returning to bed with a comforting hot water bottle. (How have I lived nearly 64 years without knowing about this wonder of warmth and relaxation?)
Today, mid-morning, we pulled up anchored and motored up around a bend in the river to anchor in a place with better protection from south winds and the predicted afternoon squalls, which passed over quite quickly. About 8 p.m. this evening, we will set off, leave the Chesapeake and sail near the Virginia and North Carolina coasts for a night and a day and (oh, dread!) another night for our next destination, Cape Lookout National Seashore on the Southern Outer Banks. After resting there, we will continue south. The weather predictions are looking quite favorable for our journey.
I thoroughly enjoyed wearing t-shirts, capris and flip flops last Thursday and Friday in Baltimore; the temperature was in the mid-70's and the wind was below a breeze. On Thursday, I rented a car to get provisions for the boat. I filled up a platform truck at Costco with paper goods, canned food, cleaning supplies and other stuff. We filled two dock carts to overflowing to transport the purchases from the car to the boat. Later in the day, I visited Target to get smaller items. I was too tired from all this shopping to face the challenge of finding places to stow everything, so I left it all out for the next day.
 |
| Some of the provisions from Costco |
On Friday, I tackled the job of unpackaging and stowing the provisions. Items in cardboard boxes, particulary corrugated cardboard, have to be unpacked and the boxes discarded because cockroaches may have laid eggs in the glue. No one wants to be surprised by a hoard of young cucarachas while at sea.
In order to make everything fit and to maintain some kind of system, I pulled out all the items stored in the galley lockers and the refrigerator and started from scratch. Now, there is a shelf for snack items, one for lunch and dinner provisions and another for breakfast and hot drinks in the main pantry locker. The food that won't be used for a while is far in the back in the galley lockers or under the more perishable stuff in the refrigerator.
Part way through my tasks, I suddenly remembered that I had to return the rental car. Changing from my stained work clothes, I rushed to get there in time, and then I took a leisurely stroll on a longer route back to the marina, stopping in a couple of boutiques near the waterfront in historic Fell's Point. The architecture from the 18th and 19th centuries has been well preserved. Dockside workshops and warehouses and bordellos have repurposed as restaurants, retail stores and inns, and the atmosphere is lively and appealing.
 |
| Cornices and dormer windows, Fell's Point |
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| Thames Street by the waterfront in Fell's Point |
Occasionally, my work was interrupted by Peter, who was busy repairing the standing rigging on the foredeck. I had to help with unbolting the stainless steel plate that attaches the forestay to the deck. The bolt heads are on the top and the nuts are underneath, accessible from the forepeak, so it is not a one-person job. In addition, all the anchor chain had to be hauled out of the anchor locker in the forepeak to access all the rigging. My easy task was operating the toggle switch for the electric windlass while Peter hauled out the chain, keeping tension on it, and ran it up and down the dock. It's always good to inspect the chain occassionally, so we accomplished that task while learning that we have about 95 meters of chain and also that the attachment of the bitter end, the piece of heavy rope that connects the end of the chain to the fastener inside the bow, needed to be redone since it would have not released properly if, heaven forbid, we ever found ourselves in a situation when we needed to abandon anchor.
Peter had hoped to finish the repair of the part of the stay under the deck in one day, but that didn't happen. Luckily, he had secured the above-deck part of the rigging with lines since the wind picked up that evening.
After I finished the second round of laundry in the late afternoon, just as it started to rain, we walked to Fell's Point, about fifteen minutes away from Anchorage Marina, where we met Steve and Susanne for dinner at an Irish pub. We enjoyed the food and swapping sailing and repair stories.
It rained hard in the night and the wind was strong. By morning, the skies had cleared to a brilliant blue, but the wind persisted. At 9 a.m., Enis picked us up at the marina and drove us to their condo where Ula was busy preparing us a superb breakfast of eggs Benedict served with steamed asparagus and fresh strawberries, followed by homemade crepes. After eating entirely too much food, we bundled up and went for a walk in their neighborhood, Homeland, which is a lovely residential community. Finally, we found the fall foliage! Alive with color, the reds, oranges and yellows of the deciduous trees vied for attention as we passed stately brick and stone homes.
 |
| Ula, Peter, Sherri and Enis in Homeland |
During my watch, the wind had picked up to 16 knots, and Peter immediately cut the engine when he took over and put out the jib. It wasn't long before I needed Peter's assistance to put up the lee sheet on the starboard side of our bed to keep me from rolling on to the floor.
Having maneuvered through the shallow shoals to the entrance of Oyster Creek on Tangier Island, Virginia, we tied on to the posts on the little dock of Parks Marina with the help of the owner and sole dockhand, Wilton Parks, who is 88 years old. Friendly and talkative, he welcomed us to the little island inhabited by fewer than a thousand people, most of whom an descendents of early settlers.
Always a small piece of land composed of three parallel sandy ridges surrounded by tidal salt marshes and cut by small streams, Tangier Island has lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850. It is now about one square mile in size and what is left is expected to be underwater within the next 50 years. Already, a much smaller island to the north has become a marsh, and some its original houses were moved to the ridges of Tangier Island, where the highest elevation is four feet above sea level.
 |
| Tangier Island marshland |
The wooden houses are small and quaint. Two churches--Swain Memorial Methodist Church (1835) and the New Testament Congregation (1946)--appear to be the predominant buildings in town, both physically and socially. Many of the houses as well as the two churches and the medical clinic have small signs posted by the street explaining their significance. Since it was Sunday morning, there were few pedestrians or carts on Main Ridge Road as everyone was either in church or staying quietly at home.
We learned from one of the signs that there is a long tradition of quiet Sunday mornings in Tangier, dating back to the early 19th century and the rise of Methodism. In the early 20th century, the law required everyone to be either in church or indoors at home on Sundays. On one Sunday morning in the 1930's, 17-year-old Roland Parks ventured outside to get ice cream for his mother (although the stores were all closed), according to his testimony, and he was shot and wounded by deputy sheriff Bud Connorton. Connorton served a year in prison but returned to become sheriff. Shortly after that, he was fatally shot through a window and his assailant was never identified. Obviously, there's more to this story, but the residents weren't talking then nor are they now.
There are cemeteries by and near the churches where most of the island's deceased are buried, but some homes have graves in their front yards. This tradition is not unique to Tangier, but it is quite noticeable. Why did families bury deceased family members in their yards? It may be because of limited availability of land above sea level or the family wanting to have the graves nearby in order to care for them and protect them from vermin.
 |
| Graves in a front yard in Tangier |
One of the reasons Peter wanted to visit this relatively isolated island is that is noted for its distinctive dialect. Some linguists believe that it has its roots in British English from over 200 years ago, perhaps from the area of Cornwall. We actually did not perceive a striking accent among the many people we talked with or listened to. Peter thought that he may have detected a western British accent, but mostly people sounded as if they were from Appalachia or the near South. But, then, we are not linguists.
In any case, the lineage of the inhabitants, if not their speech patterns, goes back to the early settlers. Although the first white people came to farm, the focus of production quickly changed from the soil to the sea. There is a long tradition of watermen. Oystering was the first major industry but was later largely replaced by crabbing, and Tangier Island is now proclaimed the soft-shell clam capital of the world (although there was no soft shell crab available that day in the only restaurant open in town, Lorraine's). North of the island are many free-standing docks not connected to land which watermen use to hold crabs while they moult.
 |
| Crab shacks on Oyster Creek, Tangier Island |
Having acquired as surprisingly large amount of information in a short period of time in a very small place, we decided to leave the next morning on our journey south, despite a small craft advisory issued by the Coast Guard. (As Matthew will attest, such warnings have not deterred Peter in the past, so it is no surprise that he disregards them in the present.) With a gusty easterly wind blowing at 23 knots and a strong current in the creek, with old Mr. Parks' assistance, we cast off from the dock on Tangier Island around 9 a.m. Out in the bay, we hoisted the main with 3 reefs as the wind increased to 27 knots (no longer a breeze, but near gale) and gusted up to 32. The 1 to 2 foot waves became 6 to 8 feet waves as we sailed south with the reefed main and a partially set jib on a close reach for a few hours. Sustained winds reached 30 knots.
I was coping with the choppy seas and howling wind by half-sleeping in the pilot house. Suddenly, the wind shifted from the east to the northwest and dropped to 5 knots; the abrupt change in conditions and movement immediately awakened me. The seas calmed and we turned on the engine to motorsail for the remaining three hours until we reached Mobjack Bay. We were planning to head up the Severn River to find a protected anchorage as squalls were predicted for Tuesday. We were hailed on the VHF by another vessel, Crazy Horse, which turned out to be another Sundeer similar to ours. After the captains chatted for a while, we went our separate ways in Mobjack Bay. Then, Peter decided to hail them again to find out where they were anchoring and it was decided that we would follow them to the mouth of the East River.
We anchored off their starboard side, tidied up and lowered the dinghy. Our little engine wouldn't start, so we didn't bother to take it off its mount on the stern, and we didn't want to haul the heavy outboard up from the forepeak, so we chose to paddle across. The water was placid and the paddling was easy. We joined Bill and Rosemary on their boat for drinks and hors d'ouevre and conversation. They have owned their boat for years and sailed her around the world in 18 months as part of a rally about a decade ago. Of course, Peter and Bill discussed sails, engines, batteries, refrigeration and other systems. Peter was delighted to see Crazy Horse's battery configuration, and Bill was pleased to learn that we had a spare part that he could use in his refrigeration system. After a pleasant evening, we paddled back to Mantra, retreived the refrigeration motor that was just taking up storage space on our boat and returned to their boat to deliver it.
Maybe because of the intense sailing conditions in the morning, we were both really tired and went to bed quite early after a light dinner. Actually, it was too early for me, so I got back up, made hot cocoa and played a couple solitary games of Anagram before returning to bed with a comforting hot water bottle. (How have I lived nearly 64 years without knowing about this wonder of warmth and relaxation?)
Today, mid-morning, we pulled up anchored and motored up around a bend in the river to anchor in a place with better protection from south winds and the predicted afternoon squalls, which passed over quite quickly. About 8 p.m. this evening, we will set off, leave the Chesapeake and sail near the Virginia and North Carolina coasts for a night and a day and (oh, dread!) another night for our next destination, Cape Lookout National Seashore on the Southern Outer Banks. After resting there, we will continue south. The weather predictions are looking quite favorable for our journey.
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