Hello, Annapolis! Ego alley and other discoveries

We had a pretty nice sail up the coast, reaching most of the time. The wind was sort of puffy, a few hours with sailable conditions, and others spent motoring. Cape Hatteras was a non-issue for us, which was nice. It’s known to get pretty sloppy around there on a fairly regular basis, so we were happy to pass without having to pay a price for it.

Once we got into the Chesapeake, we had a nice Easterly fill in, allowing us to sail overnight up the bay. It’s about 100 miles from the entrance up to Annapolis. We arrived at about 1000 on a Monday, and found plenty of open moorings out here in the bay right outside of town. We grabbed one and paid for a week.

Culturally, we feel like we’ve entered a different universe compared to the friendliness of the Carolinas. It seems to be in poor taste to acknowledge your neighbor here. I can’t count how many times I’ve been out in the cockpit waving to some passerby in his dinghy only to be completely disregarded, met with a blank stare and a nose in the air. The funny part is that Rocket Science is a pretty striking boat, so these folks tend to drive by staring at the boat but still won’t acknowledge that we are even present. Very strange, but we figure that this is going to be the norm at least as far north as Maine. The NE USA is just different from the rest of the country that way, so we’ll have to get used to it, I guess.  We’ll keep smiling and waving anyway. Every now and again somebody does stop by and say hello. We’ll try to remember not to take the snobbishness of the majority personally.

It’s safe to say that we didn’t try to get into the Annapolis Yacht Club with our Vallarta YC membership cards!

Annapolis is an interesting place, home to lots of sailboats. There is plenty of racing happening here, and the waterfront in general is active all day. There is also the aptly named ‘Ego Alley’, which is a dead-end canal maybe a quarter mile long right downtown. Folks seem to like driving down it in their fancy powerboats, generally ignoring everybody (see above), only to turn around and drive back out, sometimes repeating the trip once or twice. How very odd. Jenny equates it to mall parking lots on sale days. Everybody looking for a spot. I’m not really sure.

With this all said, we’ve actually enjoyed the place quite a lot. After the first week, we decided to stick around for another week. This is partly because the price is right (especially compared to Rhode Island-our next stop), but also because there’s a lot of history here and lots to do. We’ve rented a car a couple of times and done some exploring, including a very enjoyable day with the mutt in DC. Neither Jenny nor I had been there since we were teens, so it was good to go take a little look around the Capital again.

I’m writing this on Saturday of Labor day weekend, and this place is a total madhouse. At least 500 boats of all shapes and sizes have gone by our stern in the last 36 hours, and of course every mooring is full, many by local boats who seem to just be camping out for a night or two less than a mile from their slip.

Tomorrow or Monday, we’ll head out of here. Next stop, Newport. We’ll be there for the boat show if we can find a mooring. Rocket Science is due for some new gear, and boat shows tend to have the best deals. A new autopilot is a definite, and we will also probably pull the trigger on a bow thruster, but we need to work out some installation details before we commit to that. We really need new bottom paint and some other jobs need to be tackled too.

We had been planning to winter in RI, but plans are evolving. Stay tuned.

Next stop, Rhode Island!