Fall on the Chesapeake

It’s the kind of crystalline clear fall day that is such a treasure when you live ashore. After all, how many of these do you get in one lifetime? When you live on a boat, you’re only too aware of what is coming in a few hours. As soon as the sun sets it’s like somebody pulled the plug. Instantly cold and damp, but for now this’ll do.

Maybe it’s just me but the Power Boat Show seems a bit of a fizzle after the Sail Boat Show. Apparently nobody works on anything until the shows are over so what was so promising earlier has been nothing but unreturned emails and phone calls. Still, we managed to fix the cockpit table, repower the dinghy, rework Escape Velocity’s bicycle restraints, and maybe learned a few things about the chart plotter and autopilot.

The bicycles, as always, are lots of fun and give us great range and carrying capacity for our many trips to chandleries and town. It couldn’t be more convenient. We have the bikes locked up in a beautiful little park with its own dinghy dock and come to think of it, every street in Annapolis that dead ends at a creek or river has a public dinghy dock. This is really a boat friendly town.

Nevertheless all we can think of is heading south. Most of our fellow Mantas are making good headway south and we have that “left behind” feeling again.

So here we wait, still in Back Creek without a cloud in the sky and dreading the unplugging of the sun this evening.

That’s life on the water.