Waiting Out Storms!

We stayed in St. Mary's at anchor until Thursday last week. The hurricane that came up the center of the country created quite a havoc with the weather. We didn't mind it gave us a chance to visit some more of historic St. Mary's. We went to the plantation and the two young ladies pictured on this post were our hosts. They gave us a tour and tutorial of what life would have been like living on a plantation back during the early settlement of Maryland. 

The weather was very warm and we enjoyed swimming in the water. Little did we know someone would flip a switch and change all that.

We lifted anchor early Thursday morning and traveled the length of St. Mary's river and entered the bay. We promptly put up all the sail we had. We did notice that a rain cell was on our weather chart but the weatherman said nothing about sever weather. Sometimes radar shows cells and nothing comes of it. The weatherman sometimes gets things dead wrong, well this was one of those times. We could see a band of dark coming at us and decided before it reaches us we better get the sails in. Thankfully we did it hit us with a vengeance. The wind speed kept increasing until we stopped looking. It was well over 30 knots at that point. The waves also grew. The wind and waves were totally from the opposite predicted direction and speed and height was also very wrong. It fastly became a ride from hell. We had to hang on to be able to stand upright. Anything and everything that could fall to the floor down below did fall to the floor. We did notice a few other cruisers also caught out in the storm. You can see form the picture of the lone pelican in the picture he was out in the storm also.

We finally arrived in Solomon's Island in the afternoon. It seemed like and eternity out on the water. When we got in we decided to take a mooring ball at Zahniser's Yachting Center. It felt good to stop rocking around and be on flat water. The next couple of days proved to have very unsettled weather. Each day that we thought we would venture out another storm would come though and leave wind and big waves in it's wake. I had had enough on Thursday I wasn't about to let Larry drag me out until it settled down.

We have been in Solomon's Island before and enjoyed the Maritime museum. We felt after we took care of some errands with the use of the shuttle car and bikes at the marina we would visit the museum again. Some great changes and additions had taken place since our last visit. We also got a chance to visit the oyster canning factory, it is also a museum now. I forgot to mention the wonderful swimming pool at the marina. Even though the weather wasn't what we wanted to go out on the bay the sun was shinning and the pool felt great.

This morning we finally let go of the mooring ball and headed out into the bay. We were under sail for a few hours till the wind died down. We had a very long ride to get to Deltaville, Va and couldn't afford to go too slow. We prefer to get into port in the daylight hours, so we turned the engine back on. The peace and quiet was shattered for the rest of our journey. The sun was shinning and the air was chilly. It was the first in a long while that we had to don jackets and fleece. It felt like someone had definitely flipped a switch and we went from Summer to Winter, and it happened almost overnight. 

We arrived in Deltaville around 4pm. We needed fuel so we went directly to Norview to fill up the tank and one jerry can. From there we went next door to Dozier's Regatta Point Yachting Center to dock the boat for the night. When we arrived we were greeted by our good friend Margie. She is the office manager here at the marina. We were reminiscing about our days together when Larry was dock master and we lived here for a couple of Summers. It's great catching up with her, we look forward to more time tomorrow. The new couple that are working the marina now hosted a cocktail party tonight on the porch. All the transients that where here for the night came up. It was fun meeting new cruisers and especially seeing some from our past cruising. One couple especially Greta and Richard we definitely will spend more time with them over the next day or two.