August 30, 2006 Galesville, MD to Georgetown, MD

We were on our way to Georgetown, MD which is in the very northern part of MD. Our goal was to meet up with our friends Vicki and Norm who had invited us to their home in Wilmington, DE for the Labor Day weekend (which is about 45 minutes north of us and about 45 minutes south of Philly, PA ... if you happen to be travelling by car ... by boat it's pretty much a whole day at 8 knots).

So, we began to pull anchor in Galesville about 8:30-ish, with Lynnie on the upper helm keeping the boat headed toward the anchor, and Rick on the bow washing down the anchor chain as it was pulled onto the boat by the windlass. You really have to wash down the anchor as it comes in, because it is usually caked in bottom yuk ... aka mud ... and that's not really what you want to dump into your chain locker. Anyway, Rick seemed to wash forever, and finally got the anchor out of the water after about 30 minutes. That was the stickiest stuff we have encountered yet. Rick left the anchor dangling in the water as Lynnie made her way out of the West River back toward the Chesapeake Bay proper. It was easier to let the motion of the boat wash off the anchor than to try to blast the caked mud off. We also use a fresh water washdown, so just as Rick finished, the port tank was sucking air. Not too much of a problem as we planned to fill the tanks again in Georgetown.

When we left Galesville it was cold, windy and rainy day. Maybe we should have stayed where we were but what kind of adventure would that be? Anyway, our pictures are a bit dull because of the weather. This is the Thomas Point Light House. There are several of these types of lighthouses on the bay. They're called "screw pile" (...no kidding...) lighthouses, and this one was originally built in 1825. Obviously, we love lighthouses!

As we mentioned earlier, summer left us for a bit! Here we are heading toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Sweats were the dress of the day.


Georgetown and the river it sits on, the Sassafras, has a rich history with many land titles that go back to the original grants from Charles II and Lord Baltimore. It was just beautiful. The Sassafras river is near the top of the state. If we were continuing to head north we would have gone through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal which would have put us into the Delaware Bay. Next time.
This was an old working boat that we followed into the river to Georgetown.

The marina in Georgetown had bikes we could use and we went into the closest town, Galena since there is really no town in Georgetown. We peddled by two cemeteries; one that was started in 1896 and the other in 1726. Turns out that Georgetown was burned down by the British in the war of 1812.. After all that exercise we had to stop at the bakery in Galena before heading back to the boat.












Tomorrow we'll plan to get caught up on the blog with narratives and pictures of our time with Vicki and Norm in Philadelphia, and our visit to Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

August 28, 2006 Solomons Island, MD to Galesville, MD

Hey, don’t leave the blog!!! We’ll try to get caught up. We left Solomons Island on the morning of Wednesday, Aug 30 in the rain. We thought it was going to clear up pretty quick but, alas, no such luck. In fact, not only did we leave temperatures in the upper 90’s, but we got into lots of rain and colder temps - 68 degrees!

Ultimately, we were headed for Georgetown, MD about 6 miles up the Sassafras River in Northeastern Maryland, which is the farthest north we are going on this trip. We had originally planned to go all the way to Rhode Island but we left from NC too late to get that far this time.

Anyway, we ran for 7 hours and stopped in Galesville, MD which is a really small town on a river south of Annapolis, the West River. Again, lots of crab pots to worry about but it was a nice place to anchor. We took the dingy into town which consisted of a small market, an art shop and a wine shop (we were happy!).

We had lunch at the Pirate's Cove restaurant next to their marina ... nice place right on the water. Their specialties revolved around crab ... no surprise, and Lynnie and I both had the "Gabby Crabby", which was a very yum crab melt on english muffin with mozzerella cheese, and home made french fries. Also shared a home made key lime pie slice. Then we waddled over to the West River Market, which was an old timie general store with an elevated railroad running around on the inside. Quaint town, with not a whole lot going on.

We then went back to the marina and took the dingy out to Rickshaw in the harbor with threatening clouds and predictions of severe thunderstorms. We watched as they gathered, and then finally dumped for a few minutes. Then the skies cleared and the late afternoon sun came back out. All-in-all another fine day ...