We woke up in the morning in Portsmouth, VA (across the water from Norfolk) to thunder and lightning storms. We had to wait for them to pass before we could fuel up. We got that chore done and went in to pay the dock master. We asked him if the marina had a courtesy car as we needed a few things from the grocery store. He said no but said that we could use his car!! We have found that boaters and those who service the boating community are just great. He asked us to promise we wouldn’t wreck it, and we assured him we would do our best.
Leaving Portsmouth, we passed a tour boat, several container ships and the Naval Shipyard.
Click here to see where we were in Mobjack Bay.
We pushed off from Portsmouth at 11:00 and made our way up to beautiful Mobjack Bay in Virginia off of the south west shore of the Chesapeake where our friends, Todd and Brenda, were anchored in a creek called Put In Creek (the locals call it Pudding Creek). We rafted up to their boat, Life’s2Short, for 2 nights. Todd and Brenda have been living on their boat for about 5 years and have been cruising anywhere from the inland rivers to the Exumas, where we met them.
Rafting up to another boat is so cool. We both throw fenders out and throw each other lines and, voila, we are tied up. We didn’t need to put out our anchor and we could just walk from boat to boat. Another cool thing is that only one boat, Life’s2Short in this case, had the chore to take in their anchor, full of mud, and wash it off as it came into the boat. Thanks Life’s2Short!! We all like muddy bottoms because the holding is so good but, boy, washing the chain is work.
I realize that it is HOT, HOT, HOT everywhere these days, and it certainly was where we were. The other thing that happens when you anchor is that you typically only use your air conditioners for a couple of hours max each day. We had invited Todd and Brenda over for dinner on Wednesday night but it was just too hot to fire up the grill. So, we enjoyed Brenda’s appetizers and had, of course, some adult beverages until we all crashed.
On Thursday Todd and Brenda took down their dingy and we all jumped into it and went up to the end of Put In Creek hoping to find a dingy dock so that we could walk into the small town of Matthews, VA. We weren’t sure where the dingy dock was so we saw a guy working on his lawn in his backyard and dingied over to ask him directions. Tom told us that this was probably as far as we could go and said just to tie up to his dock. He was renting an amazing house which was probably built in the late 1800’s. He said that we just needed to walk down his driveway to the highway and then about 1/2 mile into town. Here is the house and the driveway. Reminded us of a plantation house! 
Matthew’s is a teeny-tiny town full of really friendly people. He suggested that we eat lunch at the White Dog B&B. Rick and I had the Tarragon Chicken Salad sandwich, in case you care.
The chandelier in the restaurant was of a sailing ship with a green light on one end and white steaming light on the other. There was also a Captain Hook doll in the crow’s nest on the top! We asked the waiter to take our picture outside on the front porch. Lunch was wonderful and afterwards we walked around the town until we started to melt, then walked back to the dingy.
Here are some pictures that we took as we came back to our rafted boats. Don’t they look happy??
We left Mobjack Bay this morning (Friday). Life’s2Short hasn’t been to this part of the country in their boat and wanted to check out a few of the bays and creeks. We knew we wanted to go back to the town of Urbanna which is off of the Rappahannock River. We visited here 4 years ago when we first brought Rickshaw up the Chesapeake. We may see them again on Sunday if they get up this way.
It was a beautiful day as we made our way north to Urbanna. Here is a boat enjoying it all. We will take more pictures of Urbanna tomorrow as we wander about the town.
