on to the next trip

I'm glad to have the daily log done. I enjoy doing it, but it is a lot of work. The cruise log will continue to be listed over at the right side of the blog, along with the Weekend Walkabout, Crab House 150 and Skeeter Beater 126 logs. That sections is becoming my online scrapbook, on cold winter evenings it is fun to go back and look at a day or two from a nice cruise.

Now I'm starting to think about the fall Chesapeake Bay trip. Right now I suspect it will be a solo trip and it will probably start somewhere on Tangier Sound and go north. But I'm not sure of the path or even the dates yet. It could be just about any week in September, probably middle or maybe late in the month. Got to talk to the boss about that. September is of course hurricane season, but I'll take my chances.

On the list of places I want to visit are Tangier Island, above, and the Honga River, below. I've been to Tangier Island several times, including sailing there on my first cruise on Spartina back in the spring of '07. But I would like to go back and anchor out in Cod Harbor, the sand hook at the southern end of the island (last time I anchored on the sand flat near the town). Bruce and I bypassed the Honga River last fall when we sailed from Smith Island to Punch Island Creek on Day 2 of the Crab House 150. Maybe this time I'll sail up on the Honga River and when I come back down a few days later sail outside of the Hooper Islands on the bay side.

This is one of the fun parts of cruising - the planning and dreaming ("if dreams were lightning thunder was desire, this old house would have burned down a long time ago" -- John Prine)

And then at some point I'll get technical and use a piece of string cut the length of 25 miles on the map to rough out starting and stopping points.

My friend and co-worker Corinne had her parents in town for a visit. At the end of the visit they wanted to download the photos they shot to Corinne's laptop so they could email them to other family members. They mentioned that while on a walk one day they had photographed this "cute little sailboat" (below). What are the odds that my friend's parents would take a photo of Spartina? Weird.

Corinne recognized the boat because I had shown her a photograph of it last winter while we worked in Haiti, she was my travel partner for that trip. There she is on a rhib (rigid hull inflatable boat) at an old Haitian coast guard station on the edge of Port-au-Prince. That all seems like a long time ago. Even the Tag Team 200 is starting to seem like a long time ago.

steve