Civility

Charlotte’s mother lives in Sumter, South Carolina, a small town in the middle of the state. It is not a place I would have envisioned spending much time. In fact, when we started our cruise five years ago I had not anticipated spending this much time in the south.

When in Sumter I enjoy strolling through the ACE Hardware, my favorite place in the town. It is like a museum. For a boy from Chicago there are many exotic objects to gaze at. There are stacks of ammo, display cases packed with guns and knives, rows of enormous gun safes, enough archery and fishing gear to fill several semi trucks, and more to my delight, about a hundred styles of flashlights.

One day at the check out, I was perusing the bric-a-brac and had the thought that anything would sell if it were camouflaged. Lined up before me were camo beef/buffalo jerky, lighters, bumper stickers, eyeglasses, screwdrivers, flashlights, etc., etc.

Visiting the south has forced me to change the way I view the U.S.A. I never understood the Civil War’s sacrifice. To walk the battlefields of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg is to comprehend that they are mass gravesites. I never would have known the sacredness of these places had I not visited them.

To spend days watching the fisherman ply the waters of Chesapeake Bay as they have since the 1600’s and really, for more then ten thousand years before that; to visit Monticello and see Jefferson’s intellect carried out by enslaved people; to cruise on rivers and find the preserved villages of Chestertown and St Mary’s City — the former lively, the latter just a memory; and to understand that the mud I wash off the anchor is the topsoil from 400 years of clear cutting the native forest and farming. I am not sure what to make of these revelations.

For one, I recognize that I have the manners of a chad. I have had to learn to greet people warmly, and respond when asked how my day is going. And I have learned to reciprocate, listen to the response, and remember (or at least try to) the name of the person I have just met. More importantly, and harder to accomplish is to feel this exchange with my heart and not make it reflexive. It needs to be genuine. Often I walk away from encounters chastising myself for failing to live up to the ideal.

It is difficult to change the habits of a lifetime. My home was loving; my parents caring, but I would not characterize my family as touchy-feely. Then there was my profession. Doctoring is a very succinct line of work. There was never enough time. Decisions were made quickly in stressful, scary situations and in a command role. A direct order given in a no-fooling-around timbre helped to get the task accomplished, and save the day and more importantly, the patient.

The transition to the civilian world has not been without snags, but I think the south understands that I come from the north, and cuts me some slack. Of course, this is no reason to be complacent. In France, I learned to greet with the phrase, “Bon jour! Parlez vous Anglais?” And here in the south, in response to, “Well, hello! How are you doing today”, I try to say, “I am doing just fine! And how are you this lovely day?”

Even when grumpy I smile before answering the phone (or send a text message), it makes my voice and me pleasant. Now please understand, I am not trying to be sarcastic: feelings manifest themselves in actions. A smile, a good word uttered, a text message or email expressing thanks works both ways, and this is what my unlikely time in the south has taught me — civility.

Whitecaps on Crab Alley

Chesapeake Bay is replete with thunderstorms. This was evident from the first time Charlotte and I cruised the bay over thirty years ago. We, or I should say I chartered a rotten little sailboat. It did not even have a compass. Lucky for us I had my Silva hiking compass, which I taped to the deck. This was in the days before GPS, so a magnetic compass was essential for navigation.

Amongst other issues, the boat had as many leaks as it had containers. If remembered correctly, it was thirteen. Each day brought a new anchorage or marina, and each late afternoon a new thunderstorm. All day the billowing clouds would coalesce into towering thunderheads, and then expend their energy in a tumultuous twenty minutes. Somehow, we were fortunate to be either in a marina or tucked into a secure anchorage before the outburst, and so, if a little nervous, enjoyed the show.

The bay has been our home for 7 weeks and the thunderstorm count kept climbing. Several nasty ones had been successfully negotiated at anchor, and a few others while Carrie Rose was tied to various docks. Two formidable looking storms never materialized. Mammoth black clouds blotted out the sun and filled the air with rolling thunder. But then, when about to descend into wind, waves, and fury turned away and dissipated.

It is impossible to predict this, so if anchored more chain is let out; if at a dock more lines and fenders are added, laundry taken in, windows closed, etc., etc. The extra chain in the water provides more weight and helps the anchor lay flatter, and thus it is less likely for the wind and the waves to pull it out of the bay’s mud.

Carrie Rose has had a few ailments this year. The first week of our cruise, the batteries we rely on for house functions decided to die. They were new in 2008 and so we came back to the marina to have two new ones installed. We went out again, much further this time to where Maryland changes into Virginia. The heat was relentless and while transiting from one point to another, usually over 40 nautical miles, the generator ran to power the air conditioner. Then I noticed the batteries were being overcharged.

If you are not interested in batteries, please skip the next couple of paragraphs. Carrie Rose has AGM batteries. AGM stands for absorbed glass mat. I am old enough to remember pouring distilled water into the car’s battery; well this is not necessary in AGMs. The trade off is that they need to be recharged slowly at low voltage not to boil off the water absorbed in the fiberglass mats. To cut to the short of it, if the charging voltage is too high then the batteries are toast, literately. What to do?

We were in Solomons, Maryland, a yachty place if I have ever seen one but no one responded to my calls for help. Our home base, Island View Marina, was another 43 NM north. We left early and made it back to our home slip by two in the afternoon. Other than Mike and his stressed out dog camped out on a large damaged powerboat, we are the only ones living on a boat. It is quiet during the week and not much more active on the weekends.

The sunsets across Crab Alley Lane, the small body of water we are floating on, have a nice crimson hue to them. On our second day back Charlotte noticed the sky darkening to the NW. The radar app showed yellow blobs with bright red centers cutting diagonally across Crab Alley. I tried to ignore it then realized the futility of this approach and got off my rear and tightened the dock lines, rolled up the sunscreen, took in the deck chairs and started a storm vigil.

As predicted, the sky turned many shade of gray with the approach of a long sausage shaped cloud. The ragged ripped apart low level clouds contrasted nicely with those above. A few raindrops appeared on the water and the wind died. This is not a good sign. Then the trees across the creek started to gyrate. The gust ruffled the surface of the water and Carrie Rose responded with taut bowlines.

The wind steadied her at first until the waves began to build, then she started to hobbyhorse in the whitecaps. The rapidity with which wave size can increase in response to the wind is sobering, from flat calm to racing whitecaps in minutes. On a large body of water like Lake Michigan, waves can go from nonexistent to six to eight feet in moments but here on this little creek off the Eastern Bay it is not as dramatic.

Once the wind passed the rain began, torrents of water obscured the far side of the creek. The rain came down with such force that the environment, including Carrie Rose, was scrubbed clean. When the storm finally moved on the air was crisp and the sky crystal blue.

We emerged from the pilothouse and marveled at the change. I got the squeegee and the chamois out of the aft dock box, and cleaned the windows and dried the boat. The air conditioner was silenced and the windows were opened. We relished the moment for we knew it would not last.

Seriously Rustic

Bathrooms tell a lot about a marina. If the marina is billed as a resort, it usually has clean ones. Municipal marinas are a mixed bag. Some are meticulously maintained due to the dictatorial nature of the harbormaster, and others languish with less adroit leadership. Marinas located on rivers and canals tend to be funkier in my estimation, the exception being Canada.

Now Carrie Rose is tied off on a floating dock on the eastern shore of Back Creek in Solomons, Maryland. It has been bloody hot and we are luxuriating in the new air conditioning. I admit sitting in AC is getting a bit old. It would be nice to go outdoors but it is too hot.

With that said, when we finished securing Carrie Rose to the dock both Charlotte and I separately walked down the pier to see what this marina had to offer. It is looking tired, and that seems to be due to the new condominium development being planned for this site, though at this point the project appears stalled.

When she got back I asked, “Well?” and she compared the restroom and showers to the decidedly backwoods facilities at Burton Island State Park on Lake Champlain without the mosquitos. The showers there had Vermont’s conservationist tendency of needing to be fed quarters to keep dispensing water. This is guaranteed to leave you searching for quarters with soap in your eyes.

When I got back she did not ask, I told, “These bathrooms are seriously rustic.” Of course, we did get what we paid for: a dollar a foot.

Noise

Several years ago Carrie Rose was anchored in an area remote even for the North Channel in Canada’s portion of Lake Huron. The only noise heard was when a large loon suddenly surfaced outside the pilothouse door. It felt like the sub in Red October surfaced next to our little ship, and then it was gone and the silence returned.

It is the only place I have “heard” silence. In response to the lack of sound the brain — at least my brain — began to create sound. For a while, I thought I was suffering from tinnitus. An odd reaction, it bordered on a hallucination.

Now in Maryland waters there have been a couple of quiet anchorages. Hunting Creek and Dividing Cove qualify as such but Maryland is an inherently nosier place than the North Channel. It is more alive. There are schools of rustling minnows skimming the surface, the endless call and refrain between osprey parents and their insatiable children, marauding eagles and crows fended off by whatever smaller birds they are hassling, and wasps trying to find a crevasse to build a muddy nest.

They all contribute to the sound scape. In many places that seem remote, once the anchor is down and Carrie Rose’s rattle has silenced, road noise appears. Tires are the main contributor with Harley Davidson’s unfettered exhaust being the worse offenders. In one quiet anchorage on the Corsica River I settled down to enjoy the silence when a crop duster buzzed by and commenced to spray poison on a nearby field for the afternoon. Watching its acrobatics almost compensated for its commotion.

Carrie Rose is south on the Chesapeake forty miles east of the Potomac River. She sits in an enormous state run marina. It is hard to imagine where the boats were going to come from to fill these slips. This is the land of the low lying sand and marsh islands of Smith and Tangiers. The folk on the Chesapeake, like folk all over the world, over fished, trotlined, netted, dredged, and farmed the life out of the bay. There is talk of a comeback but by then, the kids will have gone to school and be working for financial management companies.

Now that I have said this, remember I am speaking from a Midwesterner’s point of view. In my part of the world the 1850’s is old, here old is the 17th century. People are rooted to tradition in a way that I find hard to imagine. So, if there is a crab to be caught someone will catch it. And if the oysters make a comeback, a dredge will find them. My sense is that the locals know the bottom of the bay better then its surface.

As usual, I have wandered from the original topic, noise. We are in slip G25 at Somer’s Cove Marina in the town of Crisfield, Maryland. Across two wooden piles from us is a trawler slightly larger than Carrie Rose. It has an air conditioner similar to ours that pulls the cold out of the bay’s water and distributes it into the boats interior. To do this it sucks in water from the bottom and spills it back into the bay. The constant stream of water is on our starboard side. It is similar to running a garden hose in your bedroom. Though a little more restrained in the use of air conditioning, we are no different in this if the heat index starts to climb. This noise, often generated by unoccupied boats, has become ubiquitous.

The North Channel had several things going for it that the Chesapeake does not. It is remote; no airplanes traverse its skies. It is generally cool, especial the nights. There is no power available, and except in the direst of circumstances cruisers do not run generators day and night, an ethos followed by the boats that manage to get there.

There are no villains in this tale. We do what we need to do to keep comfortable and thus to keep cruising. This is the whole point after all, to keep plying the water until that silent spot is found, and then to recognize it for the blessing it is.

Tangiers

Tangiers is a low lying island of crab fisherman and their families 14 miles from Crisfield, MD. Considering that Crisfield is already the end of the road imagine Tangiers. It is cute with multiple small fenced in homes piled on top of each other and distributed in what seems to be about a city block. If it were New York City, there would be a million people here but since it is Tangiers there are 450.

There are a couple of churches competing for souls. An impressive number of war veteran memorials, the islanders have certainly done their share defending the U.S.A. The crabbers have shanty like huts build on stilts where they moor their boats and molt the crabs.

The islanders graves are distributed on various front lawns in a raised style similar to New Orleans. Their language (as we were informed by a well done video at the museum) is not British per se as much as from Cornwall. It is definitely different. It is not southern.

The island also has quite a bit of Christian signage. Many crosses dot the landscape. I think a strong faith is needed to spend generations here in as unprotected an anchorage as I have seen. God bless them . . .

Changes

Cruising on one’s own lends itself to a certain amount of flexibility. If we want to stay another day, we do. If we want to leave early, we do that to. And if a destination seems too tasking then we turn around, and thus Washington D.C. was decided to be a bit much especially with temperature hovering around one hundred for weeks at a time.

The Potomac River is wide and long, and then narrow and long. Carrie Rose is at that junction in Colonial Beach, VA. There seem to be fewer and fewer places to hide out on the rest of the trip. The next leg was close to 40NM and then close to that into D.C.

Charlotte and I did the routes, and then both looked up at each other and said, “Forget about it”. So, we are heading back to the bay and the eastern shore. It was a nice idea but probably one for the fall with cooler temperatures and a deficit of thunderstorms.

Middle Danger Zone

I don’t know if I can call it dumb luck or just dumb. The latter is probably closer to the truth. I will explain. On our way to Colonial Beach, VA, Charlotte noted that Carrie Rose was the only boat in the middle of the Potomac River. The Potomac in its mouth is a huge 12 miles wide and about 5 miles wide when she mentioned it.

We had seen boats transiting up and down but all were hugging the shoreline. I usually stay offshore when in large bodies of water if there is a clear and direct route. And thus, we found ourselves smack dab in the middle. Charlotte is often prescient in these matters and so, I was beginning to have doubts.

Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries have an abundance of military, Coast Guard and secret research establishments. Many have sectioned off parts of the bay for their use. Of course, I do not know what these areas are used for except for the ones that have “target practice” or “bombing run” listed on the chart.

There are also fishing, crabbing, and dredging limits portrayed with a variety of dashed lines, buoys and shaded areas. Other places to be wary of are “submerged piles” and “fish trap area”. These tend to be close to the shore but not always.

The above can make for a confusing mix of details on a chart. Many have the notation of “See Note A, B, or C” printed on the chart. My eye begins to search for the reference and once found read it. Please excuse me if I am jaded concerning these notes. They often refer to the Coast Pilot or to the Notice to Mariners, neither of which is close at hand. But here I admit to ignorance verging on recklessness.

Note A was the standard reference to the above sources but Note B was titled UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE, and to make matters worse another note labeled MIDDLE DANGER ZONE explained that the U.S. Navy fired weapons into this area. It spelled out the use of range boats to warn off boaters when live fire was to take place; thus solved the mystery of the empty space that we were travelling in.

The fact that I write this from the Carrie Rose’s saloon is proof that we “lucked out” that Thursday afternoon for the zone was inactive. The next day the marina’s staff confirmed that it is an active testing site with a graphic handout, and later on Friday a loud bang was heard that for once was not heralding an approaching thunderstorm.

Did I mention there is also an upper and lower zone? I have considered these and altered my route to hug the shoreline. I may have had the benefit of dumb luck but I am not about to rest my laurels on it.

Crabbers

Last night there was a thunderstorm — yes, I know I have been saying that a lot lately. In fact there were two, one at twilight, and then another at 11:30PM. It seems to be customary to have another later just when REM sleep begins. The second was worse than the first. I tried to ignore it but could not.

It is beneficial to have several landmarks during a storm to gauge if the boat is slipping its anchor. To the south was a bank of trees with a field of winter wheat behind and thus no lights. North across Island Creek were several stately homes that had lights on. They were a couple of blocks away but still offered some reference, that is when the rain was not torrential and the other side of the creek was visible.

The other reference is a GPS, a Garmin 12. It is small, waterproof, battery powered, and looks as good as the first day I bought it in the 1980’s. One of the first things I do after dropping the anchor is come back into the pilothouse and mark Carrie Rose’s location. I write the Latitude/Longitude in the logbook along with the waypoint’s number. So, when I am rudely awoken in the middle of the night by wind, rain, lightening, and thunder, I switch the Garmin 12 on to see if Carrie Rose is in the same location. Knock-on-teak…we usually are.

The storm spent an hour expending its energy. By then it was later than even my night-owl tendencies can tolerate. We walked the three steps down into the forward (and only) stateroom and crashed. Next I knew a subdued light was streaming in the overhead hatch. I snuck passed Charlotte and went up the three steps to the pilothouse to discover that sunrise was 15 minutes away. I made an executive decision to watch the golden orb and then noticed several crabbers working the creek.

Crabbers are something: sunbaked, hard working, solitary with a one-track mind and a persistent patience. George, our marina’s owner, described them as gamblers, always hoping for the next big score. As I watched them, I had the notion that they were mining the bay and its estuaries.

Carrie Rose’s personal crabber that morning had two lines stretched out like an “L”: one behind to the south, and the other longer one to starboard and east. He trawled down the short end and then up the long. And then he made a wide arch around us and began again.

I stopped watching and went to bed. It was about 6:30 AM. At eight, I awoke and freshened up. Charlotte made pancakes. The dishes were washed and dried. An inspection of the sparklingly clean deck (from the rain and hail) was done. I made the morning log entry and settled down to entering a route for the next days cruise into the computer, and he was still circumnavigating Carrie Rose.

He finally pulled in his lines and left as we were contemplating a late lunch. That is a lot of driving in circles while bent over at the waist, net in hand concentrating at a continually moving target. Maybe it is similar to staring at a slot machine and repeatedly pulling the handle or hitting a button or however it is done these days.

Thunderstorms, as disconcerting as they are, have the unintentional consequence of realigning the clock and thus the small universe that a boat is. It may make the storms worth it or it may not. That probably depends on if the anchor holds!