Mary and I got up early Saturday and headed to Baltimore to meet Kevin, Jessie and the rest of the sailing party for the weekend. We got to the sailing club around 10AM went shopping for provisions and hit the water. The boat was beautiful. We were on the Miss Ann a Beneteau 343 35' Sail boat. She is a wonderful boat.
The trip plan was to head south to Rock Hall for the evening and head to Waterman's Crab House for dinner. Watremans has the "amazing" crab dip which was Jessie's favorite place to go. I will admit the food was very good. I haven't had seafood that good in a while. I ordered some steamed clams for an appetizer and the Baked Crab Imperial for dinner. Both were amazing and very fresh. The steamers were so good even Mary had one or two of them.
We spent the night at a marina in Rock Hall. The people around us were very friendly. Many of them were older, probably retired. I was sort of prepared for the cold shoulder based on the fact that we were so young. However, he reaction seemed to be quite the opposite. Everyone around us was very friendly and seemed to be excited that "younger" people interested in sailing. Everyone was quick to introduce them selves and chat for a while.
The next morning we got up and cooed breakfast. Eggs and bacon mostly, but we had picked up some other stuff as well. The plan was to head to the western bay to anchor for the night and try our hand at crabbing. The wind wasn't as favorable so we didn't get much speed but we had 7 hours to make a 3 hour trip so we were not in a super rush. Around 4 PM the wind died and we decided to drop sails and motor the rest of the way to our destination.
We got to the Magathe river around 5ish and had an interesting time getting our anchor down. Once we were anchored we decided it would be a good time to try crabbing. We got our turkey necks (chicken necks weren't available) out tied them to some string and chucked them overboard. We had been taking bets on how long it would take us to catch a crab. The first time window of 30 minutes came and passed fairly quickly. We were quickly approaching the hour mark when a storm started to blow in. We left our turkey necks in the water and went below for the storm.
The wind picked up quickly and, while we were watching out the back, we noticed that our anchor had broken free and we were drifting toward a sail boat anchored near by. The men rushed into action Kevin started the engine and got us away from the boat we were approaching. Brian and I grabbed our danforth and sunk a second anchor. We were again solidly anchored in the cove. We went back below slightly moistened by the rain to wait out the storm.
Once the storm had ended we decided to cook dinner and check on our crabbing bounty. Needless to say we had caught nothing. The general consensus was that it was way to early in the season and we were a bit up the river so the water may have been a bit too fresh. The rest of the evening went with out incident. We stayed below deck because it was sprinkling out. Played cards and drank beer. A few of us still hoping to catch something left our necks in the water overnight to see if we would catch anything.
We had breakfast, cast away our turkey necks pulled up our anchors and headed home. Unfortunately the wind was not cooperating with us on Monday. We saw a few other sail boats out in the bay but sails up and they were going no where. We decided to just motor back to the marina.
So our first sailing adventure was great! Mary and I really enjoyed ourselves. The weather was great, even with a brief thunderstorm. It really was a great weekend and we hopefully will be able to make a few more sailing trips in the future. We are also considering making Kevin's international New Years trip next year. Lets hope they pick somewhere exciting.
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