Southern Chesapeake

We must be back in the western world. When we tuned the radio, we found our first classical station since leaving the UK and listened to Mendlesson’s violin concerto in E minor performed live. We needed a bit of calming music as our planned anchorage off Portsmouth had atrocious holding and we couldn’t get the anchor to bite in the silty mud. Rather than settling down to supper, we were forced to motor off downstream in search of better holding. We ate on the run and set the anchor off a spoil ground just outside the main channel of the Elizabeth River in the container port as the sun set.

Waiting for the Gilmerton Bridge, Norfolk

Whilst in Norfolk, we had tied up for the afternoon next to “Nauticus”, the museum of the sea. This was chock full of hands on exhibits for the kids, from explanations of the container port industry, through aquaria filled with local fish, a touch tank for bamboo sharks and horseshoe crabs, chances to try piloting a tug and, the highlight, much military memorabilia including the Iowa class USS Wisconsin. The Wiscy was commissioned at the end of WW2 and saw action in Korea as wella s having the ubiquitous merit of being the ship that opened the Gulf War. She was more like a city than a ship and the children ran through all her passageways.

Oon the deck of The Wiscy, USS Wisconsin

At first light we set off into the Chesapeake through the Hampton River. The bay is long, shallow and protected and home to a myriad of fish and other life that depends upon them. We saw bottle-nosed dolphins, hundreds of sea birds and scoters and endless fishing boats and fish traps (or, more accurately, keel and propeller traps). The sailing is very like the east coast of the UK – slow running rivers feeding into a rich, silty sea, complete with dredged shipping channels, shoaling spits and tricky entrances, as well as plenty of creeks too shallow for our 8ft draft. The coast to our south is low lying with impressive white-painted homes fronting the pale sandy beaches.

Another hitch hiker - a Grey-blue Gnatcatcher resting on CdG on the Chesapeake

As the sailing is so open, we are making a long run today to Reedville off the Great Wicomico River. This town was the hub of menhaden fishing in Victorian times – a bony and inedible baitfish used as fertiliser by the native Americans and later as ship lubricant and animal feed before being commercially harvested today for omega 3 fish oil supplements. The approach into Cockrells Creek is sparsely marked but the channel is 13ft deep as it winds past Victorian ruins of industry past whose only present day inhabitants are pairs of ospreys.

We had too close look at one of these brick ruins. I was preparing the anchor when Croix des Gardes lurched violently and stopped instantly from 5kts. James had run into an obstruction close to the bank which then held us fast and began to seep stinking oil into the river. The children rushed on deck, clothed and clutching their most treasured possessions in readiness for the abandon ship but James pushed the bow round using the rib and we got off again before the tide dropped too much.

After that excitement, we settled for a quiet meal of alligator steak in the cockpit whilst we watched those ospreys fish in the twilight.