Speedwell of Hong Kong

A Short stop in St Michaels

Author: Shirlz

10 September 2015

The new sail was fully rigged and now it was just a case of waiting for a favourable wind to help me across to the other side of the Bay and give it a try. Days and days of hot, humid calm. Turgid water which did not invite swimming.  I decided to fill in the time by doing some spring cleaning and went aft to get the bucket to fill with water and start cleaning the deck.

Oh dear! A snake was coiled in a nook under the bucket and seemed as put out as I was, by its sudden discovery.  I hastily covered it up again and had a think about what could be done. It was a strange one to me and I had no idea if it was poisonous or not, so I fetched my camera and carefully raised the bucket again and was able to get a good picture of it. Back down below, snake still safely under bucket, I fired up the smartphone and googled ‘Chesapeake snakes’. Quite quickly I was able to find an identical image of my snake. It appeared to be an Eastern Garter Snake and was supposedly harmless. Feeling a bit braver, but still very cautious, I managed to trap it under a big plastic bowl and then tried to slide a nylon chopping board under snake and bowl to enable me to lift it and put it overboard. I had to believe that it was a good swimmer, as how else could it have come aboard? Whoops, the snake managed to wriggle free and slithered along the side deck revealing itself to be about 4ft long. Thankfully it opted to head out through one of the scuppers and I was able to see it swimming away. What a relief!

Now I was keener than ever to move along. Next morning I decided to give up my hopeful wait for the wind and just go. I had plenty of diesel and the battery probably needed charging. And so, it was a full day of motoring in flat calm. I took a short cut to Eastern Bay through Kent Narrows and as it was late afternoon by then, decided to anchor for the night in a secluded little spot called Tilghman Creek. It had an interesting, winding entrance but once inside opened out with plenty of room to anchor. I had just got settled and was gazing about, when a big blue crab approached and we had a look at each other.

Next morning, at high tide, I was able to sail most of the way to St Michaels, about 6 miles further up on the Miles River. It was the Friday before Labour Day weekend and boats were already arriving to enjoy the festivities. I decided to anchor just outside the harbour where there was still plenty of space. At the time, I was the only boat there but as the weekend progressed I must have counted about 60 other boats, of all shapes and sizes, scattered over the area.

St Michaels has a wonderful Maritime Museum and I was fortunate to be allowed in and to use their showers as a guest of Dudley, who is a member there. It was a bit too crowded for me over the weekend, but by Tuesday everyone had gone back to work or school and I wandered around, contentedly absorbing Chesapeake Bay History.

I learnt all about the interesting technique of constructing log canoes and later saw them racing on the Miles River. I explored a very well-presented exhibit of a skipjack, the traditional type of boat used for oyster dredging. Life-size models of fishermen were placed here and there around the deck, in working positions and an eerie recording of their voices made the experience quite ghostly.

The skipjacks do not have inboard engines and rely on enormous sails to move through the water dragging their heavy dredging gear. When all else fails, a skiff with engine is attached to the stern and acts as an outboard.

The weather was still very warm and although here, the water looked clean, there were just too many nasty looking jelly fish, or sea nettles, to make swimming an option.

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2015 at 16:32 and is filed under Chesapeake Bay, Cruising, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.