38:57.672N 076:28.882W

 

From Rhode Island we turned south again and made our way into the top of the Chesapeake Bay via the Delaware and the C & D Canal.  We had to make a quick trip back to the UK so left Bamboozle tucked up in Annapolis, Maryland.  We returned to find her safe and well but have no plans to leave this sheltered spot until after the weekend as Tropical Storm Hanna is due to pay us a visit later today. The good news is it is not a full blown hurricane but with winds up around 50 knots we are glad to have a large number of pontoons, posts and piles to spread a web of mooring lines out to.  We are also forecast to receive a soggy 3 to 4 inches of rain during the next 12 hours so we have battened down the hatches until the sun comes out again! 

 

The plan is to spend the whole of the "fall" here in the Chesapeake Bay exploring many of the rivers and smaller bays that lead off it.  A few friends in England expressed surprise that we are planning to spend two months in one bay but.....it is a BIG "bay".  It is 170nm from it's northernmost end where we entered via the canal down to the southern opening into the Atlantic with 10,000 miles of foreshore in between.  48 rivers flow into it including the Potomac which is navigable, as far as Washington DC, 95 miles upstream from it's entrance.  There is also a huge amount of historical interest in the surrounding area including Jamestown (the first English settlement in America), Yorktown (where Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington) and, Mount Vernon, Washington's home on the banks of the Potomac.  Coincidently, 2008 marks the 400th anniversary of the first European exploration of the bay by Captain John Smith, who later made a more lasting name for himself with his amorous entanglement with Pocahontas. History-phobes beware...Jamie is on a roll!

 

We had received a few complaints from family members that our ensign looked a bit too small in the photos of our new bigger boat.  Always being sensitive to public opinion we have invested in a bigger red duster as the picture below shows. This is now a two yard flag (which means I am not as tall as I thought I was!).

 

 

 

 

The only other excitement (exciting for us anyway) is that I seem to have managed to fix our uncooperative watermaker by replacing the circuit board and pressure switch (see photo below), a job which I feared might be beyond my limited technical skills.  The digital camera is as important an element of my toolkit as and screw-driver or spanner as I try to take plenty of photos of things before, and as, I take them apart so I know what they looked like when I began to take then apart.  If, when I have finished, I have no spare bits left and it looks like it did when I started, there is at least some hope it may work again.

 

 

 

For those of you wondering where Lucy is I promise to include a photo of her legs next time!