Sunday August 15, 2010  10PM

Tonight’s our last night here – tomorrow we are off to Deltaville VA.

This has been a very nice little anchorage so we spent an extra night. Here are a couple of pictures of the anchorage. The marina:

The Sarah River

This is our view of Yorktown.

It’s about a 3 mile dinghy ride across the river to Yorktown and we made the trip yesterday. Great little town with tons of history. For the non-history buff readers, this is where the British General Cornwallis surrendered to US forces during the American Revolution. Although it didn’t end the war, the British were never the same afterwards and the war ended two years later.

There is a monument celebrating the event – it was the first monument approved by the new US government, but it was 100 years before it was erected. The reason it took so long was a lack of government funds. I guess this was before Congress discovered that deficit spending was ok. Here is the monument.

I walked to the other side of the monument and took this picture of the York River, If you start on the left hand side and go about ¾’s of the way across the picture you’ll notice  a white area along the opposite shore. That’s where we were anchored. I reduce the picture size for the blog, but in the full size version you can see our mast.

Yorktown also has a nice beach. It even has turtles. Here is one that we saw. And yes that is a real turtle.

The bridge across the Yorktown River is one of the few (if not the only) dual swing bridges in the US. When it opens two sections of the span rotate

This ship was coming from the Naval Weapons Station up river – I guess it was being loaded with bullets.

Today was shopping day. One of the reasons we spent an extra day here was to hit the grocery store. From what I’ve be able to gather from the internet, shopping at our next two stops will be difficult. Normally grocery shopping involves a bus ride and/or a long walk, but not here, Today it was a long dinghy ride. From an internet posting I found out that there is a grocery store that is accessible by small boat as it was built at the head of the bay we are anchored in, so off we went. If the dinghy was called ‘African Queen’ it would have been right at home.

After motoring to where it looked like the bay ended, there was a 10’ wide channel between the grass that we continued up. The directions I found stopped at the channel entrance so on we went. The channel then split so I picked one and on we went. Through the trees I could see the outline of the store but we had tall grass on both sides and there was no way to get to dry ground. Then we spotted an opening in the grass where a drainage culvert emptied out. The opening was about as wide as the dinghy so we turned in and were able to get ashore.

We were in a heavily wooded area and after tying the dinghy to a tree we walked through, what looked like but I hope isn’t, poison ivy. I’ll know soon since I’m allergic. Anyway we found a path that led us out to the parking lot of the grocery store. We were not well dressed so in the future should I see people coming out of the woods near a grocery store I won’t automatically think they are derelicts.

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At the end of the day we had the groceries we needed and are ready to move on.