38:46.4N 76:33.8W

Thursday 6^th June

We were up bright and early to welcome Lydia, Bill and Rick from Dragon’s Run on-board Serafina.  Lydia was here to view our cooker as she is in the process of buying a new one and was interested to see ours. Rick kindly came along to view the faulty bit of rigging that was uncovered during our rigging check a week ago. (Rick and his two brothers run two very popular and busy boatyards in Deltaville where we plan to clean Serafina’s bottom in the autumn, prior to setting off south to Florida, Cuba etc.)

They were followed around 1000 hours by Iain and Fiona from Ruffian. Iain had called by yesterday in his dinghy to say ‘hi’ as we were the only other British boat in town and so we had asked them to come for a coffee this morning. All sorts of information was exchanged and it turned out unsurprisingly really, that they had also met several boats that we knew well along the way.

However the weather here is on the turn and so we parted company fairly quickly as we had to sail south to Herrington as planned, whilst they were considering coming in from the very exposed anchorage and take some shelter from the approaching tropical storm in one of the creeks in Annapolis.

The forecasts were very varied and it was thanks to Lydia who alerted us to the approach of Tropical Storm Andrea in Florida that gave us the warning to head off quickly. The local forecasts were still cheerfully predicting 10 knot winds, whereas the Hurricane Storm Centre was suggesting 20+ knots in the Annapolis area today.

So we set off around 1145 hours and bashed our way into the 20 knot winds that developed along with an unpleasant chop for the 19 miles down to Herring Bay. This might have gone a bit better overall if we (I) hadn’t omitted to close the very small window in the forward heads, so we took a surprising volume of water on board through this exposed opening! Finally we made our way across this very shallow bay again and edged our way over depths of barely a foot under the keel with 20 knots of wind now pushing us from behind. We were directed into Slip I30 which is not really deep enough for us, but the best they could do and we tied up at high tide with barely 0.2 metres under the keel. Not sure how easy it will be to exit this berth when the storm has passed.

In the evening the rain joined in the fun and we battened down the hatches for the night with forecasts for some dire weather over the next few days as Andrea makes her way up the eastern seaboard. Still we are in a safe haven and well secured – if not already hard aground.