A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back

Sweet home Virginia..

Sam and Alex Fortescue

Sat 11 Jun 2011 23:26

37:35.50N

076:12.85W

Summer Song is nestled in a little harbour off one of the many tributaries of the Chesapeake - in a place called Urbanna. Arriving two days ago in the warm evening sunlight, it didn't seem difficult to imagine why the first settlers from England had decided to stay. The shores are low and green and topped with majestic great oaks and tall beeches. The rivers are calm and riven with inlets. Things grow vigorously. But nowadays, not a blade of grass seems to be unkempt, and the houses on the water are gaily painted clapboard affairs. Lost in a reverie of new world delight, I barely noticed as half a dozen large flies gnawed away at my limbs/

Summer Song is there by herself now, riding at anchor, while Alex and I enjoy the lubber's life at Graham's glorious house in Virginia. He very sweetly lent us a truck (in the US sense of 'van') from his work, enabling us to buzz about the countryside with roofing ladders bouncing along above us. We drove a few miles up to a Civil War battlefield and stood gazing out over a grassy plateau, studded with ancient artillery. As we looked, a crash rent through the air. I briefly wondered if we were getting sucked into some sort of ghostly re-enactment of the fight between the Confederates and the Unionists. But it was just an outrider of a roiling electrical storm that was blowing our way. When it broke, there was torrential horizontal rain, and jagged flashes of lightning making driving seem a touch hazardous. Yesterday it was hotter here than in Columbo, Sri Lanka, at 38 degrees C and today it's the same story: a morning of intesely humid heat followed by an afternoon of thunderstorms.

Last night, we met Graham for a beer in Richmond, a nearby town of 2 million people. It was the capital of the South, and was burnt to the ground in the Civil War by the retreating southern army, to stop its rich tobacco industry falling into northern hands. Today, it is all tall chimneys, brooding water towers and converted wharves with trendy bars and restos. After tucking in to some thimbles of the local brew, we headed to a little local cinema to watch Midnight in Paris - a Woody Allen film starring Owen Wilson, before heading out to an Italian resto where Graham had mended the roof in exchange for free food. Their speciality was soft shelled crab - crustaceans of the usual variety that slough off their old shells to grow new ones. The flaw in this twist of evolutionary programming is that they take a while to build up their defences again, presenting an irresistable meal in the meantime, accompanied by garlic mayo. I'm not sure how that fits in with Darwin's theories...

Today, Graham's daughter Chelsea came by to say hello. She narrowly missed joining us for the Bahamas to America leg of our journey due to work. We had a gret lazy lunch and a wander around the battlefield, with a lecture from a volunteer Civil War buff who explained the dynamics of the war (not initially much about slavery, but more about southern voting rights, as it turns out). Chelsea was on great form and is busy at work fending off emails from the extreme religious right because she is helping to write a report on the benefits of free contraception.

Arriving in Urbanna