July 4, 2008.

Yesterday we woke up in Jackson Creek, Va. It was a very peaceful night in spite of a constant breeze. We left the anchorage accompanied by a pair of sailboats. One of the boats was from the local yacht club. They passed us as we were about to head out the entrance channel. The 4 man crew looked to be out for a bit of racing and looked smugly at us as they motored quickly past. Following them out fit in real well with my plans as the tide was lower than when we had come in the previous night, and we had only 8 inches of water under our keel.

Once clear of the entrance channel Christy and I had the main sail up and had turned out towards the bay. The tide was to be in our favor for the first half of the day so we motor sailed east for 2 miles before heading north.

Depending on which weather service you believed we were supposed to have winds anywhere from 10 to 25 knots from the southwest. We shut off the engine and unfurled the genoa and it was like somebody had yelled “Go”. We had both sails up and pulling hard, along with the current pushing us, we were doing over 8 knots in comfort. We slowly walked away from the other boats leaving them a few miles behind us. We had a steady 16 knots until lunchtime when the winds started to slowly abate.

When the winds dropped to 10 knots our speed stayed above 6 knots. The guys on the boat behind us pulled out a spinnaker but weren’t really able to cut into our lead. It was a fabulous day of sailing but all good things come to an end.

We caught up to 3 boats that had left an hour before us and as soon as we did the wind just about petered out. We had to start the engine at 1500 and motor the last 8 miles of the day.

We dropped the hook in exactly the same spot we usually do when we stop here. The anchorage is full but not crowded so things are pretty good. We’ll probably spend the weekend here before heading north to Deale, Md.

A new addition to the blog is going to be a section called Waterman’s Terminology. As we travel through different areas we hear a lot of sometimes amusing local terminology. For example, down in Florida whenever 2 fishermen get done talking to each other one will invariably sign off with the mantra “Ketch em’ up”

Today’s entry. One fisherman asked another if he was catching anything and he replied “I got enough to make the pot stink” I dunno, I laughed.