June 10, 2009.

After our brief but ferocious storm cell went through last night the evening settled right down. In fact, when we woke this morning the water was as flat as we had ever seen it.

We took our time getting underway as the tide wouldn’t be flooding into the Chesapeake until after 1000. So at 0930 we hauled anchor and motored out on absolutely glassy water.

Once we turned north we did get just enough wind to barely fill the genoa. This increased our boat speed by 2 tenths of a knot. The sad part is that I was actually pleased by that.

As the day wore on the wind did build enough that before long we were dealing with seas in the 2 inch range. It was as dull a day as I can remember. It’s nice to get a dull one every now and then.

We did get to watch as the navy had gunnery practice on a huge grounded ship shown on charts as “The Target”. It looks like some cruiser left over from World War 2. It’s now just a sinister blackened hulk sitting firmly aground. We listened as a navy range patrol boat warned boaters to stay a minimum of 2 ½ miles from the target ship. We were about 4 miles away and watched as helicopters made runs at the ship delivering bursts of heavy machine gun fire.

Since they were blowing crap up on that side of the
bay I figured it would be safe to take a shortcut through the aerial target range. We usually can’t get close enough to touch the targets and it saved us half a mile by cutting through.

We arrived in Solomon’s to a very crowded anchorage. The only spot open for us was the exact spot we usually choose to drop the hook so it was like we had a reservation. Its dead calm now but we do have another series of storm cells off to our west headed in this direction.