At dawn Sunday November 4, 2018, we left the Choptank Municipal Yacht Basin and its cute replica lighthouse behind, heading out the Choptank River toward Chesapeake Bay.

The time change that morning didn’t make it any easier to get going early.

The skies were blue and the winds light, sometimes in our favor and sometimes on our nose. We motor-sailed all day as we headed south. A beautiful fall day, cool but not cold, with lots of fishing boats and a few cargo ships out and about.

At around 5 knots, one doesn’t get very far in short fall daylight, so we anchored in Mill Creek in Solomons Island, off the Patuxent on the western shore of the Chesapeake. Eight hours of motorsailing to go 40 miles.

We tried several spots to anchor but the mud bottom in Mill Creek didn’t give me a lot of confidence. On the fifth try we seem to be well stuck. We’re confined here by weather for two days, so I hope the Rocna anchor is really dug in. Today it’s pouring rain. The forecast for tomorrow is for severe storms.

Mill Creek in Solomons

The fall migration of cruising boats is in full swing, with a ton of Canadian-flagged sailboats anchored around us. Coming into Solomons from the Chesapeake, it looked like a parade of cruisers, with diesel jugs tied to the lifelines and dinghies on deck.

We left New York on our Pearson 365 sailboat a year ago and spent the past year in Cambridge, MD, trying to fix up an old shack in the historic district. We thought we’d return to cruising in a couple of months but contractor woes kept us there with our still-unfinished project.

Cruising on a boat requires one to be at ease with the strange dichotomy of neither having nor not having a schedule. It’s impossible to have definite destinations for definite dates, for the weather dictates when you can go to the next port. But in the grand scheme, the season and prevailing weather patterns give you deadlines. Hurricane season is ending, winter is coming, so it’s time to head south.

So we locked up the unfinished house and spent a month getting the boat ready to cruise. I installed a Dickinson propane heater, connected the water heater to the engine to have hot water when away from the dock, and installed a bigger solar panel. This was after a month in the boatyard doing a bottom job. And in the few frantic days before we left, Helene stocked the provisions while I changed oil and fuel filters (which involves lots of boat yoga inside small lockers.)

And now we’re finally cruising. Stuck inside by cold rain, but cruising.

Geese flying overhead at anchor in Solomons

We hauled out our sailboat eight days ago just in case hurricane Florence came our way.

We’re living in a dirty boat yard while doing back- breaking labor. Not what I pictured retirement to be.

When we hauled out, huge flakes of bottom paint ( for which we had paid a lot of money a year ago) came sloughing off s/v Laura Jack. Rut-roh. Time for a full bottom job.

Bottom paint is a toxic mess designed to keep sea critters from growing on your hull. But it only lasts a year or so. Then you have to put a fresh toxic layer of $250-gallon paint on her. But eventually you have to sand it all off and start over. That’s where we are now.

It’s been eight days of hell so far. And no end in sight.

We’ve got about two-thirds of the bottom scraped and we’re sanding away. We pulled the prop shaft with much difficulty, and $400 later we have a new stuffing box and a straightened shaft. ( A stuffing box is not something from Harry Potter’s gag shop, but rather the thing that keeps water out around the drive shaft. Kinda important, the stuffing box is.)

We’re doing the work ourselves. Thirty years ago, I swore I’d never do another bottom job. But current labor prices have changed my mind. It would take $1150 a day over a week or more to have it done. So we’re doing it ourselves.

A fine red dust follows us everywhere despite efforts to contain it. Living in a boat yard is kind of like living in a truck stop, with all the associated dirt, noise, and testosterone to go with it. Tempers are getting short.

Can’t wait to get back in the water.