August 11-13, 2000 -- Weekend at Granary Creek

August 11, we headed to the Eastern Shore and Granary Creek. It was a relatively quick trip, though very windless! The Eastern Shore is a really beautiful place. Unfortunately, it is also a long trip to get to the anchorages. It was an hour across the Chesapeake Bay, then three and a half hours to the anchorage! We dropped anchor around noon and enjoyed the rest of the day at anchor. On August 12, the rest of the members of the Open Seas Yacht Club started arriving. First was Skiboze with Ray and Jimmy. We dinked over and chatted with them for a bit before returning to the boat for an afternoon nap! Everyone else arrived late in the afternoon, and some of them rafted up to us for the night. We had 5 boats rafted to us. After everyone was securely rafted to us, we all headed to shore for a picnic. It was a lot of fun. Everything broke up around 9:00 PM or so. More to the point, the party moved back to the raft up where the party continued until the wee hours of the morning. On August 13, we were rudely awakened by our anchor alarm at 6:00 AM. Mike and I sprinted up to check things out. It appeared that with the additional wind, our anchor chain had stretched out fully and we moved outside the alarm zone. This happens to us a lot, as I sometimes set it too low when we first arrive somewhere. We stayed up for a bit to make sure we weren't dragging, then went back to bed... for a whopping 30 minutes. Our secondary anchor alarm went off, and as soon as we got up there, we discovered it was raining! We flew through the boat closing hatches before returning to bed. We finally gave up on sleep around 8:00 AM. People started moving out around 10:00 AM, and we were finally ready to go around 11:30 AM or so. The wind was blowing out of the north between 15 and 20 knots. It was actually a pretty comfortable trip, surprisingly enough. We never saw waves above 3 feet though the winds hit a maximum of 25 knots. We were able to take the waves on the forward quarter and get a boost from our main sail, though we had to head to close into the wind to be able to sail. We arrived back in Annapolis around 4:00 PM or so. All of us were exhausted from a very active weekend. Tom headed home around 6:30 PM or so, and Mike and I were soundly asleep by 9:30 PM