July 01-04, 2000 -- Our First Raft Up

July 1-4, 2000 -- Our First Raft Up On July 1, since we were expecting some friends to show up today, we didn't want to get involved in a long project. As a consequence, we didn't really do anything today. As is usual when at anchor, we maintained a radio watch. At one point, heard the vessel Hydrotherapy calling Skiboze, one of the boats we were semi-expecting. We hailed them and chatted for a few minutes. They were headed to a marina in Chestertown instead of to the raft up. Just as we gave up expecting anyone, a parade of boats arrived with everyone we were expecting. We wound up being the anchor boat for the raft up, and had 4 boats on one side and 5 boats on the other side of us. It was a fun evening. On July 2, most of the boats from the raft up decided to head up to the Sassafras river. Since there was only 1 T head dock, we opted to stay put since there wasn't a close by anchorage to where everyone was going. One other boat decided to go out for a sail, then return to raft with us for a second evening. It was a quiet evening but enjoyable. On July 3, we departed the Corsica River headed for the Magothy. There was some discussion about heading there to avoid the fireworks, so we figured that if people showed up, that would be great, if they headed elsewhere, that would be fine as well. We left around 1400 GMT. It was a very tight sail, but at 1628, just after we cleared the edge of the Chester river, we went under sail completely. We had the engines shut off! We continued that way for most of the trip to the Magothy. However, as we came close to a set of anchored boats fishing, we decided to douse the sails and go under motor. We dropped anchor in the Magothy at 1831 GMT. As evening came on, we tried to fire up Tink. He had developed a new problem. An injector appears to have died. On July 4, we did nothing. Well, we did almost nothing. It was a nice quiet day with some good fireworks launched from Sandy Point, we think. We were not expecting to be able to see any fireworks, and that was fine. It seems to us that we had watched fireworks up and down the east coast for one reason or the other. We were a little too far away to see either Annapolis' or Baltimore's fireworks though