Monday, June 4, 2012
     I wake up early, probably around 6AM, and have a good breakfast. BTW I forgot to mention in yesterdays blog that my wireless antenna was not working. I called the outfit where I purchased it from, and as we trouble shoot it we come to the conclusion that when I was running the cable I damaged it somehow. Bummer. At least I still have my IPhone to watch Internet weather. Which means that I will not be able to blog from my boat every evening. I  get the boat ready for the next stop which was going to be Ocean City, Maryland,. I setup my navigation program on the laptop, and also on my Garmin GPS display, and take care of a few other chores on the boat. I take off at about 8 AM, The wind is blowing good, about 15 to 22 knots. A lot of times, while I am sailing, I might have the engine running only to top off the batteries and take care of the electronics especially the auto pilot, which if it has to work hard is an energy user. So I figure since the engine is going to be on for a while I might as well run the RO water system and make water. Going down the Maryland coast the wind was strong and gusty. Also about an hour into the trip the water maker choked. I just shut it off, figured I would check it out later.
   I pulled into Ocean City, MD, at around 2:30 PM. The inlet is pretty easy to navigate. So I go in and bear to the left behind Assateague Island, following the buoys. In the channel I hit ground. I throw out an anchor, and go down below to feed my cat, who once he hears the anchor lower starts yelling that he wants to eat. That fact that I hit ground didn't bother me because I realized that it was low tide, and as the tide raised I would be free. So I must of been below deck for about 10 maybe 15 minutes of so and when I came up I realized that the wind and waves bobbed me across the bay almost onto the Assateague beach. Now this did bother me because I felt that I might need BoatUS in order to pull me off if I went any further in. I lowered my dinghy, attached my outboard, lowered my Bruce anchor with about a 150 foot of rode attached, connected the bitter end to the sailboat, and motored as far as I could into deep water and dropped the anchor. Now I go  back to the boat to start pulling the boat to deeper water.. This was tricky because when I realized that I had been blown over to this spot I immediately put out more rode on my original CQR anchor to hold me from blowing me further on to the beach. So now I had to recover my CQR before I could pull myself over to the Bruce. Anyway after about 15 or 20 minutes or so I was free.

I motored over to a decent spot, relaxed, and watched the Assateague ponies make their way to the bay to get a drink of water. BTW These ponies live on the island all year long and drink the salt water from the bay.