Sailing with George and Vicky: Labor Day 2022 Vacation - Day 1 & 2

It was a very satisfying moment late yesterday afternoon when my last meeting of the day ended, I finished a last-minute email, set the out-of-office notifications, and then SHUT IT DOWN! For weeks I have been carefully guarding a period of time around Labor Day when most projects would be under control and many colleagues taking time off as well. Now it's time for vacation.

This will be very different from our June Vacation, which being associated with the boating club, seemed planned down to the second.

This time the plan is... not to have a plan.

Anyone reading this knows that we have a boat, so that seemed to be a good place to start. Most of our boating life consists of day sailing (w/ occasional overnights) out of Osprey Point in Rock Hall, MD. We could spend our entire vacation doing just that and it would be just wonderful.

We do have a goal, though. That goal is "to find out if we can spend the entire vacation on the boat and away from Rock Hall". (Astute readers will note that after decades in corporate America, I'm good at always setting goals that are achievable... if it turns out we can't spend the entire time away from Rock Hall, well, then we found that out.)

While there is no plan, my expectation is that we will remain on the map above. That leaves plenty to explore... the Chester River, Eastern Bay, Choptank River, and many places along the Eastern Shore. Then maybe later making it to Solomons, Herring Bay, the Rhodes River, the Magothy River, maybe even go a little north if we want.

Provisioning is going to be loose as well. As I write, fresh oatmeal bread is proofing in the kitchen and we'll take those loaves along with some lunch meat, meat and veggies for dinners, and some breakfast stuff - roughly enough for half the time we plan to be away. We have cards for the other meals.

We also will never be more than one really long day (or two short days) away from Rock Hall in case we decide we want to return to Osprey Point.

So that's the non-plan. The only anchor points are that we have dinner reservations at Osprey Point this evening and we will spend at least two days at Herrington Harbor South (we paid for those but couldn't use them when our friends were here during July 4th weekend).

HA! The joke's on me... mere minutes after I wrote the above paragraph, Vicky pointed out that she wanted to make dumplings (which never happened, I got meatballs instead) and various other important things delayed our departure by 24 hours... therefore no dinner at Osprey Point. So now Day 1 was Saturday.

We finally departed about 2:00 PM on Saturday, arriving a bit before 4:00. Vicky quickly stowed all the food (2.5 coolers worth) and then wanted to scrub down Seas The Day's cockpit and deck.

I cooked a Blue Apron meal (beef and bok choi stir-fry), then we filled the water, hung out in the cockpit for a bit and that was it.

Our first excursion of this vacation (now scheduled for Sunday) was simply to go down to Kent Narrows and have some crabs at Harris' Crab House.

I did NOT go for a sunrise walk on Sunday morning. I must have been sleeping deeply because even Vicky was awake when my eyes finally opened to a surprisingly bright stateroom. I could recognize that the quality of the light was unusual, and I did make it for a post sunrise walk (around 7:30).

It was very foggy... the sun barely shown through the mist, and shapes were quite unusual in the surrounding landscape.

A beautiful wood boat was docked along the main walkway back to A dock.

I returned to find Vicky practicing Yoga on the foredeck, so I got to work on breakfast (after a 15 min pressure check... I had to change propane bottles mid-way through cooking dinner the night before).

Maxxon stopped by for breakfast, then blew us some bubbles from s/v Yekaterina.

After a slow bit of fussing around, we departed. (We couldn't make it to the slip until later and we wanted to avoid getting there right at low tide given the problems we had approaching Kent Narrows with Xiaomi and her family two weeks ago.)

We did a quick stop at Gratitude to fill the fuel tank and pump out. (Note I'm not including this fuel cost in the vacation cost summary... it got us to "Full" to begin our journey.)

Shardana left earlier in the morning for the same trip... a trip to Harris' Crab House for lunch. We waited for their report on the Kent Narrows channel.

Our photo of Shardana

Shardana's photo of us.

We arrived mid-afternoon and tied up at Safe Harbor Narrows Point marina. After an early nap, we headed across the parking lot to Harris Crab House so Vicky could pick her first crabs of this vacation (there will be many more).

The rest of the evening was just lazy. We viewed Shardana's Youtube video on Chesapeake Destinations, then decided that our next stop would be for Herrington Harbor South (if we can) to use up our credit.

Then we went outside for our sundowners.