From DC to Hampton Roads

Leaving CYC was the hardest part! With friends on the dock to send us off and hangovers from a week's worth of farewell parties, we finally felt ready to leave DC, our home of 18 years, 7 of which we spent at Capital Yacht Club.

A boat is never 100% ready, but we were, so we set out. Our journey began with a long, uneventful trip down the Potomac. With no wind and most of the channel being somewhat narrow, we motored the whole way in unseasonably warm early-May weather. We thought (mistakenly, it turns out) that cold weather was behind us as we had lovely temperatures for the first week of our trip. The Potomac is easy to navigate and offers an abundance of protected anchorages with good holding. Going at our usual 5-7 knot motoring speed the trip takes a couple days and we always anchor by nightfall and wait until dawn to continue because dodging the logs, crab traps, and debris necessitates a careful watch. Our first stop on the Chesapeake was Reedville, VA, a great place to anchor not far south of the mouth of the Potomac. We launched our dinghy and strolled up and down the main street, lined with a couple restaurants, an ice cream shop, and beautiful Victorian homes. Ian reminded me that a ferry runs from Reedville to Tangier Island, somewhere I have always wanted to visit since reading Chesapeake Requiem. We decided to take the ferry over there to explore for an afternoon. I'll make a separate post about Tangier, which was an awesome place to visit. From Reedville we headed south, anchoring overnight on the Piankatank River before making the hop to Portsmouth, VA, where the ICW begins. We got a great day of sailing in on the Chesapeake heading south to Hampton Roads, and knew that it would be one of our last chances to sail for a while since the ICW requires us to motor due to the narrow channels.

I find transiting Hampton Roads equal parts fascinating and terrifying. After a too-close-for-comfort encounter with a massive container ship on our former boat, Voyager, I'm intimidated by the amount of commercial shipping traffic that comes in and out of Norfolk. Then, the last time we were in Norfolk on our current boat, Altair, we were approached by a large RIB armed with machine guns and ordered to get out of the channel because a submarine was approaching. I imagined the submarine being completely submerged and wondered aloud how we were supposed to know where it was, and the crew on the RIB laughed when I turned around to see it rounding the corner half above water with a bunch of crew standing atop it. Coming into Norfolk this time there was only one Navy destroyer barreling down at us so I suppose we were lucky. It is so interesting to see all of the Navy ships docked alongside the river.

We anchored at Hospital Point in Portsmouth which thankfully was much less crowded than last time we were here, and is convenient to the Fish & Slips restaurant at Tidewater Marina. I love this restaurant an unreasonable amount and insist that we go every night for happy hour when we're in Portsmouth. Cheap craft beers and 99 cent oysters and wings is all it takes to win my heart. We ostensibly stayed in Portsmouth for three days to provision and wait for a northern wind (to blow water out of the waterways so we could make it under the iffy bridge heights on the first part of the ICW) but really it was all an excuse to have more 79 cent steamed clams at Fish & Slips.