When a Bad Day Turns Good

Which is much better than the reverse. We pulled anchor about 6:00 am at Willoughby Bay, which is on the south side of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and headed out the well-marked channel. Well, you generally expect that a well-marked channel indicates that the shallows are OUTSIDE the channel. Not so! In the middle of the channel, not 50 feet from the end, we ran smack into a shoal. It was soft mud, but the wind and waves pushed us farther on, and we couldn’t motor or sail off of it. This was the bad thing. It was also a falling tide. This was worse. Finally we bit the bullet and called Towboat U.S. They couldn’t have been more polite or helpful, but before they could get a captain to call us back, a tug boat came out of the channel and offered to pull us off. This was a good thing. So our deepest thanks to the guys from Precor on the boat Chesapeake! Closer examination of the chart shows that a shoal is indicated in that area (why they don’t dredge it or move the marker to indicate the real channel, I don’t know), so we felt kind of dumb. But about an hour later, we heard a call to Towboat U.S. from a sailboat that had been anchored near us, aground in the same place. So it wasn’t just us.

But the day got even better, because we came across WHALES! There were just a couple, but they were close (close enough to make Chris nervous) and as big as the boat. They were just swimming along, paying us no mind. Anne was hoping for a breach, but they weren’t that energetic. That’s OK, because we were energetic enough for all of us, bopping around the boat, climbing the arch trying to get the best view and take pictures. This way more than compensated for the bad start in the morning!