Day 1: Deale to Annapolis

We made the hop today from Herrington Harbour up to Annapolis to join up with the DelMarVa rally.  This year we did not have the dead batteries or mysterious leaking engine fluids to kick off the trip so that was good.  Sean was worried that we might loose the boat's good set of needle nose pliers on the trip so he left them at the dock.  Well, not really at the dock. More sort of next to the dock in a location where they are unlikely to get stolen.

 

The boat settled a few inches into the water as all of the food, water, and beer was loaded aboard.  Several inquisitive slip holders stopped by to see where we were headed (clearly thousands of miles away based on the 6 cart loads of supplies).   

There was not a ton of wind and it was almost on the nose so we motor sailed a good portion of the trip up but we decided that we needed to sail it into Annapolis.  We had a nice run in with our big red,white, and blue gennaker.  There were lots of sailboats coming and going and multiple fleets of kids out in heated race competition as we picked our way into Annapolis.  We executed a beautiful jibe with the gennaker in view of many spectators.  Unfortunately we did not stop with that jibe and tried it again with a bigger audience but much different results.  After we got the rats nest of lines and sail untangled and wrestled the tack back into the vicinity of the bow, we called it a day and got into our nice slip at Annapolis City Marina.

 We have our tracker on the boat so you should be able to see our position now on http://spinsheet.com/delmarva-rally-tracker/ . Then we headed up for our first skippers meeting and a nice kickoff party.  We are in the C group of boats which is clearly the best group because we get to enjoy more time on the water than the other groups for each leg of the trip. 

Tomorrow, we start at 9:00 with race photographers trying to catch a shot of us as we streak by.  Next blog post will be late Monday when we get in and settled in Hampton.