August 17 – Friday
We left the dock at 06:10 bound for Rock Hall – we were going home. Polly noted that, to the day, it will be 10 weeks since our initial departure on Friday, June 8. Conditions were not bad and forecast to get better. There was no traffic on the water to speak of, and even the autohelm was behaving its self – it must have sensed that its brain was going to be removed and sent to New Hampshire as soon as this day was over. We passed a couple of north bound tugs pushing barges as we made our way down the Bay and into familiar waters. Only the local crabbers and netters were around to keep us company and remind us that we were back in crab pot territory, big time.
We clicked off the shore features we have become so familiar with these 20 years or so of Bay cruising – Turkey Point, Sassafras River, Fairlee Creek, Tolchester and finally, Swan Point. By 11:00 we were crossing the shallows at the north end of the bar, a short cut to the channel that leads into Swan Creek and FLIGHT’s home port. At 12:00 we were settled into our slip and sitting on the bridge having a celebratory beer.
10 weeks, 1700 NM, 112 locks, 285 engine hours, many new ports many new friendships and countless credit card receipts. When you include ZERO boat problems, it nets out to a great summer cruise.
The blog has been fun as well as helpful. Doing it served as a template for organizing our memories and maintaining a more comprehensive journal of our travels then we might otherwise have done. Knowing that others may be reading it inspired us to be more descriptive than we might have been for our private purposes. We continue to be pleasantly surprised by the number and extent of readers who have followed our Flight North – many folks we have never met. The cruise served us as a test for future adventures and has given us ideas for consideration – maybe a month on Lake Champlain or a cruise on the Trent-Severn, another Canadian waterway. Next year who knows, perhaps New England and some time cruising with new friends Maureen and Peter from Rhode Island in the summer and then head south in the fall for a winter in Georgia, Florida or the Bahamas. Plenty of time to decide and plan during this winter, knowing FLIGHT will be ready to take us.