Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - Pocomoke City to Tangier Island, MD

We were up before 0500, made coffee and walked Sailor. We cast off our lines at 0600 but the Pocomoke City bridge tender wouldn’t answer us on the VHF radio. We finally called him on our cell phone at 0620 and he opened immediately. It was a beautiful cool, almost chilly, morning. The trip down the river was uneventful. Since we had planned to reach the shallow area at the mouth of the river at high tide we transected the area fine. Beach Cruiser bumped bottom once but backed off easily. It took us three hours to make it from Pocomoke City to the wide part of Pocomoke Sound. We had spent 16 nights at Pocomoke City. It was a great place to relax and take it easy.

We were planning to anchor for the evening at the mouth of Onancock Creek but as we passed Watts Island, we realized that it was a relatively short run to Tangier Island which would save us a day as we headed for the Baltimore, MD area. We called Parks Marina to see if they had two slips that could handle us. He said that he would have space after 1500. That meant that we would have to slow down and kill a couple of hours. It’s hard to slow down when you are only going five knots to start with. We called Mr. Parks again at 1430 and he told us to “come on in.”

The current and wind could have made docking difficult but Mr. Parks was at the dock when we arrived and he told us to pull up to the face dock and took our lines. Barry and Barb had fallen back to give us time to dock so that there wouldn’t be two boats trying to dock at the same time.

Seascape was docked in minutes. The space for Beach Cruiser was more problematic. Barry had to turn to port perpendicular to the current and the wind , slip past a piling and stop short of a docked boat, all the while being swept toward the dock. It looked as if he wasn’t going to make it but he swung the boat around 180 degrees and the boat was carried gently to the dock between the piling and the docked boat.

We went for an evening walk through the village and we had tacos on the aft deck in a cool breeze.