Back at Solomons

We are anchored in Mill Creek near Solomons, MD tonight.  Tomorrow we will spend the day back at Spring Cove Marina where our car has been faithfully waiting our return.  It's now time to restock the boat and admit we are turning the corner and starting to bring Sea Breeze home.  Although from this point forward we are retracing our track toward home, we plan to visit new places; places we bypassed on our way north last summer.  Hopefully it will still feel like a new adventure, but it is sad in a way to be retracing our steps.  I'm sure exciting new challanges will face us each day.... Today for example.  We crossed the Chesapeake from Broad Creek to Solomons.  It's a 30 mile (more or less) trip across the bay on a course running from roughly NE to SW.  It was a windless day, so we made the trip under power.  Leaving at about 8:30 AM we encountered light fog with visability of about 1 mile.  Two hours later the visibility had reduced to 0.2 mile.  We know this because we used the range feature on our GPS to mark the distance to bouys that would appear out of the fog.  In the shipping lanes, freighters travel at about 20 knots.  We figured, it we encountered a freighter we would have less than 1 minute to take evasive action after seeing one come out of the fog.  Spooky feeling.  We did encounter a southbound sailboat emerging from the fog on a course parallel to ours.  By the time we saw him he was perhaps 500 yards away to port.  We decided to travel together assuming we would make a bigger target on any ship's radar if we were together vs being alone.  We were fortunate to not encounter any shipping.  Our anchorage tonight is quiet and well protected.  There are modest homes along the bluffs of both sides of the creek.  We have anchored in many places with no homes on the shoreline.  These are the anchorages I love.  In the evening we only hear the sound of the birds and the lapping of the wavelets on the side of the hull.  At night there is no sound at all when the wind is calm.  It is so peaceful to lay in our bunk and hear nothing but the sound of our own breathing.  Now, "you know who" would say the sound of me snoring.  Crabbing has been a bust so far.  The rivers we have travelled so far this spring have been mostly fresh to lightly brackish; not healthy for crabs.  As we travel south, the crabbing opportunities will improve as the water gets more salty so expect stories and photos in the near future about the exploits of crab-woman.  My internet connection is running a little slow tonight so I will post some photos and a map tomorrow when we get a little closer to civilization.