It's Not All Rainbows and Butterflies...

A lot of times, people only post about how dreamy their lives are living on a boat and traveling around and people get this false idea that we are out here living in bliss 24/7. However, we aim to give an accurate depiction of what this lifestyle is really like so we try not to sugarcoat everything! If you have ever watched a boater's YouTube channel or if you've spent much time talking with long term cruisers, you will inevitably hear the phrase “the highs are high, and the lows are low” come out of their mouths at some point or another. It’s because we are out here living this amazing life, immersed in nature every day, getting to experience the world up close in a way many do not get the opportunity to, and it really is incredible and makes you feel truly alive.  Then out of nowhere, you get a week like the one we’ve had this past week and it really makes you start to question your life decisions! LOL

After a few lovely days in St. Michael’s, MD, we crossed the bay over to Annapolis in hopes of doing a little provisioning and getting some much-needed laundry done!  We decided to anchor the first night, and then had planned on picking up a mooring ball the next day so that we could use the marinas laundry facilities. It got extremely bouncy in the anchorage there so we were excited to move in a bit to the mooring field, but to our dismay, we discovered that they had completely knocked down the building for renovations and there weren’t even bathrooms on shore anymore, so we decided to just stay anchored!  Pretty soon, the harbormaster came and tied up to our boat while we were busy working and scared the heck out of us!  He was very nice but told us that we needed to move because we had anchored in a restricted zone – apparently we were too close to the Naval Academy.  He told us we didn’t need to move immediately, just by the end of the day. We really needed groceries, so we decided to at least make use of the free dinghy docks in town to get a delivery before we moved the boat. I ended up having to do 3 separate Instacart orders from different stores because each of the stores was out of something we needed, including Bella’s Fresh Pet food that we were almost out of. I tried my best to coordinate the delivery times to all be in the same time window so that we didn’t have to make a million trips to shore.

We loaded up our wagon and went outside to get in the dinghy, but it was GONE! I looked up and saw it floating about 20 yards away and frantically yelled to Dustin who was still inside!  It had gotten quite wavy out and when Dustin moved the dinghy from the davits, he just wrapped it around a cleat a few times instead of locking it the way we normally do because he was just going inside to grab something and was coming right back out. In that amount of time, it had managed to escape and was on a fast track to crashing into the rocks on shore if we didn’t do something fast!  We scanned the area and there were no other boats around that could assist fast enough. I was kind of frozen not knowing what to do. There were tons of jellyfish in the water, so jumping in just didn’t occur to me. Dustin on the other hand, quickly started removing his jeans and then dove into the water, which was only 58 degrees that day! 

I kept watch on the boat since he was swimming through a busy harbor.  Thankfully, he somehow did not get stung by any jellyfish and managed to wrangle the dinghy just in time. The adrenaline mixed with the cold water gave his body quite a shock though and made it hard for him to breathe for a little while after.

Just as Dustin got back to the boat, soaking wet, our Instacart driver texted that he was almost there. Dustin quickly changed into dry clothes and then we headed to shore. I had plugged in an address for a building that was closest to the dinghy dock only to find that the entire block was under construction when we arrived. Instacart kept directing the drivers to turn the opposite way of where we were standing, which was on a one-way street, but we eventually got all of our orders and the timing worked out quite well, as they all arrived within the same 30 minutes.

After all the commotion, we still needed to move our boat out of the restricted zone.  Since we desperately needed to do laundry and now that wasn’t an option here, we decided that we might as well head to a different port the next day.  Another of the reasons we had come to Annapolis was because we needed diesel so we figured we might as well fuel up since we were already moving the boat anyway. We called the marina on the VHF and by phone and no one answered. Their hours showed they were still open, but we could see the marina and it looked pretty buttoned up, which was super frustrating that they had closed early.  We did some quick calculations, and determined that we could make it to another town called Rock Hall on the diesel that we had left, and made a spontaneous decision to just head out. Annapolis is usually one of our favorite stops, but this time wasn’t very enjoyable!

A few hours later, we arrived in Rock Hall, MD. We found a nice, private little anchorage in a nice, protected creek with some beautiful homes along the water and settled in for the night just before sunset. It was quite and calm and peaceful and it was nice to be away from it all finally! 

As we were relaxing and watching a movie that night, another sailboat pulled in. As we was attempting to pass us to go further into the creek, he ran aground. RIGHT NEXT TO US. Our peaceful little anchorage quickly turned into us looking out the window every 5 minutes to make sure we weren’t going to swing into this boat that couldn’t move. After awhile, we all determined that our boats were not going to hit, and the other captain assured us that he set an alarm for high tide so that he could wiggle his boat out of the way.  We went to bed that night trusting God to protect us and our boat while we slept, and as always, he did. When we woke up, the boat had moved up further and re-anchored at a much more comfortable distance from our boat.

We started making some phone calls to the different marinas in the area regarding diesel and learned that it was still pretty early in the season for marinas in Maryland and some of them were not open yet. We found this interesting because it was the end of April and Maryland has a much milder winter than Michigan, and the marinas back home open April 15 typically! Thankfully, Gratitude Marina (aptly named) was open and offering diesel! 

Throughout our travels in the Chesapeake, our boat had become completely covered with a thick yellow coating of pollen. I’m not exaggerating – the entire boat had a yellow sheen, and it was on literally every surface!  You can see in the photos below how thick it was in the water and on the vehicles! It's definitely been riling up our allergies lately!

We were the only customers at this marina that afternoon, so they allowed me to quickly spray down the boat, which we were so grateful for, and it was so covered in pollen that we had yellow rivers running off from it!

We had planned on transiting the C&D Canal that afternoon and making our way to Chesapeake City, MD, but when we got to the area where the Chesapeake forks and most people take the Elk River, we decided to deviate from our plans and head up the North East River instead. That direction looked much hillier and just sort of beckoned to us since we had never been up that way before. We are definitely proponents of taking the path less traveled as often as we can! 

We went all the way up as far north as we could to a little town called North East. I can imagine how vague it sounds for the residents of this town when they have to say they live in “North East, MD”.  LOL, that could definitely get confusing! This town has a free town dinghy dock and a laundromat only 0.3 miles away so we would FINALLY be able to do laundry! We were dangerously close to having to wash our clothes in the sink at this point!

We anchored that night and had to keep the windows shut because the bugs were so bad. There was some kind of hatch in the area over the past week and there have been all of these translucent little bugs that kind of resemble mosquitoes. They are called “midges” from the best we can tell. They do not bite, but are EVERYWHERE. There were thousands of them on the boat outside!

If you look closely, you can see the swarms of bugs!

I’ve actually been having to work out with a mosquito net over my head so that I don’t suck them in while I’m breathing hard! I look super glamorous and can only imagine what passerby boats are thinking, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do to get things done!

Working out with a bug net over my head so I don't involuntarily forget to breathe trying not to swallow bugs! LOL

We threw our laundry in the wash and then realized that there were about half as many dryers as there were washers and noticed that there was quite a line of people waiting to use the dryers. To make it worse, one family had loaded their wet clothes up from home and came just to dry them, so it was really throwing off the cycle for everyone.  A dryer finally opened but then it kept eating my quarters and there was no one on site to refund the money. The annoyances just seemed to keep coming that day! 

We finally got 2 dryers and threw our stuff in and then decided to walk into town to mail out a card at the post office that was a short distance away. The town was a little tired looking, but cute.  I was in kind of a bad mood that day so I didn't take many photos! It took us about 3-4 hours all said and done to get laundry done. We had to load it from the boat into the dinghy, dinghy to shore, load the laundry from the dinghy onto the dock and into the wagon, cart the wagon almost half a mile away, get money out of an ATM, exchange the money for quarters, sit at the laundromat for a couple of hours, fold up all the clothes and then pack them back into the wagon, wheel the wagon back to the docks, cover the laundry bags in plastic garbage bags so everything stayed dry because the wind had really picked up, unload the bags onto the boat and then pack up the wagon. I seriously took it for granted being able to just easily do simple chores like these when we had a house of our own!

The next morning, we awoke to a rather unwelcome surprise.  The thousands of little bugs on our boat the night before had drawn hundreds of little swallows to our boat and every last inch of the lifelines, cables, davits, and anything else offering a stable perch, were filled with little blue and white swallows. 

Dustin went outside to try and scare them off of our boat and they started flying around every which way and it looked like we were in an Alfred Hitchcock movie or something!

Then as soon as he came back inside, they all landed again. He even got our air horn out, attempting to scare them away but it didn’t faze them at all. We watched in horror all day as hundreds of birds left us hundreds of disgusting little presents all over our boat! Later that day, the wind picked up and thankfully, the birds finally left. We went outside to assess the situation, and it was completely disgusting how much bird poop was all over the boat.

Being at anchor, we didn’t have access to running water to clean up the mess. The water in the northern Chesapeake is considered brackish, but nearly fresh.  We went swimming in this area last year and we couldn’t even taste salt at all. Knowing this, I ended up just getting our scrub brush out and dipping it into the water a million times over and scrubbing the poop off the boat with the water beneath us. Bird poop stains unlike anything I’ve ever come across, so I ended up having to go back and hand spray a stain removing cleaner all along the boat’s perimeter. Then, I got a 7-gallon jug of our fresh water and poured it into a hand pump spray container that we have and had to hand spray the entire boat off. It took me about 3 hours all in all to clean up after these messy little jerks and I vowed that any bird to land on our boat again after that had a death wish! LOL I was pleased with how clean the boat actually came using this method and it looks good as new again!

This post probably sounds like a lot of whining and complaining, but I just wanted to be real. This life is sometimes unnecessarily difficult and is not for the weak of spirit, but if you can make it through weeks like these, the payoff is huge. Not all weeks are this way and when they are, I just remind myself that “this too shall pass” and soon we’ll be on to more incredible adventures! 😊