Thursday, September 18, 2025 — Eric has been worried about the transit that we we’re about to make to DC. One of his concerns was speed: we were going to be going upriver against the current. To help maximize speed, he wanted the bottom clean. Even though the bottom hadn’t been too bad the last time it was cleaned in Baltimore, the extreme amount of growth we’d gotten in Little Creek had Eric worried that there may be enough growth to slow Kosmos down.

Eric has been trying to get the diver to come to do another bottom cleaning for over a week now. The diver is very busy in general, and recently had some issues that caused him to be backlogged. The diver promised Eric that he would do the bottom this morning at 0530. Christi was dubious that he’d really show up, but we still got up at 0430 to shower before he arrived (we try not to run water when the divers are working).

We were not surprised when the diver cancelled. But in good news, we were completely ready to go at first light, which was 0620. First light didn’t mean good visibility, though. It was totally overcast, making it a very dark morning. The cloud cover was so thick that we couldn’t see any hint of the sunrise. 

As soon as we’d turned on the radio, we heard regular warnings to be careful near The Francis Scott Key Bridge as they were doing demolition work to the remains in order to clear the way for the construction of the replacement bridge. We were glad to hear they were finally getting started on a new bridge.

Looking back at the Francis Scott Key Bridge remains and Baltimore.

We’re not sure which factor that was, but man, was it smoking away.

Birds hanging out on the channel marker.

We saw them testing a drone boat.

Lighthouse.

The wind was light, the water was mostly calm, and the ride was uneventful. The current was with us most of the time, and we made great speed — for quite a while we were doing 8+ knots at 1875 RPM. As the day wore on, the clouds slowly dissipated, and the skies were mostly clear by the time we anchored at about 1515. The anchorage was in an area called The Solomons, which was where the Patuxent River met the Chesapeake Bay. We were just a smidge up the river in very protected waters. It was now a beautiful day with pleasant temperatures.

The anchorage was in a little nook of residential housing. The anchor set on the first try and the holding seemed good. It was calm when there was no traffic, but a relatively steady stream of boats went by and we did get a little rocking from the wakes.

This was looking north up the tributary.

This was looking south, taken shortly after the sun went down.

We were all tired and discombobulated from getting up so early, so we just laid low onboard in the evening. Here is a map showing how far we’d gone today and how much farther we needed to go to get to DC.

Since it wasn’t a good idea to travel up the Potomac at night, it would take us three days to get there, which felt inefficient since it was only an hour drive from Baltimore. But we knew that visiting DC involved long days of walking, and we figured having our home with us in DC would make the experience more enjoyable than making day trips in.