Saturday, October 4 — Our plan was to leave as soon as it was light enough to safely navigate. The days were getting shorter, and the sun was rising later, so we didn’t untie until 0650.

It was calm and peaceful on the water, though there was patchy fog here and there. There were also a lot of rowing (crew) boats out on the water that we needed to be wary of.

Looking back at The Wharf.

The passage from Capitol Bay Yacht Club to Brenton Bay was calm and uneventful overall. Here were some early morning photos:

Since we wanted to arrive at our destination while the light was still bright, we ran at 1750 RPM. Our speed varied between the high 6s and high 7s, depending on how strong the current was flowing at the time. Except for the rare patches of fog in the morning, the weather was gorgeous. It was sunny with temperatures in the low 70s and light wind. We did get caught up in one of the fog patches, but we were only in it for a few minutes.

We had expected there to be notable boat traffic on a Saturday, but we didn’t say many other boats. We also were worried that the military would make us change course to skirt the edge of the channel again, but they didn’t. We were able to stay in the middle of the channel, far away from the crab pots.

Not far from the anchorage we saw a well-marked, weird contraption that was not on the chart. We were 95% sure it was not there on our passage up. Our guess was it was some kind of temporary shellfish trap.

We arrived at the Brenton Bay anchorage at about 1700. From what we could see, it looked like it was a rural area with homes on big lots, much like Deltaville.

Eric loved the anchorage. It was so easy! There were no narrow openings, no scary shallow areas to navigate, and lots of space so we didn’t have to worry about the anchorage being full and having to go somewhere else. The anchorage being full turned out to be an unfounded fear as there weren’t any other boats there. Eric usually didn’t sleep well the first night in an anchorage because he worried about dragging. But here, he knew he’d sleep great. There was no one else to drag into us. We were far enough away from any hazards that the anchor alarm would go off well before we would be in danger. And, another huge bonus was that there were no crab pots around here to worry about. This was a map of where we’d anchored.

This was a map showing how far we’d come and how far we still need to go to get to Annapolis.

Except for wakes from occasional fast boats that zoomed by, the anchorage was calm and pleasant. The sunset was lovely.

The moon was nearly full.