Sunday, August 3 — The water here in Little Creek was 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27.2 degrees celsius). When water temperatures were this warm, we generally cleaned Kosmos’s bottom once a week. However, we’d just gotten new bottom paint, and with new paint, you were supposed to wait a full two months until it was fully cured before you clean it. We found out the hard way that cleaning it early just takes the paint off and significantly shortens the life of the paint.

The two months were just about up. Kosmos’s bottom was so full of growth that she looked like she had a bushy beard. We couldn’t believe the growth was so bad on brand new paint. Generally speaking, neither Christi nor Eric were willing to do the bottom in a marina, especially this one, which had brackish water from the creek (there was a possibility of electrocution if one of the boats were leaking electricity into the water). Maybe if the water in the Chesapeake were clearer, we might have taken Kosmos to an anchorage and done her bottom ourselves, but since the water was totally murky, neither Christi nor Eric wanted to do it. So we hired a diver. He charged $150 per hour and had estimated it would take 2-hours.

He came this morning. Instead of a wetsuit hood and goggles that divers usually wear, he wore a full head mask so his entire head was covered. He had lights attached to the mask to help him see. As anticipated, he said the bottom was really bad. It took him 4.5 hours to do the whole bottom, but he kindly only charged us for 3.5. And he confirmed there was a big crab living on the bottom. We’ve seen a lot of crabs in the marina around the boats and we’d suspected for a while that the crabs were living under the boats.

Since the diver was working, we turned on the AC, which had been running 24/7 since we’d pulled into this slip. The temperatures were so pleasant today that we left the A/C off even after he’d finished.

Once he finished, we met Blue Heeler at the Trail Center in First Landing National Park, which was a large state park that encompassed the tip of Cape Henry (where the Chesapeake Bay met the Atlantic Ocean). Karen had pointed it out to us when she’d given us the tour of Virginia Beach, but up until now, it had been way too hot to go hiking in the forest. But the weather was glorious today, so it was the perfect day for a hike. We apparently weren’t the only ones with that bright idea — the lines to enter the park were quite long, especially the beach entrance. The parking fee was $10. We miraculously found a parking spot. Next to where we parked was a Chesapeake burial ground. According to the sign, in 1997, the 64 bodies had been unearthed during excavation for a bridge in the city of Chesapeake, and the bodies had been reinterred here in a traditional ceremony.