Off to a slow start. Susan decided that with the really nice laundry facilities at Anchorage Marina ($2 wash $2 dry) that she would do a quick load of towels. I hit the Safeway and Ace hardware for some forgotten items. Both the Safeway and Ace are on the level of “if you don’t have it, you don’t need it”. Clerk at Ace was great, I had three items and I got excellent help finding them. There is also a West Marine near by, but being on a Looper budget I passed on going in.

We had decided that lunch today would be one of our favorites Fogo de Chao in Baltimore’s inner Harbor. It’s 90 minutes of food indulgence from the salad bar, to so much meat, and there is my favorite the sweet and hot bacon. Bread are little Brazilian styled popovers. So much great food!

We did walk around the inner harbor some, past all of the shopping, the aquarium and the Coast Guard Lightship Chesapeake. But all that food and shopping, along with the haze made us decide to get back to the Quo Vadimus.

Our goal was to have “ice cream for dinner” at BMore Licks a Baltimore favorite. There was rain predicted for 5PM and rather than risk being out in the rain we decided to wait.

The rain came in buckets!! With the boat being under cover, we’ve not been subject to heavy rains. Prior trips have been mostly fair weather or light rain across week long trips. We noticed some minor leaks (around the flybridge door, and coming out of the salon speaker) that we’ll need to do some research on.

A little after 7 the rain stopped and we started on the 5 block walk. The rain had taken both the heat and the Canadian smoke out of the air. We went along a tree lined street that had some really nice row homes. Fancy doors, some window box planters, even a toddler swing from one of the trees. A very pleasant walk.

BMore Licks has a huge selection of both softserve with flavors but also hand dipped hard ice cream. Susan went for the banana cream pie (it even had chunks of vanilla wafers) and butter pecan. I went for chocolate cherry and peanut butter and Oreo. Everybody was happy with their choices.

So ends another huge food day. While I’d like to think that the walking is offsetting some of these calories, I have my doubts.

Friday 30 June 2023

Up early to do a final load of fresh water, get a pump out and do a load of fuel. Diesel is down from last years purchase price of $5.09, we got 170 gallons at $3.65.

While on the fuel dock also changed out the fuel filters. They were pretty dark, and I wanted to start with fresh everything for the trip.

Pushed off the dock at 9:30 AM into winds from the NE at 3 kts. It’s one of the time that the Bohemia has been this calm. We continued down the Elk and into the Upper Chesapeake. It was also flat calm with just a very slight swell. I had caught the outbound tide so we were doing about 10.2kts at 2000 RPM, a fuel burn of about 6 gallons per hour combined.

The cruise down the Bay, past the Sassafras, then west skirting Pooles and Hart Miller Island went well. Only issues were the 3.2 million crab pots off of the channel and the heavy haze from the Canadian wild fires. Visibilty was 1.5 to 1.75 miles, so not the best. (In our regular Go/No go, I would have not gone, we hate the fog.)

We had done this trip in 2021 so there were tracks for me to follow. So we stuck to them, ducked the crab pots and arrived at Anchorage Marina just before 2PM. 42 NM on 30 gallons of fuel in 4.5 hours. Not bad for the first big run in a long time.

We got set up, lines adjusted and took naps to get us back on track. Looper naps are always the best.

Jellyfish are around when the water is warm. This is a picture of our dock neighbor, it was about 10″ across.

Dinner was a 15 minute walk to Mama’s on the Half Shell, (O’Donnel Street). Susan had the fried oyster appetizer (6 huge oysters) and a salad. I went for the Steam Beer Mussels, which was a dozen mussels, sausage, 5 jumbo shrimp, peppers and onions. It was also the appetizer size and I wasn’t able to finish it.

We rolled around the block to check out the other stores. We picked up cupcakes from Cup Love and pie from Dangerously Delicious Pies. We can highly recommend the Key Lime Pie. The sour cherry crumb was OK, next time we will order it without the crumb.

On the way back we walked along the water front. At the end of a creek / storm drain that flows into the river is this solar and water powered trash collector. The sun moves the wheels that lift the trash up the belt and into a dumpster. The wheels on the side are also powered by the stream flow, so during storms it pulls the trash out of the water.

Back at the marina we walked the T-Head of our dock. There were catamarans there, but sadly they were not part of the Looper Cat Mafia. The mafia is off on different parts of summer trips, one is laying in Boston ready for fireworks.

Like Wednesday night we were in bed at 9PM. The long days really are hard when you haven’t done them in awhile. Tomorrow we will try to hit the water front.

Thursday 29 June 2023

While we have been talking day trips, we’ve not really been lots of places due to Covid. We have some cruising planned for 2023 and we thought we’d start up the QVMarine Blog again.

We are presently on the boat unloading food, drinks, clothing, etc. to get underway on Thursday. It’s a big load of things, we’ve only been bringing weekend things down. All of that fit’s in a small suitcase and a few bags of groceries. This time it was three full dock carts of items.

Stay tuned as we get ready to do a two week cruise around the Chesapeake.

You can see all the posts as a group here Summer of 2023 trips
Wednesday 28 June 2023