Gap year on the Endeavor

Posted by Jack On October 11th, we went to Smith Island.  Smith Island is slowly sinking into the Chesapeake.  When we were there, there was a foot and a half of water on the streets. There are three communities on Smith Island, all located on the highest parts of the island.  Most of what appears to be Smith Island is actually wetlands.  The people who live on the island are watermen; they catch a ton of crabs and oysters. Tangier has the same problem as Smith - it is also sinking. Tangier is bigger and has one big town on it.  When we were staying at the dock at Tangier Island, a ton of large striped bass were swimming against the current and catching minnows in their mouths. We fished for them and I caught six (I don’t know how many Fox caught). I wish we could have caught them before dinner because we could have cooked them. Yesterday, we sailed to Mobjack Bay from the Piankatank River. On the sail we saw dolphins on two occasions, the first group we saw from farther a

Feel free to skip to the pictures at the end of the post! We continue to make our way south through the Chesapeake.  We stopped in Annapolis for a full week - both to see Annapolis (the sailing capital of the United States), and to park ourselves in a good place for my mom to visit, and to see the sites in D.C.  We spent four days in DC - this was a whirlwind tour of our nation's capital, and we saw so many amazing things in a very short time.  We have to thank the Smithsonian for being free - we were able to skip from museum to museum and spend just an hour or two if that's all we wanted to see; if we had been spending $120 on admission for the family per museum, we would have felt obliged to stay until attention spans were low and tempers flaring, and thus we not have been able to go to so many museums or see so many great things.  Some highlights, in my opinion:  the Lincoln memorial, the Hope Diamond, Abe Lincoln's top hat from the night he was assassinated, the wh

Posted by Jack 10/5/19 Yesterday (the 4th) we were in Harness Creek, a real cool little harbor with three small coves in the harbor.  We paddle-boarded around the coves.  In the biggest one, there was a derelict sailboat with the name Decoy.  It wasn't anchored; it was aground. In the middle of the night it broke loose and drifted across the cove only to run aground again.          We made our stand-up paddle board into a sail boat.  We went pretty fast when we got a gust of wind, and then we would have to paddle the boat upwind (the mast was the paddle) since it would only sail downwind.  After padding upwind, then we would put up the mast and sails up again and sail downwind. Yesterday, we did a rough sail to La Trappe Creek.  We broke the personal record for speed on our boat- we did eleven knots!  That's double how fast we go while motoring and that's also about double a mono-hull can go in those winds.  The wind was blowing at twenty knots with gusts to thi