Wednesday, May 6, 2015. Our son Brian flew down to Norfolk to help us sail back to Gibson Island. We had a wedding on Friday at the Naval Academy that we didn’t want to miss. We left our slip in Norfolk at 7pm, without incident (YEAH!), and motored past the port’s massive cranes as the sun set.
How to describe our night voyage up the Chesapeake? It was cold, but beautiful, and we bundled up. It was dark, really dark, until an almost full moon rose off our starboard side around 10:30pm. There were crab pots and fish nets everywhere, but we couldn’t see them until we passed them, so we tried not to worry about getting tangled in them. We worked out a watch system. Two hours on the wheel, followed by two hours at the beck and call of the person at the wheel, followed by two hours to sleep. Repeat, repeat, repeat….. The wind was from the south, so we set sail and ran the engine on a lower RPM. What a perfect night for our 23 hour trip back to our home port, the first long leg of our Great Loop trip, and with our wonderful son to help us.