Thursday 30 May, MD day 5: Cleared in at last, reunite with friends, and play doctor on my toe.
Beautiful bright morning in our peaceful near-paradise anchorage in Herring Bay. After we enjoy the surroundings and make the action plan, we disturb the peace with our little engine as we dinghy ashore to Herrington Harbour North Marina. The 6HP engine is rather slow for the 1 mile ride as it put-puts away, pushing us along at a fast waking pace.
We have a short stop at the marina office, only to find out they still don’t have a slip available for us. Maybe over the weekend. And when we are reminded the daily rates ($2.25/ft), we feel happy to be at anchor!
Then time to pay some visits and give some “good to see you again” hugs. First, to our dear and knowledgeable friend Ray (at Weaver boats) with whom we have lots of catching up to do. And he already gives us some good advice on issues we wrote about. Can’t wait to have dinner with him, we’ll take a notebook with us! Then to Roger & Liz at Free State Yachts (the Hallberg Rassy dealer in USA). Liz greets us with our usual pile of mail, Amazon and Ebay items.
With the friends we have here, Herrington Harbour North almost feels like a second home. It really is a beautiful marina and surrounding area: lovely manicured gardens, spotlessly clean, and even has a wonderful swimming pool and hot tub! It all looks so much nicer in this early summer than it did in early winter last year. Though the fall colours were quite special.
By 10.30am our pickup arrives and we collect our hire car for the week. It feels almost surreal to drive a new car on these perfect roads. Oh, civilization…so good to be back! Heading for Baltimore (1h30’ drive) we do a mental inventory of all the rent-a-wreck we had this season and have a good laugh.
Today’s priority is to clear in. The CBP office is at Cruise Maryland, the cruise-liner terminal in Baltimore. And when we get there a large crowd is boarding one such ship. We wander how busy CBP officers will be and how long we need to wait. But once we find the CBP office, they attend to us right away. It takes a while to go through the entire procedure, but after one hour we are finally cleared in, both us and Cloudy Bay. Finally! Hurrah!
As we exit the office we congratulate ourselves for having picked up our cruising permit in Puerto Rico, here would’ve taken a whole day to get one. Lesson learned: clear customs only in a designated port of entry, where officials are all very familiar with procedures of clearing in foreign yachts. We now know Baltimore (let alone Annapolis) is not such port, as the officer who completed our paperwork had to call another office and had step-by-step guidance over the phone on what needs to be done.
Next important task is to buy Rydlyme, so that Glen can give the generator and engine raw water system a good anti-calc flush before we leave. We have the distributor address plotted on google maps, but once there we learn they moved elsewhere. Eventually we manage to find a new address and a phone number, and good thing we called before we drove there: the address on Google is wrong. Hm, maybe this distributor has too much business and they want to make it hard for the clients to come to them. Once there, we buy 6 gallons of Rydlyme. That should last us for a while! It certainly dents our pocket @ $42 per gallon.
Happy with our successes, we head for the nearest wood oven pizzeria to celebrate with some junk food. It is 3pm by now and we are hungry. While waiting for our pizza our eyes are glued to the TV screen where the weather channel broadcasts severe weather alert for our area: storms, tornadoes, etc. Some very dark clouds outside, this front is definitely coming our way. So we immediately decide we drive back to Cloudy Bay after we eat. Forget the other tasks on today’s to-do list.
Well, drive back preferably via an orthopedics doctor, as my toe doesn’t seem to make good progress. We call few clinics and the best we can get is an appointment for next week. Too late, we’ll be gone by then. And when we actually speak to an orthopedist, she confirms that all they could do was strap it to the next toes.
By the time we leave the dinner it is pouring with rain. To drive back towards Herrington we have to pass over Annapolis bridge, and we worry the bridge might close if there is a tornado alert. But it’s all good, only very slow traffic in extremely heavy rain.
In Deale we have a short stop at the Do it Best hardware store. Oh, lots of memories we have of this place. I think we drove to it probably every day last October when Cloudy Bay was in the yard. This time we buy garden wire for Glen to manufacture a birds-landing-preventer on top of the mast and along the boom.
Back at the dinghy there isn’t much water in it, so probably our bed is still dry on Cloudy Bay. We left the hatches closed on vent, as usual, and the wind can blow the rain through the little gap.
We warm up with a cup of tea and we play doctor again, to attempt save my toe from pointing towards the top of the mast forever. Google images are our source of inspiration on how to strap broken toes. And digging through all our boxes of bandages we find surgical tape and crape bandage. After few attempts and ouches my broken toe is nested in a bundle of crape bandage, hopefully holding it firm to the next toes. At least now I can’t actually see it pointing the wrong way! Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.
Then start the evening jobs, which are mostly related to admin on internet. Paying bills (ouch our budget, when we pay the boat insurance invoice) and more items listed for sale on eBay (good news is we also sold the evaporator air-conditioner).
Before we know it it’s passed midnight and we head to bed exhausted. Doesn’t feel like we did much progress today, we’ll have to catch up tomorrow.