Wednesday 5 September – Thursday 6 September

Here she is!  This beautiful Gemini 105 Mc catamaran is our home away from home for the next week.

Yesterday, Paul, Susannah, Townes and I made the drive from the Outer Banks to Annapolis, Maryland.  For some reason, we entered a time warp and the trip took us hours longer than usual, but we eventually made it to our destination at Annapolis Bay Charters.

We stowed our gear and went into downtown Annapolis for our now-traditional pre-sail dinner of sushi and ice cream, before settling in to enjoy our first night aboard.

And because I know you’ve all been waiting for it (Carly), we would like to re-introduce everyone’s favorite segment, which highlights the most hilarious thing my little cousin Townes says each day:

TR Quote of the Day:

In response to comments that his hair is getting rather long…

“If you give me a ponytail, I will shriek and regurgitate my dinner.”

This morning, we tied up all our loose ends while Marcus checked us out.  The captain and first mate made sure that everything was shipshape.

We set off under an overcast sky and some slight rain, but unfortunately not much wind.  We set a course for Baltimore and motored for the first little bit of our journey before the wind picked up to 15-20 knots and we were able to let the jib out.

Townes steered the boat for the majority of the trip today and did a great job!  It was funny to watch the people on a couple of boats that passed us realize that we had a seven-year-old at the helm.

We sailed for a few hours until the wind totally died again, and at Townes’ request, fired up the Iron Jenny to take us the rest of the way into the Inner Harbor.  It’s cool that Baltimore is our first destination this year, since it was the last destination on our 2011 trip.

We docked right next to our slip from last year and Susannah immediately took care of the important stuff: boat drinks!

We were in the midst of enjoying a couple of those (not Townes, don’t worry) and a delicious home-cooked spaghetti dinner when out of nowhere we saw what looked like a moving apartment building gliding past our windows, immediately followed by a really loud BOOM and our boat shaking.  In fact, it was not an apartment building, but a gigantic cruiser being driven by two rather incompetent sailors, and they’d completely sideswiped us.  The wife also immediately started yelling at us.  Luckily, there was no damage to the Bay Cat… but not cool, people.  Not cool.

After that excitement, we disembarked and headed into downtown Baltimore to check out the evening’s main event: the Orioles vs. Yankees game!

Oriole Park at Camden Yards is a REALLY nice stadium.  We were all remarking on how clean it was, and how easy to move around it was even though the place was absolutely packed to the gills.  We hadn’t gotten tickets ahead of time and ended up scoring some cheap nosebleed seats – perfect for us, since we were much more interested in seeing everything that was going on than in seeing it up close.

So much orange!  Fun fact: there were more people in that stadium than the entire population of Dare County.

The game was really fun (Orioles fans are INTENSE!  I do not think the Yankees felt very welcomed) but Townes got a little restless so we ended up skipping out after a few innings.  What we did see of the actual game was great, and it was fun just exploring the stadium and getting to see the energy of the crowd.

And now, we’re tired.  We haven’t decided on a course for tomorrow yet – the forecast calls for north wind, so we’ll see how that holds in the morning.  Who knows where we’ll be blogging from next time!

TR Quote of the Day:

While singing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep:”

“We could have had it badder

We rolled in the deep pee

You had my heart, it’s fatter

But then you took it away”