A busy couple of days, but we made it to Washington, DC as planned today!
We are glad to be sitting still for a while now...we have been in 4 marinas in 4 days, and traveled 157 miles in that time. It is about 125 miles up the Potomac from the Bay to get to DC. We had mostly good weather, with rain only really hitting us when we were at a dock, and wind mostly always blowing in the right direction for comfortable travel. So...all in all, a bit hectic, but productive and enjoyable 4 days.
Bayside (in Colonial Beach) was a small marina, and one where we thought we might return for an extended stay later in the summer. But, we found the area to be a bit more depressed than we hoped, and the marina fine for a short stay, but not what we would chose for a longer visit.
Belmont Bay is a huge development about 25 miles south of DC, and largely populated by folks who commute to DC for work. Lots of construction...lots of condos...but not much for us as transient cruisers. The marina itself was nice, and fit the bill for transiting through on the way up the Potomac.
The Potomac starts out as a very wide and not very scenic river, but narrows as you make your way north and becomes quite pretty. One of the out of the ordinary happenings was when we exited Colonial Beach. The Navy has a practice firing range over this section of the river, and occasionally blocks off the majority of the waterway to traffic. You see...they like to fire these really large "guns" at targets in the water from long range, and they don't particularly like folks like us to be in the way! And certainly, we would rather be spectators than actual targets. Well...as we entered the river, we were immediately hailed on the radio by a Navy Range Control boat, and they were approaching our position as they were hailing us. This certainly gets ones attention!
To make a long story short, the range was "hot" and they were requesting that we re-route to the extremity of the range to make for safe passage. Obviously we were glad to comply. The only downside was that this added 3 miles or so to our already long day...but it worked out just fine. And unfortunately from our perspective, we never saw any large splashes from incoming artillery fire, so we are not certain that they were actually firing anything as we passed by.
Enough chatter...here are a few pics from the past few days.
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| One of our days of travel was entirely into the tidal current. It was running past this buoy at about 1.5 mph, which cut into our speed by that much, and added to the length of our travel day. It makes you feel like you are in slow motion some days. |
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| As we moved closer to DC, our imaginations ran wild with speculation about what secret government agencies might be up to. We're pretty certain that these were being used to talk to aliens. |
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| Here is our friendly Range Control Officer...making sure we were staying where we should be. |
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| Mount Vernon, George Washington's home. |
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| A couple of kids having a ball on a slightly windy day...just south of DC |
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| The Capitol from the Mall...just to prove that we made it to DC today. We took a walk for a couple of hours this afternoon...this is just about a 20 minute walk from our marina. |
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