Another storm approaches, and we are Baltimore bound

With yet another tropical storm heading our way, we left the Sassafras River on the morning of September 22. We’re always making plans based on weather (of course!) and having anticipated this storm, we had already reserved a slip in a marina in Baltimore where we could tie Oestara up and wait it out safely.

Patrick and I have been to Baltimore a few times before, both by boat and by land, and we were looking forward to visiting again. It’s a fun town, and has many conveniences close to the water. Cecelia has also been to Baltimore, but she didn’t remember anything about it (I think she was four years old, so that’s fair).

We did manage to have a nice sail for the first part of the journey, but we dropped our sails as we got closer to the port. There’s a fair bit of traffic going in and out, and typically those are much bigger boats than we are!

Fun fact: there’s a buoy near the Francis Scott Key bridge that approximates the location from which Francis Scott Key watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry and was inspired to write “The Star Spangled Banner.” We weren’t close enough to get a good picture of the buoy, which is removed every winter and reset each spring by the Coast Guard, but we did spot it from a distance.

We pulled into the Anchorage Marina, near Canton and Fells Point, on the north side of the inlet. We were met at our slip by the waterfront manager and one of the dockhands. When we got tied up, they gave us a warm welcome with information about the surrounding area, as well as a booklet of drink recipes compiled by the marina community. What a fun way to greet your guests!

The marina was a nice spot to settle in for a few days. It was truly a luxury to be at a dock, where unlimited water and power were ours to command! The marina also hosted coffee and donuts for everyone on Saturday mornings, live music on Saturday nights, and had good laundry and bathroom facilities. And just a few blocks away, we had access to a grocery store, hardware store, liquor store, West Marine, Starbucks, and more bars and restaurants than we could ever need.

Before we got to Saturday, though, there was this amazing sunset on Friday night. Our featured photo at the top of this post is from the same evening. The glow was pretty incredible!

Once we were done soaking up the sunset, we set to work plugging things in to use or charge. With unlimited power, we could have any electronics we wanted to make use of plugged in or turned on at the same time. (This is not the case when we’re not at a dock!) We reveled in our unrestricted Starlink use to catch up on some YouTube sailing videos on our projector, while I worked on some photo editing and blog posting.

With some rainy weather on its way, we were also glad to have this chance to top up all our electronics and our boat batteries too, as the solar panels would not be very helpful for a few days…