10/3/14
Nabbs Creek, Chesapeake Bay
Posted by Bill

The weather is supposed to turn for a day as a cold front moves in. There is also a coastal flood warning along the east coast and the bay area. This is why we needed to get the boat here and I am glad we made it before the front.

It was nice not to have to get up and start moving for a change. Instead, while Tricia worked, I did some boat maintenance. First thing was to get the diesel exhaust stain off the transom (back of the boat). Our model of Island Packet boat is known to develop a “mustache” along the transom due to the way it slopes. It captures the exhaust which allows the mustache to develop. Having the dinghy hanging in the davits doesn’t help either. We usually have a minimal amount of mustache that I try to keep clean. After pushing the boat so hard, we had a major stain that just looked terrible. I was beginning to think that we had some sort of engine problem but I am chalking it up to the fact that the engine has never been run for more than 4 hours at a time up to this trip, and figured we were just burning out some crud (great technical analysis…I know). Contributing, we have 90 gallon fuel tank, and we usually only use 20 or so gallons a year. We religiously use stabilizer, but we have been doing this for 4 years and I think it was the same with the previous owner for some time. So we had fuel that didn’t make for the most efficient engine combustion. So I cleaned the transom and waxed it while standing in the dinghy, polished some stainless steel that was developing rust. We will have to see if the normal or bad mustache reappears.

I also cleaned out the dinghy…it was pretty dirty…and put the outboard engine on it. Mike had a diver showing up to clean the bottom of his sailboat and also clean the prop so he could move it over to the other side of us. We had the diver check our bottom and everything looked “really good”, so happy captain. We moved Mike’s boat over and started prepping for possible flood waters. It was forecast to potentially be 2 feet over normal which would put the dock underwater, so we moved in with Mike and Sue for the night.

Once the boats were prepped, we all jumped in the dinghy and motored across Nabbs Creek to a restaurant/bar that was on the water. It was always fun to do that in our home waters, but the number of places you could do that was so limited. The bay has so many places to go to by water. This was fun. We chowed on mussels, steamed shrimp, bacon wrapped shrimp (they were awesome…everything’s better with bacon!), crab cakes and sliders. We also drank “Orange Crushes” which did taste just like Orange Crush and had a delightful kick…lol. The food was great.

Let’s hope the flood doesn’t float the boats away!