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We spent another day at St. Michael’s to celebrate our 40^th wedding anniversary.  We had a nice breakfast at a place called Carpenter’s Saloon.  After we had eaten, Bill got a slip of paper out of his billfold.  It had the name of our breakfast place and the owner’s name, which had been given to him by a fellow mariner in Hilton Head.  After paying our bill, Bill asked a waitress if the woman he’d surmised was the owner had the same name as the one Jack had given him.  It was indeed, and Bill and she talked about his friend.  It was so funny that we ended up there for breakfast without any forethought and it was only when Bill was taking out his credit card that he remembered the paper.  Small world!

After breakfast, we donned our bathing suits and headed for the pool.  The temperatures have been brutally hot.  I know we’d wished for warmer weather, but this is just another example of being careful what you wish for.  It is hotter than the hinges of hell, as Cousin Talmage would say.  Makes you want to be a better Christian!  The pool was comfortably cool, and we enjoyed taking a vacation from our vacation.  As I went to check on the laundry, I noticed the truck bringing more ice cubes and block ice to the marina.  After I returned to the pool, the dockhands were pitching bags and blocks of ice over the fence into the pool area.  Seems, when they get “new” ice, they just dispose of the old by dumping it in the swimming pool!  They must have put 15-20 bags of crushed ice into the pool and two big blocks.  Someone remarked that they had done the same thing yesterday.  Well, it certainly did cool the pool down, and we were treated to another new experience we’d never seen before! 

After showers and a few cocktails while waiting for the temps to cool, we went to the St. Michaels Bistro for dinner.  When we walked in the door, the hostess said she needed to check if the kitchen was still open.  Fortunately, it was, but she said we’d be the last guests to be served.  We split a salad and Bill ordered crab cakes (surprise!) and I ordered soft shell crabs.  Then we swapped one of each.  This was Bill’s first time eating a soft shell crab, and I was surprised that he liked it.  The couple next to us was from Baltimore but had a house in St. Michaels.  We learned from them that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld both had houses here and were their neighbors.  They said they often saw them in the Bistro for dinner.  I don’t think I’ll get into a political discussion here, but the couple’s opinion of their neighbors seemed to track closely with ours. 

There were several boats at the marina without air conditioning, and we couldn’t imagine how hot it must have been for them that evening.  Our air conditioner had frozen up once, but Bill did something that unfroze it.  We are a little concerned about our refrigerator in this hot weather.  The temperature is hovering closer to 50 than to 45 where we’d like it to be, but it seems to be holding its own even with this brutal heat.

One last comment about St. Michaels.  It is a neat town and the museum shouldn’t be missed, but if you plan to visit, try to plan your trip during the week.  Otherwise, the weekend for the marina goes up to $3 per foot with a minimum of $120 no matter the size of your boat, whereas during the week it is $2 a foot with a minimum of $90.  Also, the laundry facilities are expensive.

We left the marina fairly early after fueling up.  It was another hot hazy day and we had to motor until we reached The Bay.  Then, we raised our sails and turned off the motor.  We had winds of about 10 knots, and we sailed for about 2 hours, probably out of our way, but it was what I had imagined sailing on The Chesapeake would be.  When we turned into the Choptank River we had to take down the sails as the wind had clocked around to the south.  When we turned north to Harris Creek and our anchorage in Dun Bay, we were headed down wind at about the same speed that the wind was blowing so we felt the heat once again.  Bill threaded his way through sandbars and shallow water to the bay where we anchored in another lovely setting.  Only one other boat joined us and was anchored a distance away.  Once anchored Bill dove under the boat to check the propeller to see why we seemed to be going a knot slower than we had before, but found nothing.  Then he washed the boat sides while I pulled him around in the dinghy.  I had planned to go for a swim, but it got too late.  We were entertained by more mute swans and many rays that surfaced and splashed around the boat.  We took showers and cooked hot dogs, but it was still uncomfortably hot.  We had all the hatches open, the screens in and even the wind scoop on the forward hatch.  When Bill got the scoop out of the V-berth, he informed me that he had found my sweat pants that we’d been looking for for the past 6 weeks.  Isn’t it ironic?  Even with the fans going, the temperature was still about 90 in the boat when we turned in.  Needless to say, it was a very uncomfortable night.  Even more uncomfortable was the fact that the refrigerator was registering over 50 degrees at bedtime.  By the time we got up, the temperature was down around 48 (in the refrigerator) and 84 in the boat.  We knew from the NOAA forecast we were in for another hot, hazy day. 

We pulled anchor around 10:00 and cautiously made our way out past several watermen who were setting trot lines.  We were deathly afraid we’d snag one with our propeller as there wasn’t much room to maneuver, but Bill got us back into deep water.  It was so hazy on the Choptank, it looked like fog.  It only took a couple of hours to motor to Oxford.  We had thought we might sail for awhile, but the most wind we had was 4 knots, and most of the time it was dead calm and HOT, HOT, HOT!  We came into Mears Yacht Haven and the dockmaster who helped us dock said we could adjust our lines later and quickly headed back to her air conditioned office.  As soon as we could, we plugged into shore power and fired up the AC.  It was over 90 degrees in the boat and we were afraid it would freeze up again, but so far so good.  The refrigerator, however, was registering 51 degrees, which just is not satisfactory.  We bought a block of ice and put it in the fridge and had the temperature back down below 50 before we donned our suits and headed to the pool.  No one was dumping ice in this pool, but it was comfortable enough with the wind picking up a bit to give us a little cooling when we got out of the pool.  We met a couple with two young children who lived in Annapolis and had planned their boating vacation for early June when the weather wasn’t supposed to be so hot.  They are from Denmark originally.  He is the IT guy for The Washington Post and commutes by bus from Annapolis.  They both had fairly heavy accents and were semi-fluent in English, so I would guess they haven’t been here a long time.  Unfortunately for them, their boat (called “4 Danes”) is not air conditioned, so they are hoping the anticipated drop in temperature will come this evening. 

Actually, we are once again under a severe thunderstorm warning.  The harbourmaster said strong winds both tonight and tomorrow, with small craft warnings through tomorrow.  Therefore, we’ll probably stay here two days and tour the town on our bikes tomorrow.  We had dinner at Schooner’s Restaurant, where we think we ate when we cruised the Bay before with Bill’s cousin.  Bill has turned in with his latest Jack Reacher book and I’m trying to get this blog posted tonight.  Wish me luck!