Sailboat Show & Moving South, #25-42

Jimmy Lee
7 days ago
7 min read

Updated: 14 hours ago

Annapolis, Maryland to Deltaville, Virginia

Thursday, October 8 – Thursday, October 15

109 nautical miles (NM) / 125 statute miles

Our time in Annapolis culminated with the Annapolis Boat show and with that we have departed and are heading south.

Sailboat Show

Thursday, October 8 – Sunday, October 12

This week we attended the Annapolis Sailboat show for our third time. The first time was in 2017 before we owned Utopia, and we flew up here and met some friends from our yacht club (Apalachee Bay Yacht Club). We had a fun time and met a lot of cruisers that were traveling the world. At that time, we had a general desire to go sailing when we hit 62 and had not formed our plan to leave our work at the City of Tallahassee early. We were amazed by the number of boats and the vast number of sail-related vendors.

Looking at all the new boats

Fast forward to 2022 and we attended the Sailboat show a second time with our friends Cam and Denise. We had chartered a sailboat with these guys in 2018, so we knew we traveled well together. We flew again to Annapolis and got an Airbnb close to the action. By then, we had put our plan to full time cruise in full motion. Since 2017 we had 1) sold our house and most items in it 2) moved into a small apartment and continued to downsize and 3) bought Utopia in 2021 which is now our full-time cruising boat. We still worked at the City of Tallahassee, but we were on a fast track to retire at age 55 in October of 2023.

Now our present day- We have just completed our first two years of cruising, and we are at the boat show again, but this time on our own boat. This was a specific goal of ours to do this and we are so proud we have accomplished it.

Since we attended Cruiser’s University early in the week, we get full access to the boat show, and we can even enter the gates before they officially open on Thursday. We really wanted to go on Thursday since this is the Preview Day which has fewer people in attendance. We ended up concentrating on getting on a few boats that were interesting. We have no desire to purchase another boat, but we do like to look at new boats to get ideas for Utopia. We ended up looking at a Halberg-Rassy 57, Island Packet 439, Passport 545 and a Blue Water Yacht 56. They are all very beautiful, and very expensive.

The way the boat show works for a lot of the boats is that the boat builders will get an existing owner to attend the boat show since a lot of boats are built to order and they don’t really have inventory in stock just laying around, so, most boats in the show are privately owned. In exchange, the boat builder will pay for the owners’ shoreside accommodation and have the boat detailed (which can be pricy) since they want a shiny boat in the show. Some friends that we met in the Keys in January 2024 were showing their boat Sorella (Antares Hybrid Catamaran). We hung out on their boat for a bit on Thursday (and again on Saturday). It was great catching up with them.

After lunch at the Fleet Reserve on Thursday we talked to a few vendors including The Yacht Rigger (which did some work for us in St. Petersburg) and Blu3. Blu3 makes a floating battery powered dive compressor. We have been wanting one of these for cleaning the bottom of Utopia and finally pulled the trigger for one. It can also be used for snorkeling reefs. The battery has about 40 minutes life (and a second battery to drop in) so we should have some fun with it. We had a full day of boat show ended up going back to the boat for dinner.

A few boat bucks were spent

Friday was another full day of boat show where we ended up focusing on visiting vendors and looking at our lengthy list of items we wanted for the boat. Our list is long, and we are focusing on items that we need to get prior to heading out of the U.S. since we plan on having the boat out of the country for the foreseeable future. We ended up not purchasing anything today, but we did look at mattress toppers and looked at various safety gear.

Friday night we went to a meet up with host of podcast "How Not to Sail" in which Sondra and I were on a couple of years ago. Bradford the host insisted it was one of his most popular episodes due to the mishaps on Utopia.

Saturday was another day at the boat show. We wandered around some more and shopped for two new life jackets and two Personal Life Beacons (PLB). A PLB is a little item you wear on your life vest. In the case you fall into the water it sends out an alert on AIS and on VHF radios to boats in the area (including your own). So, in the event one of us goes in the water, the person driving the boat can find their way back to the beacon in the water by looking at the chartplotter. It’s an item we have been wanting for some time, and we wanted to get it before we leave the U.S. We ended up back at the boat in the afternoon and had dinner onboard. I needed some decompression time due to the crowds.

Sunday was the last day of the Sailboat show but due to a nor’easter and gale warring we ended up only getting off the boat for a couple of hours to do some grocery shopping. We had gotten three days of boat show, and we were satisfied with the amount of time spent there. Right now, the general plan is to leave Tuesday morning heading south but due to the weather it might still be up in the air when we leave. As in most things cruising the weather dictates your movements.

Getting ready to depart and departure

Monday, October 13 – Wednesday, October 15

The boat show is over, and the weather is poor this Monday. We have decided to stay put until Wednesday to allow the weather to exit the area. Present plan is to do three days of hops starting Wednesday and be in Norfolk by Friday. We took one venture off the boat to walk in the rain on Monday, and again as the rain stopped on Tuesday (and the sun peaked out). Tuesday we ventured out to dinner with the Whitlocks. We also did our normal preparation for the boat since we haven’t moved it in over three weeks.

Annapolis, MD to Solomons, MD (50 NM)

We woke up Wednesday before sunrise to make the 7 am bridge opening out of Spa Creek Bridge. It was nice seeing Annapolis at sunrise as we motored away from the city. It was a nice sunny cool day, and we had a wonderful downwind 40-mile motor sail to Solomons Maryland. We stopped in Solomons back in late June on our way up and it was nice to visit a second time. We were keen on getting to our anchorage a bit early, so we motor sailed the entire way. We could have sailed the whole way, but we would have gotten in after 5 and we wanted to get there by 3 pm. Since the weather is changing there is a mass exodus of other cruisers heading south. At any one point on the Bay you could see dozens of other sailboats going in the same direction as Utopia. We went out for a bite with the Whitlock's and walked the town a bit and retired early since we were leaving at sunup on Thursday.

Solomons, MD to Deltaville, VA (59 NM)

We left at sunrise on a cloudless and cool (50 deg) morning at around 7:20 am. Leaving Solomons, I was a little concerned that we would not have enough wind to sail but I did not need to worry about that since once we entered the Bay winds piped up to 17 knots and we were sailing nicely downwind with a poled-out jib and main. We kept this configuration throughout the entire day except for gybing the main at times and going wing on wing some. As the day went by winds and waves built considerably. It was common to be sailing in 25 knots of breeze with very short choppy waves. If this was an upwind sail it would have been extremely uncomfortable, but since this was downwind it was like a slightly rolling sleigh ride with Utopia going over 8 knots at times. We were getting overpowered in the gusts (30+ knots), so we did reef the main (and roll in the jib) and later we were sailing under main alone but still at 6-7 knots. The seas got choppy when we crossed the confluence of the Chesapeake by and the Potomac River, but it was not too bad.

On the move down the Chesapeake

The only issue we had was that we did have an uncontrolled jibe (where the boom slams from one side of the boat to the other) when our preventer block exploded. We were sailing by “the Lee” a bit when the block broke. I had wondered if that block was a bit small for that job and I should have addressed it beforehand (actually the part that attaches the block to the boat is what broke). Chalk that up to a nice learning experience.

We exited the Bay at Deltaville and anchored in a very protected pretty bay in the late afternoon. Overall, an epic trip down the Chesapeake. Next week we enter back into Norfolk and more than likely will retrace our steps down the ICW.

Other Things of Interest

Sondra and I might be changing our plans a bit for this upcoming season. All along we were going to head to eastern Caribbean through the Bahamas but in the last few days we have been weighing the possibility of heading to the Western Caribbean for a season and doing the eastern the following year. Instead of being in Grenada next summer it might be Rio Dulce in Guatemala. Stay tuned.
There is such a thing as too much boat show.
These last three weeks in Annapolis have been wonderful. Watching the end of summer and fall enter has been really cool. Speaking of cool it has been cooling off over the past couple of weeks. Time to head south!!
Don't cheap out on important gear (like a block that secures your preventer).

Post 25-42