Pea Soup, Anyone?

We weened ourselves off dockside life, yesterday by dropping the hook for the first time.   Between needing an anchorage near enough to our then-current position, one that would enable us settle in well before dusk in case it took us numerous tries to get the anchor set, and a thick fog that didn't clear until 10:00 our time underway was barely more than an hour--not much southerly progress, basically just across the Patuxent River.

Jast after the near miss.

Our decision to wait out the fog was confirmed when we saw two sailboats nearly bash into each other right in front of us.  For reasons we don't understand, neither had navigational lights lit, nor were they sounding their horns, which is more understandable--it was just past dawn--so it's not surprising that they nearly collided.

Precisely because we gave ourselves so much time to set the anchor, we got it on the second try.  Our traveling day was over by 12:30.  So what to do?  I decided to try out the oven by baking fresh bread.  It was not a huge success, but I credit its underperformance to bad yeast that didn't proof well.  Still quite edible, at least we thought so.  Jane made more successful use of her spare time by mixing up our first onboard batch of "Joy Juice."  It's our own sundowner drink recipe, but one, we've decided, which adapts itself to whatever we have on hand whenever we're inspired to whip up a batch.  That took three tries to "perfect."  Warmed by the heat of the oven, the bright sun, and significant quantities of Joy Juice, we barely minded that we were anchored by a naval air station carrying out training runs every few minutes.

Today, we are again blanketed by fog, but are thinking about maybe pushing our envelope.  We are very anxious to finally be out of Maryland and there's an anchorage we've chosen that we can get to before some bad weather sets in if we leave soon.  Otherwise, it will be somewhere much closer, still somewhere in Maryland to hunker down and wait out the blow.