Rock Hall Regatta: Up With The Sticks

Despite the luxury of being based practically at the site of the regatta for both the Chestertown and Rock Hall regattas, Silver Heel is almost exclusively a Saturday morning rigging crew.  Chalk it up to laziness, lack of numbers, or the attraction of the pool, but we rarely make it out the dock to rig the masts on Friday evening.

A way better sight on Saturday morning than when the mast is horizontal.

Which made this Friday evening an exception.  With our resident Chairman of the Boards Joe Adams having built a nifty brace to rest the foremast on while slotting the base into the pin (something we’d seen used on a few other boats, admittedly), raising the billion pound fore is a lot less of a pain this year, so we were feeling pretty ambitious this evening.  With the sun sinking fast on an ideal Eastern Shore July evening,  we mustered enough crew to get both sticks up in a matter of minutes.  This was going to make Saturday morning way more pleasant, as we weren’t going to be greeted with the fore first thing after waking up.  We lay the main across the hull, satisfied to wait until the morning for the much easier mast, and made the Heel fast to our bitchin’ tender, Yetsgo.

Walking up the dock, all felt pretty deserving of the crab salad my grandmother had waiting for us in the house.  Of course, we weren’t yet even approaching the amount of Friday preparedness displayed week after week by the crew of Mystery, who were ghosting back to their dock across the Chester as we sat down for dinner.  Oh well, there’s always next year…

Rock Hall Regatta: Escape from DC

Log canoe weekends always start with a ride.  Trapped in the gray cubicle in Washington, DC all week, I can’t escape my professional captivity without a little help from a friend.  In most cases, the prospect of driving two hours each way and being detained for the entire weekend discourages even the strongest of friends from offering a ride.  When the two hours end on the Eastern Shore, however, and particularly at Bachelor’s Hope Farm in Chestertown, the task of finding wheels becomes considerably easier.  When the weekend-long detainment prominently figures log canoes, my grandparents’ pool, and American made Budweisers that flow like wine, a stranger could likely be convinced to lend me his front seat for the weekend.

This weekend, as has been the case several times in the past year, my friend from Georgetown Jon answered the call.  His family has roots on the Shore, so he never needs convincing.  At 3, I informed my boss that I’d be leaving at 3:30, and by 4 we were on our way out of the city.

Leaving town via some of the more charming parts of Northeast left little reason to complain, and Route 50 whisked us along to the Bay Bridge quickly enough, once again proving correct the inane signs on the Eastern Shore side of 50 that read, “Bay Bridge Bound?  50 is Swiftest!” (how else would one get to the Bay Bridge, I wonder).  Two hours later we were rolling down the gravel road at Bachelor’s Hope Farm in Chestertown, home of my grandparents, the Hewes’, and home-base for Silver Heel for the Chester River regattas.  The  noticeably relaxed atmosphere of the Farm and the Shore in general let us know that another Log Canoe weekend was underway.