Choptank River

I think I’m going to call this blog “A Tale of two Ships”.

We had a lazy morning and didn’t leave Rhode River til almost noon, this put us a bit behind schedule for our next destination which ended up being much further up the Choptank river than anticipated. The winds were light so we mostly motored. It was during our first few hours that we saw this massive tanker(first picture) coming toward us at 16 knots, so since I had learned my lesson from the other day, I made haste and got as far away from him as I could. At a closing rate of about 24 knots it does not take long for the ship to catch up to you! We noticed there was a good bow wave that was being pushed by him and as we were a good ½ mile away I didn’t think there would be any issue with the wave. I decided that when it came to us, I would go straight into it, as the bow is the best spot to take a wave (so I thought). Well, we thought the bottom of the ocean had dropped out when we hit the wave, we dropped a good 5-6 ft which does not normally seem that bad but I think the problem is the period of the wave is extremely small and caused the front of the hull to not have any water under it! A wall of water came over the boat and struck the dodger, water ran through areas around the dodger and soaked the cushions plus a pile of water covered the decks. Some even went through the dorade boxes.

An hour later a second ship was steaming toward us, so of course we went away from him. It was not long after that he turned about 10-20 degrees and was pointing at us - eek, we turned back the other way then - sort of like a bad horror movie… Anyways we managed to stay out of his way and prepared for the big wave by making sure all the ports were closed and the hatch boards were in place.

This time I thought it would be better to run away from the wave IE: put our stern to the wave and see how that would work. Well wouldn’t you know it, there was virtually no wave at all! Both of the big ships were about the same size and travelling at the same speed. Bit of a mystery, sort of like why the peanut butter sandwich always falls face down…..

Anyways, the trip up the actual river took much longer than expected, we finally got settled in at 6:00 PM in a big cove on the Choptank River (Madison Bay) plus we had the place to ourselves, nice.