16 May 14

Finished “1776” by David McCullough last night. Excellent read; George Washington was an amazing man and almost certainly is single-handedly responsible for keeping the Continental Army together long enough to win the Revolutionary War. Had anyone else been in command in 1776, we would all be British citizens. It was raining and cool this morning, so we decided to wait until the rain was over to head to Urbanna. I called the marina to reserve a spot, but was told that they had a club coming in and we could not get in until Saturday afternoon after 17:30. So, we started collecting rain water and collected 4 or 5 gallons without too much trouble before the rain stopped. We got the anchor up just after noon and sailed nearly all the way to Urbanna. We anchored in Urbanna Creek and dinked ashore to see about getting a 2.5 gallon collapsible water carrier; nobody had one, so we bought 2 gallon jugs of water from the grocery store and took them back to the boat. Then I refilled them and a 2 gallon bucket and a 2 gallon ice chest 4 times and lugged them all back to the boat, for a total of 26 gallons of fresh water, which should tide us over until tomorrow afternoon. Turns out, there is not a yacht club coming in but a “cocktail class” bunch of little power boats having some sort of meet tomorrow and they are tying up the whole marina, although there are plenty of slips empty. We went into town and had dinner at Something Different, Virginia’s version of BBQ. While waiting at the bar for our table, we ran into one of the presenters - Keith Ruse of Deltaville Marine - at the AGLCA rendezvous, small world. Ash and Ronda and their 3 girls drove over from Gloucester and met us for a drink after dinner.  

17 May 14

We woke up to the sound of racing engines, as the racers - 8 foot long, hand-made hard racing dinghies, with 6 HP engines - got out for their early morning exercise. It turns out we had ring-side seats to a full day of racing, so we sat on the boat all day and let the spectacle unfold before us. Don’t know that I would pay to see this, but it was good fun to watch as we were here anyway and it was free. We had dinner aboard.