Reversing Course

August 7, 2024

So when we last visited Tardis months ago, she was in dry rack winter storage at Sunset Harbor Marina north of Baltimore. The plan was to move her south down the Chesapeake to Hampton Marina, staging for a final jump this fall to South Carolina.

That’s not going to happen. Molly and I took a trip to Charleston last spring for the Charleston Festival, had a great time eating shrimp and admiring historic homes, then headed further south to scout out a winter home for Tardis. But while the charming downs such as Beaufort and Port Royal are still charming, go one mile inland and the amount of ugly strip center and tract housing development is just mind-boggling. Marina prices in Hilton Head are worse than Long Island Sound — when you can get in. And I just miss be able to get to the boat to fool around and do odd jobs. As a wooden boat, Tardis needs a lot of TLC to keep her looking sharp, but as I have learned with the boat in Hampton, the 10-hour drive through Baltimore and DC to get to her is just a killer.

So Tardis will come back up the Chesapeake this fall to Sunset Harbor, cruise the Eastern Shore in the spring, hopefully with Molly joining me for part of the trip, then back to her slip at Guilford Yacht Club.

Anyway, the spring trip south was great. Went over from Baltimore to beautiful Osprey Point Marina in Rock Hall, then crawled creeks down to Oxford, including Dividing Creek, which the guidebooks say is one of the most beautiful on the Chesapeake. I heartily agree. It was the last week of April, and we were the only boat.

Oxford even held a parade for us to open the boating/tourist season. Wonderful town, off the beaten path with totally redone Safe Harbor Marina. Safe Harbor is a conglomerate that has been buying marinas everywhere, and while they are expensive, they seem to have done a lot of investment in their new properties.

Stopped in Solomons, another great town that is sort of a boating suburb of Washington, DC, and rented a car so I could come home for John’s master’s degree graduation. Then I creek-crawled through Mobjack Bay down to Hampton Marina and Dry Storage, a really nice place with very friendly people.

The only boat work I did over the winter was a total rebuild of the forward faux butterfly hatch. I forgot to put gutters around the Lexan, and as water built up I had constant small leaks. Plus the Lexan scratched if you looked at it and was very hard to keep clean. So I replaced the Lexan with acrylic (Plexiglass) and refinished the whole works. It looked beautiful when done — but there was still one leak, quickly fixed with a bead of G-Flex, the miracle epoxy that will stick to anything.

I also had to make a quick trip down to Hampton in June, since when they were lifting the boat into the racks, I noticed a spot where the bottom paint was failing and looked rough. It turns out that the padding on one of the trailer bunks had failed and the bunk was rubbing up against the hull. Easy enough to fix because the tough old Xynole fabric had only broken through in one tiny place and just needed smoothing out with epoxy filler. But the ordeal of the trip down and back plus the heat and humidity on a short cruise afterwards convinced me that Tardis eventually needs to come home.