What a strange feeling it was to awake in our aft cabin the morning after we arrived at Summit North and realize that we were no longer cruising, that we did not have to travel on our boat any more, that Summer School was now at a permanent mooring with all that this single fact implied. We awoke early and went about our morning routine as if we were trying to get underway, and then lingered over coffee staring at each other and wondering what we were going to do on this seemingly empty day. We had been traveling since the last day of May, covering almost 1500 miles in 43 days. Since Daytona Beach, Florida, we had cruised every day on our boat except for the break at Beaufort for the July Fourth weekend, cruising with a specific purpose and pushing hard to arrive at this destination. And now what?
Of course it did not take long for a whole new set of goals to replace our old ones. There was much that needed to be done, and much that we wanted to do before we could occupy our house in Easton in the middle of August. My brother Willie, at whose house we had stored our two cars, lived only about a half hour's drive away, and the day after we arrived he and his wife Marie brought our TransAm to the marina. Now we could do our shopping, get needed provisions and supplies and explore the local area.
We found that Summit North Marina, with a nominal address in Bear, Delaware, was located in a wooded and rural area. In fact, we discovered that the marina is actually part of the Lums Pond State Park, a large wooded park and recreation area on a hill above the marina and canal, centered around a lake of considerable size. Sharing the marina site was a moderately large boat dealer and marine repair facility. But aside from the marina and boat dealer there was nothing but woods and some rural property within walking or biking distance. Altogether, the marina and surrounding area seemed pastoral and pleasant, but a car was necessary for any shopping.
A drive of only five miles brought us to Highway 40 in Glasgow, Delaware, where there seemed to be almost unlimited shopping at upscale supermarkets, hardware stores, department stores, even a large boating supply store, which we found to be the very same boating store where we made our first purchases after buying Summer School in the summer of 1992, when we were staying on the Sassafras River in Georgetown, Maryland. Interstate 95 was five miles north of Glasgow. This would be our main route towards Philadelphia and thence to Easton when we finally took up our residence there. Until the development of the interstate system Highway 40 was the main east-west corridor through northern Delaware, and I had a few vague childhood memories of the farmlands and rural countryside along this highway. Now, however, the highway was congested and populated on both sides with various strip malls and shopping centers separated by large suburban housing developments. The whole area, apparently, had become a large bedroom community with the advent of Interstate 95. (We were later to find that to be on the interstate during rush hour was almost suicidal.) However, south of Highway 40 the area quickly reverted to its former rural character complete with roadside vegetable stands, which we were especially delighted to find.
As we came to know the marina in the days following our arrival our reactions varied between joy and gratitude for our good fortune in finding such a suitable home for our boat, and consternation and dismay at some of the conditions that existed. The marina itself occupies a basin accessed through a comparatively narrow half-mile long channel off the north shore of the canal about midway through its twelve-mile length. There is no current in the basin, which is a relief after coping with the usual 2-3mph currents in the canal proper. Neither is there much wind since the basin is surrounded by hills that are 50-70ft. high. And the inlet to the basin is sufficiently narrow and long so that the docks are little affected by boats transiting the canal, a fortunate condition since the C&D canal is regularly used by large ships such as tankers and container ships. The marina thus gave excellent protection to moored boats and, we learned, it was a well-known "hurricane hole" throughout the surrounding coastal area. Even the tides posed no problems due to the relatively new system of floating docks, which allowed boats to be tied firmly and securely in their slips. (No slack had to be left in the dock lines to accommodate the rising and falling of the boat relative to the docks since the docks and boats floated on the tides together.) We were very pleased at the security afforded by the marina. Not only would this ease our minds while living more than a hundred miles away, but it would allow us to leave the boat unattended for extended periods of time.
In contrast to the security, the administration and maintenance of the marina caused us concern and even aggravation. Summit North was a large marina with 250 slips that could accommodate boats up to 125 feet long. The dock structure seemed to be fairly new and well designed. Each slip had full-length finger piers and a lighted service pedestal that included water, a telephone jack and 240/120 volt, 50/30 amp. service. Situated as it was between the Delaware River and Bay on one side of the canal, and the Chesapeake Bay watershed on the other side, the marina was in an ideal position to be a popular and heavily used boating facility, and whoever built it had constructed a first-class structure. Yet when we arrived in mid-July most of the slips were empty. In fact, because the marina had not received necessary periodic dredging, many of the slips were totally useless. I have photographs showing whole docks resting on bare exposed mud at low tide; at high tide the water in their slips was only one to three feet deep. And as we had found, the entrance channel to the marina basin had silted over to the extent that it was barely passable even at high tide with our four-foot draft. Deep draft sailboats would not be able to transit this channel at all, which explained the fact that there were very few sailboats moored at the marina. Evidently some inadequate attempts at dredging had been started before we arrived; there was a small dredge on a raft (too small to be called a barge) anchored near the entrance channel, and pipes were haphazardly piled on the dock nearest the entrance, but we never saw any activity with this equipment despite what Doug had told us when we arrived. It seemed to me that the dredging equipment was much too small to be adequate for the amount of material that had to be removed even from the entrance channel, not to mention all the docking areas that had become useless due to accumulated silt. Rick, the marina manager, seemed to be amazingly unconcerned about these problems. He sat in his large private office wearing his gold chains, flowered shirts and yachting shoes, busy at the keyboard of his computer (he considered himself to be something of an expert), and told me the dredge was broken and they were waiting for parts. Then he told me that they were waiting for a larger dredge to be delivered. Finally, after my repeated inquiries, he told me that I was worrying too much, that the bottom was soft mud and it would not hurt my boat if we had to plow our way through it. It quickly became obvious that nothing was going to change. Nancy and I decided that we would try to keep our heads down and our mouths shut, to be thankful for what we had, and transit the marina entrance only at high tide. In all the time we were at Summit North (almost a complete year as it turned out) no dredging was ever done and most of the slips remained empty.
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It was relatively easy to keep to ourselves at Summit North because there was much boat work that needed to be done, and our time was thus occupied for most of the month between our arrival at the marina and the move into our house in Easton. Of course, everything had to be thoroughly cleaned from the bilge and the engine room, to the anchor tackle, the decks and the bridge. We cleaned, checked and serviced all engines: the six cylinder Perkins diesel that was the main boat engine, the old, loud and troublesome 7.5 Kw. Onan generator ("Tommy") that was such a source of problems and frustration when we were cruising the Florida Keys the previous year, even the 3 hp. outboard motor that we used for our dinghy Recess, though it was relatively new. When all the immediately necessary work had been completed we began the major project of cleaning and waxing the hull. All boats that cruise for extended time on the ICW acquire an unsightly brown stain on the bow and all along the waterline due to the dissolved tannin in the ICW waters. This had to be removed, and then we applied a layer of protective wax to the entire hull, buffing it to a high polish. The full-length finger pier was especially useful during this work. When we were finished Summer School virtually gleamed and drew numbers of appreciative comments from people passing on the dock.
Ordinarily we enjoyed working together on our boat, but the work we did that summer became somewhat onerous due to what became known as Heat Wave 95. Almost every day, 20 days out of our first 21 days at Summit North, the temperature was well into the nineties and the heat index was above 100. There were many record-breaking temperatures in the area during this time. On July 15, for example, we had a high temperature of 103 with a heat index of 129. Many were dying in the urban areas of the eastern cities. By the end of July, Heat Wave 95 was the lead story on the evening news. The city of Philadelphia was giving away free fans. On August 2 the death toll was reported to be 57.
On what was to be the last day of the heat wave, we had one notable diversion from our boat work, and that was a visit to St. Michaels, Maryland, during the annual Crabfest celebration. Everyone we met at Summit North, it seemed, asked us if we had been to St. Michaels and recommended that we go there. This small old waterman's town on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, in the middle region of the bay, had become a very popular boating destination. We had read about it in our cruising guides and were attracted by its old maritime history (about 300 years), but we had avoided going there by boat just as we had avoided visiting other popular, and therefore crowded destinations such as Annapolis and the Baltimore inner harbor. But St. Michaels was only about 75 miles by highway from the C&D Canal and we had a pleasant drive through the Delaware and Maryland countryside. Upon arrival we found St. Michaels had a charm that, in our eyes, exceeded its various descriptions. There were old attractive houses lining small streets clustered around a picturesque little harbor complete with swans and a dinghy dock for the convenience of boats anchored nearby. Despite the heat we thoroughly enjoyed walking around the town. Best of all for us was the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum located on Navy Point on the north shore of the harbor. The museum was interesting in its own right, but it was also the center of the Crabfest activities. We enjoyed crab cake sandwiches and crab meat potato skins washed down with cold beer. Inside the museum we found that a well-known Chesapeake Bay author was conducting a book-signing. I talked with Larry Chowning at some length and bought a copy of his book, Barcat Skipper, which is comprised of the tales of a Tangier Island waterman. This was of great interest to me because, in my various readings, I had become fascinated with Tangier Island, a remote island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, accessible only by water, where there was a small population that still derived its livelihood from the bay, where people could trace their residency on the island back for generations, and where, supposedly, people still spoke with the accents and inflections that were prevalent hundreds of years ago. Someday, I hoped, Nancy and I could go there in Summer School.
After our trip to St. Michaels, which we made on August 5, our attentions became progressively more focused on our new land home in Easton. The person at Lafayette responsible for faculty house rentals had assured us that our house would be ready for occupancy by August 15. Accordingly we had contacted our mover in Colorado to make arrangements for our furniture to be delivered. We had a telephone on our boat (another amenity at Summit North) and the mover agreed to have the van driver call us a day or two before delivery so that we could drive to Easton and be at the house when the moving van arrived. This seemed a simple and straightforward arrangement but it was to become difficult and complicated to a degree that we little imagined.
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Thank you for sharing your wonderful experience. ;)
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