Point Lookout

Point Lookout Marina,  N38 06.96 W76 24.02

 

(6/26/05) Well it’s settled.  We’ll rent a car and drive to West Charlton, attend to the house business, then return to Tarwathie by Saturday July, 2. 

Point Lookout is almost, but not quite as remote as Onancook Creek.  It is on the point of land with the Potomac on the left (looking north) and the Chesapeake on the right.  It's only 50 miles from Washington but it's a dead end road wise.  The nearest town, Lexington Park MD, is 20 miles away   Cell phones work only 2% of the time.   I’m hoping that Enterprise Rent-A-Car will volunteer to pick me up at the marina tomorrow.  Otherwise, I don’t know how to get there.

 

It’s very laid back at this marina.   Not much happens here, at least not very fast.

 

We met a very nice couple in the next slip, Bill and Martha.  They have a beautiful Catalina 40 called Fearless.

 

Fearless’ jib roller furler fouled and they had to take down the jib the hard way.  I helped them get it back up.   It wasn’t easy.  Roller furling jibs are one modification I’ve been thinking about for Tarwathie.  Handling those big headsails is a tough chore for old folks like us.  However, roller furlers do get fouled and do break from time to time and if one gets stuck in really heavy weather, it would be best to not have them up there.   Headsail furling design needs refinement. 

 

One of the things I love about sailboats and sailing is that the art and the equipment is so darned refined.  Refinement comes when experience suggests a small improvement in the way things are built or operated.   Further experience weeds out the bad ideas and keeps the good.  Sailing benefits from more than 12,000 years of refinement. Every little gadget, every method and technique one learns represents countless lifetimes of sailing experience. Contrast that with the wild and wooly software industry I worked with for nearly 40 years.  It has less than 60 years of refinement.

 

Bill has a foundation that runs a violence hot line in Annapolis, and Martha is a judge.  I guess if the bad guys don’t listen when Bill’s hot line tells them “Don’t” they risk standing before Martha to suffer the consequences.   Bill offered us a ride with a friend to Lexington Park today to try to rent a car.   They, like us, have to return to civilization for a while to tend to business, so they’re leaving their boat here too. 

 

We met another man also named Bill who used to own a Clipper Marine 26’ flush deck model sailboat.  That’s exactly the boat we owned in the late 70s and early 80s.  It was a great boat. I used to take it to Lake Champlain every year for a fall sail.  That’s how we learned to love Champlain and Vermont, and the connection that eventually led us to live in Vermont.

 

Two slips down is a CSY 44.  That’s a legendary boat built for the Tortola charter company CSY.  We chartered one in 1976.  It was a great boat, and fun to sail.  When CSY went out of business, the used CSY 44s became legendary, like the Westsail 32s.