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Monday, August 25, 2014

Sailing the Chesapeake: The Corrotoman River

July 31 - August 1, 2014

We hauled anchor that afternoon in Urbanna at high tide, hoping the extra flood tide would prevent us from again bumping the bottom as we exited the town. As the anchor came up, I noticed that the seizing wire on our anchor shackle had come off, so that would need attention before we dropped anchor later on.

We slowly made our way out of Urbanna at high tide, watching the depth finder and forward scanning sonar as we approached R2 and G3. The bottom quickly came up and and we lightly touched the bottom before the depths quickly dropped to 9, then 13 feet. We turned east and made a short trip to the Corrotoman River.

The Corrotoman River was wide with predominantly deep water, though you should give each mark a wide berth as there was definitely some shoaling near each, especially R2, G3, R4, and R6. We dropped anchor at 5 pm in the Eastern Branch of the Corrotoman River -- the lone boat in a serene anchorage with a few homes peppering the landscape.

Anchored in the Eastern Branch of the Corrotoman River
 
Scenes from the deep, quiet anchorage on the Corrotoman



Bill pulled out the fishing rods. We caught and released several croaker and I found out first hand why they got their name!

Bill hard at work

They really do croak!
Another beautiful sunset on the Chesapeake
We turned in after a quiet night, and awoke early the next morning to light rain. We were expecting rain all day, so we cleaned and reapplied Rain-X to the windshield, filled up our sun showers, and hauled anchor at 7:45 am. This time we noticed that the seizing wire on one of the snubber shackles had come off and needed replacing -- very strange! We double checked the anchor shackle and began motoring out of the Corrotoman River. We turned east into the Rappahannock River, continuing to make our way back up the Bay.

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