Moving Toward the Dream

The first marina where we docked Celtic Dream was on the South River just below Annapolis. It was convenient to our house, a mere 25 minute drive depending on traffic. You have to say "depending on traffic" whenever you judge distance by travel time in the DC/Baltimore area because it can vary by hours! Now, when I say marina, I'm using the term very loosely.

There were docks with security gates and that was a plus considering that the bar that was on the property usually ended the weekend nights with police presence. The "bath house" was conveniently located under said bar and the locks on the doors seldom worked. Nothing is more exciting than being in the shower and hearing a bunch of drunk 20 somethings either, crying, screaming or puking. The highlight of the "bath house" was that the changing area just outside the shower curtain was open to the rest of the bathroom, making the odds of you inadvertantly becoming that night's entertainment pretty good. Thank God Celtic Dream has 2 decent showers.

That leads us to the water situation. The water on the docks was foul. Our showers usually reeked of sulfur and the ice from the ice maker was always a lovely shade of gold. God forbid you rinsed your boat off with it. The resulting copper stains looked far worse that the salt buildup did! We finally bought a fancy water softener/filtration device. The booklet said that the filter could soften 1,000 gallons of water before it would have to be recharged. We couldn't even make it to 300 gallons before having to throw away the filter.

The electric wasn't much better. Several times a month the electricity would just go out and they'd have to call either the local electric company or some fly by night electrician who looked like he might have been homeless. The end result was that you could be without electricity for a couple hours or a couple days. It was anybody's guess.

Our slip faced the public access ramp. At first we found this endlessly entertaining. We would make it our happy hour routine to go out on the sunpad on the bow and sit and watch the hapless masses defying logic and physics while trying to get their boats out of the water. It was like a live version of America's Funniest Home Videos right there in our front yard! Of course it's all fun and games until some yahoo wakes your boat in the middle of the night so hard that you think it was surely a collision. Then there was the ignorant meat heads in cigarette boats that had to rev their engines for a half hour at the ramp before hauling ass through the no wake zone. Ah yes, good times!

The best part of our entire experience was the "management" team at the marina. Again, I'm using the term "management" very loosely. The "manager" actually lived on the property in an apartment over the office which seemed like a plus at first. We liked the idea of someone always being there especially when we were not. It turns out that the management plan for the marina was modeled after a frat party. When he wasn't out in his fishing boat, the manager could usually be found at the bar, which left the poor high school girl at the desk in charge of things. At the very least they could have given her a book of nautical terms so she could appear to be speaking our language. English was of course her first language but apparently her only response to any inquiry was "I'll have to ask the manager." This rendered her useless for anything other than collecting money for a bag of ice. When you were actually lucky enough to corner the manager and ask him a question, he would give you any answer he thought you wanted to hear, which had absolutely nothing to do with reality.

For example, the road leading down to the marina was a complete cow path. It had pot holes inside of pot holes that could swallow a car whole. So one day, after I got a flat tire because one of the pot holes tried to swallow my front tire, I asked if there were any plans for repaving the road. I was told that he was currently getting bids to have not only the road but the entire sinking parking lot repaved (It flooded at high tide regularly). He went on and on about how great it was going to be. I had only known him for a couple of months so I believed him. That was 3 years ago and when I recently drove some friends to that marina to pick up their car it still hadn't been repaved. I managed to escape without having to re-tire my car.

There were a few water men that kept their boats at the marina and we noticed that they were fueling their boats at the docks. I found this odd since we were right across the river from a fuel dock where we usually fueled up. The next thing we know there were several boats regularly putting fuel in their boats at the dock. I don't find this to be a safe practice and in previous weeks 2 boats had exploded while fueling near our marina. Paul is a retired firefighter and he was totally uncomfortable with them doing it anywhere near our boat. I brought this to the attention of the "manager" and he feigned being appalled by the notion and vowed to put an end to it. Not a week later we saw him standing there drinking a beer while someone on the same dock fueled their boat.

Now, my husband Paul and I are about as laid back as they come. We mind our own business and tend to just go with the flow. We're not demanding by any means so any one of these "inconveniences" taken alone would probably not have bothered us. Unfortunately, after 2 years of all of this, day in and day out, our patience was wearing thin. 

On Memorial Day Weekend of 2013 we had planned to stay on the boat for a nice long weekend. We got up in the morning and I was up on the aft deck starting to cook some bacon while Paul was below starting the coffee. That's when Paul realized that we had no power. Again. My bacon had started to cook but was now cooling. We went to the office to find out what was going on and were told that the power was turned off so that the "electrician" could work on it. On a holiday weekend???!!! I was furious! When we came out of the office we saw the electrician/homeless guy fumbling mindlessly with a breaker. 

That, my friends, was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. This whole situation was ruining my dream. If every time we came here to get away we left pissed off then we were not going to spend another minute in this dump! We packed up our half cooked bacon and went home and spent the rest of the weekend looking at marinas.

A week later, after I got home from work, we pulled in our lines and fenders and left in an approaching storm. Paul and I are typically very conservative when it comes to boating. We try to never go out in bad conditions and both knew that we should have waited but it was supposed to be nasty all weekend and we just couldn't bear another wasted weekend spent there. It was 6:30 in the evening, the wind was picking up and the sky was getting dark. I looked at the radar and figured we had about an hour before all hell broke loose. We looked at the charts and figured we had a small weather window and could just make it. We started hauling ass down the South River, headed to our new home at Herrington Harbour North. 

When we got out into the Chesapeake Bay it was even darker and we were running against a punishing head wind in at least 4' seas. The only other boats on the bay were a couple of freighters heading up to Baltimore, and for good reason! The conditions were getting worse and were slowing us down, our weather window was closing fast. To make matters worse, we had never been to Herrington Harbour North by boat and were unfamiliar with the approach. The markers are typically tricky to spot unless you know where to look for them and as the blinding rain started it became almost impossible so we had to rely on the chart plotter for the last leg of the trip. We finally spotted the red marker and made the hairpin turn into Herring Bay and basically surfed our way up to to Herrington Harbour North. Captain Paul did an amazing job making the 3 right angle turns through the unfamiliar thoroughfare in high wind to get us safely into our slip. We were soaked to the bone by the time we wrestled the lines to the dock and sat down to have a beer. We were exhausted by then but confident that we were moving in the right direction toward our Celtic Dream.