A capital idea

We are under way upbound on the Potomac River, bound for Washington, DC and the Capital Yacht Club. It's a three-day cruise for us from the Chesapeake Bay to DC, and we are part of the way through day two, somewhere between Quantico and Mount Vernon. Tonight we should be in Alexandria, Virginia.

Sunrise eclipse this morning.

We had a pretty comfortable night in Annapolis harbor Thursday night, and the repaired transfer switch worked fine when we started the gen in the morning for heat. A short while later the Low Battery warning light alerted me to the fact that the battery charger was not working, which I attributed to perhaps leaving its breaker off in the engine room after the work. Alas, it was not so simple.

Not something you see every day. Annapolis water taxi pushing a building, probably boat show teardown.

The breaker was, in fact, on, and I had good power on both input legs but only one of the two output legs was hot. I pulled the breaker, cleaned the contacts, and operated the handle back and forth several times, and all was working fine after I re-installed it. It's weird to have two electrical problems like this so close together in time. And space -- the troublesome breaker is just a couple of feet from the transfer switch.

Transfer switch postmortem

I've ordered a whole new contactor -- Schneider has updated the design a bit from Telemecanique's original -- and I will be rewiring the whole thing when it arrives. Like the NTSB, I hunted down all the broken bits of the old one and reconstructed it, wherein I determined that aging contacts contributed as much or more to the ohmic heating as did any wire clamping force.

Passing a RoRo. They're huge.

We left Annapolis harbor on the turn of the tide, running down bay to Solomons. We are firmly embedded in the southbound migration now, with a pack of perhaps a dozen of us all making the same leg. It drives the ship pilots nuts; we moved out of the way for one preemptively while he was still five miles behind us. Being one of the slowest boats in the fleet, we of course arrived to Solomons to find our preferred anchorage nearly full. We dropped the hook three separate times before we were comfortable with our swing in the tight anchorage (map).

Sunset over the Patuxent, as seen from the Island Hideaway.

From that anchorage it is a short tender ride to our favorite joint, the Island Hideaway. No longer hidden, it, too, was very busy, and we were happy to score a table. We had a nice sunset walk along the Patuxent River waterfront before returning home. We arrived at Vector to find two more boats squeezed into the anchorage, in spots we had rejected as too tight. We decked the tender to be ready for a morning departure.

Vector as seen from Captain Billy's.

Saturday we weighed anchor on an outgoing tide, timed to arrive at the mouth of the Potomac at slack, and we had a nice push all day. We left the pack behind after angling toward Point Lookout from Point No Point, and had the river mostly to ourselves after rounding Point Lookout. It's a rare day we can have a fair tide from sunup to sundown, and we took full advantage, pushing all the way to dinner time and dropping the hook in a familiar place near Newburg, Maryland (map).

I liked this look, coming home from dinner.

The last time we anchored here, we tendered ashore to a fun beach bar called Gilligan's. Sadly they closed down a couple of years ago, and this time we settled for Captain Billy's Crab House next door. It was not bad for a fried-seafood joint, and we learned from the friendly server that this coming Saturday is the last day of the season for them.

We woke to temperatures in the 30s, making mist over the river, backlit by the sunrise.

This morning we made a dawn start to catch the last of the flood. We followed the tail of the flood upriver for a long way, and made better time than I expected. While I had figured to stop somewhere short of National Harbor today, we've made such good time we could actually make it all the way to DC. We've booked a slip at the Capital Yacht Club starting tomorrow, and it sounded like it was not available today, so we will instead stop three miles short, at the Alexandria Municpal Docks. This will be our first visit to Alexandria on the boat.

We passed this nesting pair of bald eagles this morning. My phone could not do justice.

I expect this will be my last blog post until we are on our way back downriver, after perhaps a week in DC. We are supposed to have gorgeous fall weather until late in the week, when it starts to get chilly again, and we'll be looking at the regional weather forecasts and the Chesapeake Bay marine forecast to plan our actual departure date.