Page 5 2003 Spring Cruise

I was the first to anchor while the rest did a circumnavigation of the island. I dressed my boat with a string of the Murphy clan “ancestor flags”; a flag for each ancestor country including the in-law ancestors. It’s a colorful flag set that includes flags from the United States, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Germany, France, Puerto Rico, and Scotland. Once the flags were flying I felt pretty good. Seeing all that color aloft did a great job of counteracting the gray afternoon with its darkening clouds scudding by.

Soon the PeepHen, the Dovekie, and Zephyrus came along side for a late lunch and chat. We soon broke up, eying the darkening skies, to sail around the bend up Hunting Creek to find an anchorage protected from the expected nighttime East wind.

Phil and Morry during world affairs discussion

We found other SWSers already anchored and rafted up in a perfect spot. But to tell you the truth, something was really eating at my brain. All week long I’d been keeping an eye on the weather predictions; they didn’t seem too good for that night. The latest one was forecasting heavy rain and East winds increasing to 19 MPH by 2 AM. Rain is OK and even wind is OK, that is during daylight hours. But give me a break. This was going to be a repeat of the Hog Island washout, which was the very last cruise of mine last year. The one in which I got an hour’s worth of sleep. I quote from that report:

“And what a night it was; it got really dark, so trying
to check if the anchor was dragging was quite useless
for you couldn’t see a thing. Even the Dovekie,
anchored so close to us was very hard to make out. ”

I was so disturbed with the prediction that I waved at those in the raft-up and anchored by myself for the night, giving myself plenty of time to prepare for the worst.
The rain came and built up pretty good, but the wind died to nothing. Ah, it was waiting for dark before it pounces! Crawled into the rack at 9 PM; the tinkle of gentle rain soon put me to sleep. Several times during the night I had an urgent need to “study my charts” (as Morry would say) and found mirror-like waters reflecting the anchor lights of the other SWS boats. All the worry and inner turmoil had been a big waste.

Early morning shots of the fleet at anchor

To me the morning was lovely, even though the rain was still around. I picked up my copy of Three Men in a Boat; it seemed to fall open at Chapter 5 from which I read:

“I do think that of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness
by which we are plagued, this 'weather-forecast' fraud
is about the most aggravating. It 'forecasts' precisely
what happened yesterday or the day before, and
precisely the opposite of what is going to happen today.”

Those words were written over 114 years ago. True then, true now. But I keep no grudges, not after getting a good eight hours of sound sleep.