Sailing from Janes Island up the Manokin River. The video above is from the first part of the day.
Manokin River ~ Janes Island to Teague Creek
Doug in his Cornish Shrimper Tidings
Forecasts call for clearing skies and tempering wind overnight. But back at camp the rain has not yet dissipated. In the evening, in the Executive Conference Room, there is some disagreement regarding the direction the company should take in the morning. The destination is not disputed – the Manokin River – just how best to get there. Wind will be out of the North, dead on the nose.
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Leaving Tangier on Shannon Kay III
leaving Tangier aboard the Shannon Kay III
By mid-afternoon we need to work our way back to the docks. We pass the house owned by the retired guy on the mailboat. It’s surrounded by ankle deep water and tall reeds waving in the wind. This corner of the island is lower. I remember even 40 years ago the streets here flooded at high tide, and yards carved from a sea of reeds.
another Tangier mirror found
Tangier Island Mirrored
Two images, taken eleven years apart
As we walked the island I kept having flashbacks to previous trips – things half remembered, familiar in some way. It wasn’t until I got back, though, and started going through the photos, that I realized I had photographed many of the same views taken before – some of them almost exactly – but eleven years apart. We even walked a similar clockwise route around the island.
Makes me wonder, if I could find photos from that first trip back in the 1970’s, how similar those old photos would be. How little has changed. The same boats, hauled up in the marsh, still decomposing decades later.
Tangier Promenade ~ Chesapeake Float 2015
Mailboat Harbor, Tangier
Around the corner from the ferry dock is Lorraines’s, the only place on Tangier Island, we’re told, open for lunch today. It is closed. This according to Lorraine, who is sweeping the steps. Tonight is the Senior Prom, and the Prom Dinner is at Lorraine’s, so they’ve closed to decorate and make preparations.
She says, however, there is one table of four that has not been pulled into the banquet table and decorated, and she can set that for five. As long as we only want crab cakes she will serve us lunch.
Crab cakes it is.
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Tangier Island Homecoming ~ Chesapeake Float 2015
video: Mailboat entering Mailboat Harbor on Tangier Island
Two other times I’ve been to Tangier. Once as a boy of 12, my grandparents took us – me, my brother and sister – on the ferry from Reedville, Virginia, just up the road from where they lived, where I spent summers. Thirty years later, when my own daughters were the same age, I took them over on the same ferry. Ten years later still, on the mailboat from Crisfield, will be the third time. What’s most surprising is not how much has changed in all that time, but how very, very little.
Our group meets for breakfast down by the town dock at the Waterside Cafe. (It’s good hearty food, with omelettes that cover a dinner plate and endless coffee.) From there the we split and parts ways. Some head back to the campsite to sleep and read through the rainy day; others drive south to scout the lower peninsula; five of us wait on the dock to board a boat for Tangier.
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Camping Out the Storm ~ Chesapeake Float 2015
Crossing Tangier Sound
Getting out of Smith Island at low tide is proving a surprising challenge. A text comes through from home saying the storm knocked out the power, the same front heading our way. VHF weather says rain and high wind, with gusts to 30+. We dallied longer over lunch than prudent, we realize, and now dark clouds are filling the sky to the southwest.
Everyone ties in reefs and shoves off. We have three miles of sailing within Smith Island just to get out, and all dead into a wind still coming from the southeast. Beyond that it’s another 7 miles to across Tangier Sound. A couple of hours of sailing, at best. That’s a lot of time for wind and waves to build in the Sound.
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