Thursday October 6: Bumming Around Baltimore

Sailor Dave is finally in the water! He finished most of the work needing to be done on the exterior and now officially floating and tied to the dock behind us. Of course we felt a need to celebrate with him and for someone who had never had lobster (he's from Idaho - no lobster out there??) what better way than a lobster dinner?!

First: find a good place for breakfast. Steve did his homework on Yelp and found Lucy's Cafe in a small town south of here. Perfect. Then another 10 minutes to the Asian Supermarket where Steve had found the lobsters. Not quite as large as the 5 pounder we found in San Diego but most were 2+ lbs. I threatened that we had to eat outside the boat but it was too cold - instead we were just careful about spraying lobster stuff everywhere :-)

Since that was so good, we decided to get the crab pot out and try out luck. For some reason we thought the water here was fresh water (crabs live in salt water) but guess this is just salty enough. Steve spotted a couple of crabs on the piers along our dock so we gave it a try. Not so much luck - we need better bait. We'll try that again next week.

Yesterday we finally made it to Fort McHenry. This is the fort that protected Baltimore from being taken by the British during the War of 1812. Again, the history in quite interesting. When you see the resources the Americans had (12,000 in the armed forces) versus the British and their 250,000 armed forces - to say nothing of the numbers of sailing vessels), we must have been crazy to declare war! But after 4 years everyone seemed to tire of the fighting and finally the British left us alone :-) The flag had 15 stars and stripes (not the 13 I had posted earlier) and was still flying after 26 hours of British warship bombardments of the fort. In fact, there were only 4 casualties from the fight. Defeated, the British left Baltimore alone. The cannons could shoot 1 1/2 miles and took 18 men to fire each one.

Fell's Landing this morning for breakfast - fun building on the corner all decorated for Halloween already.

Then off to the Trawlerfest in-water boat show at the Inner Harbor. Wow - what a collection of trawlers! One was a Florida Coastal Bay Cruiser. It was truly a house on the water with 3 floors! Still looked like a trawler though. We've seen this style on the water but being able to walk through it was pretty fun. We didn't see any that caught our eye so guess we'll stick with what we have :-)

Tomorrow: off to DC for the day (after therapy and doc's appt for Steve), meet Rebecca at Dulles in the evening and off in the morning for the Franko Family Reunion at Rock Gap State Park in Western Maryland!