Annapolis

Annapolis during Navy's homecoming weekend! Our timing is impeccable. The town is filling up rapidly.

Annapolis has a small city marina and three mooring fields. A mooring field, for our non-boater friends, is a place where someone, in this case the city of Annapolis, has put permanently placed anchor substitutes in the water. Instead of dropping your anchor, you pick up a floating line, called a pennant, and attach it to the front of your boat. The pennant is attached to a line which goes down to the bottom of the harbor where it, in turn, is attached to something that usually looks like a big screw, screwed into the ground. Annapolis is notorious for bad holding (anchors don't really work well), so the moorings keep boats from dragging all over the place and banging into each other. They also provide the city with a revenue stream. In addition to providing the moorings, the city also provides a water taxi and a pump-out boat service, so it is a convenient place to be "on the hook", as opposed to being at a dock in the marina.

Every Fall, Annapolis hosts one of the largest in-water boat shows in the nation. They actually build temporary floating docks around the boats as they arrive for the show. First they do a weekend of sailboats, then they move all of the sailboats out, replace them with powerboats, and do a weekend of powerboats. Then they tear the whole thing down and go back to their usual operations. About half of the mooring field is taken over by the boat show and boats on those moorings have to leave for the duration of the show. Jim has always wanted to watch the "load in" when the show boats arrive and the docks are built, so we deliberately chose a mooring that we could stay on during the boat show.

But the boat show stuff won't start for another 10 days and I'm going away for five days with my mother in the middle of it, so if we stay for the first load in we'll be here until October 20. Neither of us is sure we need to be in Annapolis for a month. It is an interesting place, but not that interesting. So we are debating staying for the boat show, or moving on south and just driving back up to spend one day at the boat show. Such are the problems of retired folks.