Head north from Deltaville and turn left when you reach Smith Point Light. After trying to do just that for a week, we finally made it to the mouth of the Potomac.
Smith Point Light
During our visit to Ontario in August, LSYC members Pat and Peter told us about their visit to St. Mary’s College at St. Mary’s City on the St. Mary’s River. The timing was right for an overnight stop. We decided to check it out and ended up staying for two days.We anchored in 15 feet of water at horseshoe Bend, just off of the docks used for the sailing program at the college.
Sailing school dinghies.
St. Mary’s College is a liberal arts school with a student population of about 2000. The 319 acre waterfront campus is idyllic with mature trees, walking trails, historic buildings and its own sailing center with a sandy beach. It feels more like a resort than a school. We walked around the campus and had lunch and dinner at the school cafeteria that is open to the public. The food was great and very reasonably priced.
We did not get invited to the college beach party at the sailing center and didn’t think we would blend in very well if we crashed it. Oh, to be young again!
If you take daylight savings time into consideration this campus sun dial was only 10 minutes off the correct time.
Adjoining the campus is Historic St. Mary’s City which was established in 1634 and was the original state capital of Maryland before the seat of government was moved to Annapolis. St. Mary’s City is known for several American firsts: freedom of religion was mandated, the first African-American participated in colonial legislature and the first woman requested the right to vote. The settlement was later abandoned and returned to farmland for many years. The site has been rebuilt using techniques and materials that are based on what has been learned from extensive archaeological activity.
The reconstructed ‘ordinary’ where early travellers would have stopped for sundowners.
The landscape is scattered with these frames on original footprints depicting the buildings that once existed.
Early morning departure from St. Mary’s
We expected the trip to Washington, DC to take three or four days. We left St. Mary’s very early in the morning and headed up the Potomac with a list of anchorages as potential overnight stops. We soon caught a strong up river current and by late afternoon we had reached Mattawoman Creek, just a few miles from downtown DC. After stopping on the river to chat with the Canadian catamaran Zero to Cruising and hearing that their upriver trip had taken six days we were quite pleased with our progress.
Communication dishes on the banks of the Potomac.
On our arrival at the entrance to Washington Channel we were escorted by dinghy to the Capital Yacht Club docks by a member whom we had met last year at the Seven Seas Cruising Association ‘gam’. This is not a service normally provided by the club. Bill just happened to be passing by in his dinghy and recognized Polar Pacer.
The Washington Channel is also the flight path for US government helicopters.
They fly low and are loud.
The club members and staff at CYC are very friendly and helpful and for a nominal fee anchored cruising boats can access their clubhouse facilities which include showers, laundry, pump out, bar service and wi-fi. We were also welcomed to join them for Spaghetti Night and Rainy Day Soup. The volunteer cooks are very skilled. And many thanks to Mike and Jean for hosting us for dinner on board and making a special grocery store run.
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There are how many different kinds of shrimp?
From the CYC parking lot it is an easy walk to the fish market and many of the museums and monuments that Washington, DC is so well known for. On our first day we had an early start and took the dead presidents walk past the Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln Memorials to the Reflecting Pool, World War II Memorial and the Washington Monument. Then we spent three hours walking through the Museum of American History!
The Reflecting Pool
Forrest Gump was nowhere to be seen.
After almost wearing out the soles of our shoes we slowed the pace down a bit but still managed to cover a lot of ground and see most of the Smithsonian Institute. These are just a few of the highlights of our Washington tour:
The view of the anchorage from the top of the 555 foot high Washington Monument on a drizzly morning. Polar Pacer is third from the left.
The White House.
Every car that gets this close is searched by bomb sniffing dogs.
The black statue sits in front of the Canadian Embassy.
Its white twin is in the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.
The Capitol Building.
The House was in session but we were able to tour much of the building without having to get a special pass.
Opened in 1897, the Library of Congress is an amazing example of Italian Renaissance architecture.
Best selling fiction writer Isabelle Allende, niece of assassinated Chilean President Salvador Allende, was one of the authors interviewed at the annual Library of Congress Book Fair.
She is a very animated speaker with a wonderful sense of humor. She is now on my ‘need to read’ list.
Ken Follett, Martha Grimes and Scott Turow were other familiar names on the agenda.
The government of Russia provided the Air and Space Museum with this replica of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. The Soviet Sputnik program was prominent in the news when I was a child.
Tomatoes on sale at the Eastern Market on Saturday.
The National Museum of the American Indian was designed by Douglas Cardinal, the same architect who designed Canada’s Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.
Jimmy Hendrix’s Coat of Many Colors
And there was much, much more. Entry to all of the Smithsonian Museums, gardens and Art Galleries is free. We could have spent several more weeks there and still not seen everything. It was definitely worth the trip up the Potomac.
Relevant Reading : Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
In this book, written well before he was elected president of the United States, Barack Obama talks candidly about his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and what it was like for him to grow up black in his white family and having a father that he had never known. He speaks about abandoning a career in the world of high finance to become an “organizer” in the poor, mostly black, neighborhoods of Chicago where he struggled to provide leadership and show them how they could make a difference in their own lives. Over time his sense of family was challenged as he made contact with his extended family and travelled to Kenya prior to attending harvard Law School to meet his numerous step brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and his grandmother.
Always focusing on the human side of his experiences, Mr. Obama is an excellent writer and his memoir reads like a novel, ending on a note of romance with his marriage to Michelle.
The Portrait Gallery in Washington DC does not yet have an official portrait of Barack Obama but has this fine art version of the mass produced campaign poster by Los Angeles graphic artist Shepard Fairey.
Michelle Obama’s inaugural gown is a recent addition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
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