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During a weeklong cruise in the land of the blue crab,
a father of twin boys learns there’s more to boating than—well,
boating.
By Alan Harper — Spring 2005
Boating with children does not always go quite the way
you expect. Dads tend to imagine teaching kids to tie knots and throw
lines, with possibly light engine maintenance in the afternoon, when in
fact all the kids really want to do is have some fun with the hose and
then move on to an early lunch. At age four, my son Sean screamed at me
to “SLOW DOWN!”—unimpressed by my protestations that we
were doing only 13 knots (that boat was a little noisy). His twin brother,
Lewis, once fell asleep onboard during a total eclipse of the sun.
Now seven, the twins looked forward to our first cruise
on Chesapeake Bay. They’re London boys who generally approve of America,
for America has most things a seven-year-old boy could possibly need:
natural hot tubs (Pagosa Springs), a good swimming pool (Cocoa Beach Holiday
Inn), an excellent large TV (their cousin Kate’s in Vail), a cool
snake (my friend Steve’s), and some great airplanes (the Smithsonian).
To that list we can now add the pancakes and poached
eggs at The Captain’s Table on Solomons Island, Maryland, some lively
otters at the Calvert Marine Museum next door, another great swimming
pool at Oxford’s Mears Yacht Haven (complete with friendly Labrador),
and the ice cream at Justine’s in St. Michaels. We discovered them
all during a week spent cruising Chesapeake Bay aboard the 34-foot PDQ
Powercat Big Toot chartered from Annapolis-based
Sunsail (see “Charter Options”).
The horseshoe crab was pretty cool, too. Most grown-ups
associate the Chesapeake with the blue variety, but this chap was on display
at the Calvert Museum, scuttling along under his hooded carapace like
an undersea monk with a pointed tail. A brave lady scooped him out. He
was big, with lots of busy legs scrambling about underneath. The lady
said that fossil records show this bay native to have remained unchanged
by evolution for the past 400 million years.
“Actually, he’s not a true crab,” she
explained as he crawled up her arm. “He’s related to scorpions.
He’s a bug.”
The boys stopped poking his shell with their fingers
for a second and looked thoughtful.
>> Next page >>
Part 2: We’re used to moaning about high marina costs
in the United Kingdom, and the Chesapeake versions were about twice as
expensive, but we got a better value. Page
1,
2, 3,
4, 5,
6, 7
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