October 23, 2020

We picked up the anchor Friday morning and left Yorktown.  The weather had become foggy the night before, and it was looking gloomy and overcast with no wind.  We decided it would be a good day to position for going into the Tidewater Marina in Portsmouth for our week long reservation on Saturday.  We motored down the coast in almost no wind and flat seas to a nice anchorage off Fort Munroe in Hampton.  It’s just in front of where the highway goes down into the tunnel under the harbor, so we did hear a bit of road noise, but it was only loud enough to hear it up on deck.  We came in and saw just a three other boats, so lots of room for us.  We dropped anchor and the sun came out, for a beautiful afternoon.   We spent some time getting the dinghy out of the davits and up on the foredeck for our upcoming trip around Hatteras, which is known for confused seas and unpredictable weather, so we wanted to be totally prepared.  I wanted to move the dinghy here because I was worried there wouldn’t be enough room in our slip at Tidewater to get the dinghy alongside and crank it up with a halyard.  The only downside of having the dinghy on deck now is we can’t open the fore hatch.  It’s been such pleasant weather that we haven’t really been doing that recently anyway.  Plus, in the marina we will have AC or heat easily on shore power, so I like being ready early.

This turned out to be a very popular anchorage, and it was fun to sit on deck and watch all the other boats come in one by one.  A huge variety of boats:  a couple cats, a couple pocket cruisers, a couple Amels, a couple power boats, and a gorgeous 60 ft Shipman right next to us.  The guy seemed to be single handing too – very impressive.  By sunset we were one of twelve boats anchored there.