August 29, 2004

Tangier Island Part 1 - The Arrival

bout 5:20 pm we started to gather at the city dock. Caroline and Nelson Labbe, Ron Barnett, Yvonne Thayer, Katie Woodard (my famous daughter) and myself were standing under the dock overhang when Carolyn Schoelles drove up. We went inside the restaurant and ordered dinner while discussing the weather and route for the next day. As we were wrapping things up someone asked our group to use a cell phone so that he could call "Robert Woodard". This marked our introduction to Mark Woodside, who managed to be able to make the trip after some last minute shuffling at work.

We were 8 souls bound for Tangier Island. Six of us would paddle, while Katie and Caroline (who graciously offered to escort Katie so that I could paddle) would take the mail boat.

After a quick stop by the ice cream shop we headed to the Motel (Carolyn headed for the State Park where she was camping) for a good nights rest.

We agreed to meet at 7:00 am at the boat ramp. At 6:00 am I made a quick trip to McDonalds to grab Katie some breakfast and then headed over to the ramp to unload my gear from the car. I wrote the distance and headings on my deck in grease pencil and the others soon started arriving. We quickly got ready and shuttled our cars back to the motel, which had offered to allow us to park while we were away on Tangier.

We waved goodbye to Caroline and Katie at 8:00 am after rafting up for some pictures. We were off. Heading out of the port toward our first waypoint - Great Point, about 2.5 miles away.

We took a pretty direct route, staying to the left of all the channel markers. We watched several boats head out of the port and near 8:30 we spotted the mail boat heading in to Crisfield.

Great Point is separated by shallow water from Cedar Island. It was a rising tide and I decided to try and cut across the shallow water to save some paddling. We just cleared the shallowest water between the island and point and after checking to see if anyone needed to stop we headed for waypoint number two.

Our second waypoint, Great Fox Island lay just 4 miles away. We were paddling against a slight current, as evidenced by the water moving past the crab pot buoys.

We had a small open water crossing between Cedar and Clump Islands of about 1 mile. As we approached Great Fox we prepared to beach but the day marker I remembered on the corner of the island was in a different place. We continued on toward the day marker and after rounding a point I realized there was a small detached piece of land just in front of Great Fox.

We took out at the day marker a few minutes after 10:00 am, fueling up on an early lunch. The bugs found us quickly so out came the bug spray. I think everyone was feeling good and by 10:30 we were ready to take on the final and riskiest portion of our trip.

Up till now we had been using 'dead reckoning', navigating from point to point by heading toward a distant point we could see. But now we switched to 'piloting', a much more difficult method of navigating. We steered a course of 214 degrees for 40 minutes, heading toward the eastern side of the deep water channel. We could feel the current pushing us off course, and I found myself frequently turning a bit more south to compensate. The water began to grow darker and we turned to approximately 240 degrees to cross the channel. We used the Tangier water tower which we could clearly see as a point to navigate toward.

After the water began to lighten again, we started watching the work boats entering the Tangier harbor. We picked a new object on the island (a large communications tower) to navigate toward to bring us in closer to the dock while staying out of the approach channels.

On entering Tangier, Nelson, Yvonne, and myself headed to the dock while the others headed on to the B&B. I had told Nelson we'd have a nice low dock to take out on, but on getting there the dock was much higher than I remembered. In hind sight, last year there was a nor'easter blowing and the island was mostly flooded, which explains why I remembered no difficulty getting in from the dock.

The mail boat arrived right at 1:00 pm, just moments after we arrived. But the dock is well over my head and I had to sit there a few moments pondering how I would manage it. I should mention there were a LOT of people sitting around on picnic tables watching us try and work our way out of this predicament. I asked Nelson to come over and support my kayak and once he clamped on I wiggled out of the cockpit and stood up in my boat. From here I easily pulled myself up on to the dock.

I met Caroline, Katie and Wallace Pruitt, the proprietor of the B&B. We took Katie and Caroline's baggage to the golf cart (the "truck" as Mr. Pruitt called it) and took the kayaks off the mail boat.

Now we had a dilemma. It was easy for me to get up on the dock, but another thing for the 3 of us to get back down. I quickly scouted the shore and found a fairly low sea wall below which had water only 6 inches deep. Nelson and Yvonne took all the kayaks over to the sea wall and we hopped down into the water and were quickly off in our kayaks.

We paddled through the harbor and turned in to the creek that leads to the B&B. We easily slid under the first bridge but it was still near high tide and we had to limbo under the second bridge, just barely sliding under.

We climbed out through some mud as the others carried our boats into the yard of Shirley's Bay View Inn. After dripping off a bit I went inside to check in. Within moments we were checked in and starting to get settled having covered 14.3 statue miles on the water.

Pictures!

Continued in Part 2