Solomons Island to Deltaville – 55 nautical miles sailed, 1 mile by dinghy, 3 kilometres walked
In the country with the largest fighting force in the world you are sure to see signs of the miliary everywhere. And we do. From the fighter jets in the sky, to Navy boats on the water, to the people in uniform and Army vehicles we see on the streets, and the military dedications, monuments, and cemeteries we see everywhere we go, it is inescapable. In a town we were recently in we passed by a regular cemetery then right beside it was a military one, with identical white markers lined up in perfect rows as if preparing for a march. There were far more grave sites in the military one than the regular one and we wondered if all these dead soldiers were from the local area. It’s great to have the biggest army and get involved in many of the global conflicts, but there is clearly a price to pay. We will see what happens in the coming years, but it is undeniable that the US wields the world’s mightiest fist and they invest a great deal of their wealth to maintain this.
One does have to stop and realize that the United States can do whatever it wants because there is no other country with a military large enough to stop them. Unless, maybe, if it was the US against the world, but that’s an unthinkable proposition. In any case, Canada would not fare well with our pathetically underfunded military, weak-kneed politicians, and blind faith that our neighbour will always protect us from foes, and could never, ever turn on us. I have been thinking about this a lot the last couple of days in the wake of the recent election in the US and some of the extreme ideas that have been put forth by the incoming party. We plan to be traveling back through the US sometime between March and May. What will the situation be? Maybe they will close their borders to all foreigners. Maybe they will ban non-commercial foreign marine traffic. It seems to me that everything is on the table with a government willing to go to extremes. In any case, there is nothing we can do about it so we will just continue along our way and hope for the best. We do live in interesting times.
Today we were looking for a spot about 60 miles south to anchor for the night before making the final push to Norfolk, which is Mile 0 for the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). We pulled into Deltaville around 2:30 which gave us a few hours of daylight to explore. Ana had to do some work for our yacht club so I put on my shorts and went for a swim. Incredibly, this is the first time I have been in the water on this trip. I put on a mask and inspected the undersides of the boat. Surprisingly, there was no growth of anything on the hull. And the sacrificial zinc anode (which protects the metal components of the boat from electrical corrosion) looked the same as when I put it on back in the spring. These two discoveries were of immense relief to me as I just didn’t know what to expect with the boat now in ocean water. I had myself a quick ocean bath, rinsed off with fresh water, and felt fresh as a daisy as my mom likes to say, although I have no idea why daisies would be fresher than any other flower, say a tulip or rose.
We took the dinghy into the public dock, which was a heavily built wooden structure, rigid, unlike many of the floating docks we’ve been using which move up and down with the tides. Well, this one was a pretty high jump from the dinghy. I was able to get up there with my longer legs but Ana had to take a few moment to figure out her strategy. She stood on the edge of the dinghy and reached up to me, but then the dinghy started slipping under the dock taking her with it. Soon, there was just a head and arm sticking out so she abandoned that plan and fell back down into the dinghy. Her second attempt was fully successful, even graceful. We walked through a quiet neighbourhood enjoying the warm temperature and soon came to the main commercial street. I found a dumpster to toss a bag of garbage we brought from the boat (living on a boat makes you realize how much garbage you generate, especially in the US with the obscene amount of product packaging used for everything) then we walked up the main street, but everything was closed except for the public library and the True Value hardware store. We went into the hardware store and found a nice little broom to replace the one that had broken a few days before. If Ana can’t sweep the cockpit floor at least six times per day she just doesn’t feel right, and that takes a toll on the cleaning instruments.
The library had their annual book sale and, though it was done for the day, the librarian opened the vault for us and we found a treasure trove of titles, each available for the reasonable price of one dollar. I already have about five books on the go so I didn’t get anything but Ana picked up a novel.
During the walk back to the dock we were approached by what looked like a horror movie creature. Something black with black eyes walked towards us slowly and painfully. It was skinny, with legs that seemed multi-jointed, bending the wrong way, mantis-like. I got the broom handle ready to beat it when it attacked. But it was just a dog, a very old and sick dog, with today’s steps likely its last. It expressed a morsel of interest in us, but we steered clear, and looked back to see it slowly wobble across the road and up a driveway.
We were finished dinner and cleaned up by 6:30, leaving the prospect of hours of darkness. We’ve been experimenting with evening entertainment. We have a television in the main salon, but it has a flaky HDMI connection and can’t consistently connect to our Mac. There is a second newer television in the portside aft cabin and we horsed around with that stupid thing for hours the other day trying to get it to connect through AirPlay, and when it finally did, for some reason it put the movie on triple speed. If it were a Chinese kung fu movie it would have been fine, but it just didn’t work for our selection. We’ve tried watching the laptop in bed but I can’t stay awake for longer than 15 minutes and I do not really want to be up at 3 in the morning typing obscenely long journals. So we tried converting the table in the main salon into a bed and using cushions and blankets to make a comfortable seating area. It worked okay. I was able to stay awake for a full horror movie then part of an episode of a series we’re watching.
By 9pm I was out.
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