Annapolis

There I was innocently putting my clothes in the washing machine in the (completely empty) men’s room in Annapolis City Docks marina when I was startled by a very angry dockmaster:
Him: “You shouldn’t be in here ma’am”
Me: “I’m sorry but the washing machine in the ladies room is not working. And there is no one in here.”
Him: “Doesn’t matter, you should get your husband to do the laundry rather than come in here.”
Me: “And what if I don’t have a husband”
Him: “Then you’ll have to go and have your washing done in town”

Well I never! I’ve never been made to feel like a dirty criminal simply for venturing innocently into the men’s room.  The City Docks Marina was generally unfriendly to boaters and this tainted our first impression of Annapolis, the sailing capital of America.    

Things started to look up with our frequent visits with friendly people in the local playground and an amazing seafood extravaganza (oysters, blue crab, snow crab and king crab, clams, mussels, crawfish...yum!) topped off with an incredibly yummy ice-cream from the local homemade ice-creameria.  Annapolis is a rather pretty historical town to wander about in, houses a nice farmer’s market on Saturday’s just next to the dock and is the home of the US Naval Academy.  We found the tour of the academy as a whole a little too forceful but it did bring us to an amazing collection of model boats, incredibly intricate mini replicas of early naval vessels used as designs for the real things.   

But ‘sailing capital of America’...hmmm.  There seems to be some good club racing as the bay is full almost every evening and the local 532 dinghy racers used our mooring buoy as a race marker, much to the delight of Emma and Macsen as the little boats whizzed around us with their booms tacking and crew scrambling.  Unfortunately, November is an unfair month to judge a sailing community in this part of the world.  We’ll have to come back for the Annapolis boat show to see what all of the fuss is about.