Our Last Voyage

It’s an interesting feeling when you are close to reaching the end of a part of your life.

Old Man Time doesn’t know how to stop.

It’s an irresistible force that keeps pushing you to the edge of a cliff, and you pray it’s going to be a soft landing.

Our feelings ran the gamut from being proud to cross our wake to a melancholy feeling of ending our adventure to a sense of relief that we could see the end in sight.

In our case, we had two more stops before we reached Selkie’s final destination with us on board.

Our next destination was the Chesapeake Yacht Club (CYC). We had taken advantage of our membership at South Beach Yacht Club in San Francisco by using our reciprocal privileges at a few yacht clubs along the Loop.

Our stay at CYC was typical of our stays at other clubs, as we met some folks who have common interests in boating. It helped to have a good restaurant there as we were starting to reduce our food supplies in preparation for leaving Selkie for the last time.

We invited the couple who were going to buy Selkie so we could give them some training.

We took them out for a preliminary sea trial and showed them Selkie’s systems including anchoring her.

We lowered the dinghy down and showed them how to use it.

We went through all of Selkie’s manuals so the new owners would be properly prepared.

We then went to dinner with them, and enjoyed getting to know them better.

We then said good bye, and the next day departed for Annapolis one last time.

It is about a 2 1/2 hour trip from CYC to Annapolis.

When we pulled into Annapolis, we went into the mooring ball field and grabbed Mooring Ball Number One.

I called the Harbormaster for Annapolis. They still had Selkie’s information on file from the last time we were there in May 2023.

We were right off Ego Alley so there were a lot of boats parading past us during daylight hours.

When we arrived in Annapolis, we were contacted by friends of ours that we met on the loop previously.

We had run into this couple at least two other times.

The most recent was in Key West Florida. We came upon each other when we came to a street corner and looked up and there they were. 

This couple was from Wisconsin, but they had spent a lot of time doing the loop and were on a similar three year Loop plan as us.

They had been working on us to join them on the Down East Loop.

The Down East Loop is a shorter voyage than America’s Great Loop. One starts in New York, head up the Hudson River through Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence Seaway, out the St. Lawrence Seaway, out around Nova Scotia and down to Maine and then back to New York.  It is a trip we would like to do, but perhaps it will happen in another lifetime.

We met our friends for dinner in Annapolis. We had a great evening. I had some of the best cioppino I’ve had in a long time.

We had wanted to go to the east shore of the Chesapeake and explore that area, particularly Saint Michaels and Rock Hall, but alas, that was not to be.

Looking ahead a few days showed the weather was forecast to be small craft advisories and pretty rough.

It was as if someone was herding us to Selkie’s final destination.

The next morning, we dropped the dinghy in the water to grab breakfast, and did a short visit to the United States Naval Academy. I bought a souvenir tshirt.

It was a pleasant way to say one last goodbye to a favorite stop.

After returning to Selkie we cast off Mooring Ball Number One, and headed to Selkie’s final destination.

It would prove to be a good end to our time on Selkie, but not without a lot of hard work getting Selkie ready for handing off to her new owners.

That will be the topic of my last post about our time on Selkie.