2011-10-13 - to Cambridge, MD

We headed out of the harbour of  St. Michaels (at 8:45am) heading towards Solomons Island.  The winds were on our nose (SW) making the waves strong and the boat, unable to sail.  We were taking a lot of waves over the bow and decided about ½ way there to abandon the path and head toward Cambridge.  The good part about that is that the wind would be more favourable for sailing and the waves wouldn’t be streaming over our deck!  The con on that decision was that it was about 2.5 hours in the wrong direction.   Because we would have to double back the following day….this actually adds 5 hours to the trip – in effect, a whole other day.  But, it was a very rocky day and, I think, it was a great decision.  We landed in Cambridge at the town wall at 3:30pm, in front of the county offices.  As we were tying up an elderly lady came up to us and whispered that she wanted to speak to the gentleman.  After a few tries at trying to decipher her whispers, we did determine it was Kerry she wanted to speak to so Kerry went over to her.  She spoke quietly and pointed to some houses behind the town hall.  I figured that she may be warning of the local bordello – no big deal. ;)  When he came back he whispered…’they have just issued a tornado watch’.  She didn’t want the ‘women and children to hear’.  We hadn’t seen this on the forecast so we immediately checked and, sure enough, there was one in effect until 9pm.  But, the interesting thing was that it was mainly on the western shore, where we were headed and only our county on the eastern shore.  I was looking around at all of the other people in town going about their business.  There was a restaurant next to us that was starting to serve up the supper crowd.  A few local children were playing on the dock with their family.  Surely, shouldn’t they be running home and barricading themselves in the basement?  It seemed like an ordinary day.  Perhaps, they get these warning all of the time?  We were just about to unload our bikes and head out for a bike ride when she came with the news…so, we abandoned that idea and began to ensure that we were all tied up according to ‘tornado standards’ and put our loose things away.  After that, we did brave it a bit with a short walk around town.  Cambridge is another lovely old town.  The history seems to be tied in to the underground railroad and the slaves.  We walked towards to point and as we rounded the corner we saw two news vans waiting in the parking lot overlooking the open water – one of the vans was complete with a  transmission tower on it.  I just assumed that they were there to film any wind effects that were soon to be upon us.  I couldn’t resist asking them what they knew and when they thought the tornado would come.  They kind of looked at us blankly and informed us that they didn’t think anything would happen there.  They simply film the news every night from that location.  Relieved, we finished our walk and closed up the boat for the night.  There wasn’t even a howling wind to make us suspicious.  Quite uneventful.