Cape Charles Harbour VA USA

East River

We motored out of East River in Mobjack Bay on 19 July as the first part of our passage to Cape Charles Harbour. The engine has been behaving itself since we left the boatyard and so we now feel that we can plan on leaving Chesapeake Bay and continuing our adventure heading up the Eastern Seaboard. Because of the delays we are a bit behind where we wanted to be and so we are expecting to leave Chesapeake Bay and try to sail to Nova Scotia in one passage.

Civil War heroine Sally Tomkins’ birthplace (bottom). “Capt Sally” founded a military hospital that saved the lives of a remarkable 95% of its patients and she was the only woman commissioned as an officer in the Confederate Army

But the weather is not suitable for that yet, which is why we are initially aiming towards Cape Charles Harbour on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay.  First though, we just enjoyed looking at the pretty scenery and lovely houses in East River.

Approaching Cape Charles Harbour through the dredged channel

The sail across Chesapeake Bay was actually a 25nm 4 hour motor directly into wind as a last test run of the engine. We were working on the plan that if anything didn’t seem quite right we could return to Deltaville and let Mack have another look at it.

BV (far right) moored in Cape Charles Harbour Marina

All went well though, and by 1400hrs we were tied up in the harbour ready to explore ashore.

The rails (L) ran up a ramp allowing the trains and full carriages to be loaded onto the special barges
for the trip across Chesapeake Bay

The eastern shore of Virginia was one of the earliest colonised areas in North America.  When the Bay Coast Railway was built, Cape Charles was transformed from an agricultural community into a bustling railroad town. The trains started running in October 1884 and within 6 months, 2 passenger paddle steamers and several specially designed railway freight barges were running regularly across the 36 miles of Chesapeake Bay.  The town flourished and quickly became the economic focal point of Northampton County.

With the advent of cars, at the town’s peak in the early 1900s, 300 cars a day were transported across the bay from Cape Charles Harbour.  However, in the 1950s the car ferry was moved to Kiptopeke and, with the decline in the railway industry, the increase in trucking, and the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in 1964, Cape Charles slipped rapidly into economic decline.

The Cape Charles Distillery and a zany mermaid sculpture

Ah, now we understand the love of pick-up trucks
here – they are for transporting Laser sailing dinghies!

Today the town is in something of a resurgence due to tourism.  It has a lovely sandy beach and an unspoilt coastline with opportunities for birdwatching, wildlife observation, hiking, biking, horseback riding, fishing, kayaking, boating and canoeing.

It has become a popular holiday seaside town with several boutique shops on the main avenue and it has also been hit by the latest USA trend in microbreweries.  There is one on the outskirts of the town and on Peach Street there is the newly opened Cape Charles Distillery.  We had a quick look in but arrived just behind a large party of visitors.  They were keeping the staff busy and so we moved on to look at the other shops and the residential area.

There is a good hardware store, a nice gourmet food and wine shop, a very small (disappointing) grocery store and an ice cream parlour voted by Trip Advisor as one of the Top 10 best in the USA. Now that was not to be missed! The ice cream is all made on site and the flavours available change daily or more frequently; I suppose it depends on how sales go.  They even have a flavour of the hour.  We sampled a couple and then continued our explorations armed with 2 excellent but rapidly melting large ice cream cones.

Our ice creams lasted long enough for us to wander to the small fishing pier and alongside the sand dunes behind the beach.  With the lovely houses and one of the few public beaches with easy public access on the east Virginia shore of the Chesapeake, it is easy to see why the town is so popular.

At the northern end of the beach there is a shellfish farm and it was here that we turned back in land to make our way back to BV.  We checked out the Central Park where they have live music concerts every few weekends in summer and then cut back towards the marina on Strawberry Street.

The Cape Charles Distillery tasting – ‘A spirit journey’. 
(Bottom left pic, from L to R) Patrick, Sandy, the bartender and Bob

That brought us back past the Cape Charles Distillery which was much quieter and so we stayed to try their wares. We joined Sandy, Patrick, Linda, Bob and Natalie for a tasting session which turned out to be great fun.  The distillery produces a bourbon, a rye whisky, a wheat whisky, a maple whisky, an apple and cinnamon moonshine, and a very smooth vodka.  We sampled each in turn and whilst Bob and Patrick compared them to Jack Daniels (Bob is a self-confessed Jack Daniels connoisseur), we compared them to the Scotch whisky with which we are more familiar.

Inevitably the tasting experience got our tongues wagging and our fellow tasters proposed that we should move on to the Cape Charles microbrewery.  Bob drove us all there in his truck, which was lucky for us because it was not marked on our map and, being on the edge of the town, is further than we would have walked.

Our 2 flights of beer

Regular visitors to the microbrewery, our new friends knew exactly what to order.  For us though, with 10 different beers on offer, the decision was more challenging.  In the end we went for another tasting experience and ordered 2 flights.  Each had a small glass of 4 different beers and so we were happily able to try the majority of the beers on offer.  They were very good (and a million times better than the ubiquitous Bud Light) and we now know exactly what to order a pint of when we are next in Cape Charles.

The fun-loving characters we’d met at the distillery. (L to R) Lynne, Bob, Natalie, Nicky, me, Patrick and Sandy

Sandy and Lynne are sisters and with their husbands they had been neighbours of Natalie and her husband (not at the event) at various times in their working lives.  Now that they are retired they have moved to become neighbours again in a small village about 6 miles away from the harbour.  It was interesting to hear about their experiences and they were fascinated to hear what we were up to in our sailing adventure. We think we’ve recruited some more followers of our blog!

After a fun afternoon together, we all clambered back into Bob’s truck.  He kindly dropped us back at the marina on their way home.  So, for us, the next question was what to do about dinner. That was an easy one to answer because right beside the marina is ‘The Shanty’ restaurant recommended to us by Richie (Puff).  We followed his advice and sampled the delights of the local shrimp and oyster Po’boys as well as trying out the restaurant’s really excellent New England Clam Chowder.

On the morning of 26 July it rained torrentially, the wind blew hard and all told it was really rather unpleasant. We had intended to move down to an anchorage 6 miles further south but put off our departure waiting for an upturn in the weather.  Eventually, after lunch, we saw the beginnings of the forecasted clearance and left the marina heading south.

About 6nm south of Cape Charles town is the Kiptopeke State Park, a nature reserve on the shores of the Chesapeake. In the 1950s, with the rise in motor vehicle usage, the ferry route for carrying motor vehicles across the Chesapeake to Norfolk was moved from Cape Charles town to Kiptopeke, though the railroad ferries continued to operate from the town.  When the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel opened in the 1960s the ferry routes shut and the area was converted to a State Park.  At some point thereafter, about 9 WWII Liberty Ships were sunk and concreted in to provide a breakwater protecting the point, the fishing pier, the beaches and, of course, the anchorage.  We had been recommended the anchorage as a convenient jumping off point for leaving the Chesapeake and, with the wind forecast to come from the southeast and east, albeit rather strongly, the northern part of the anchorage looked to be a reasonable place to spend the rest of the afternoon and the night. We planned to spend the time doing final preparation for our passage to Nova Scotia, checking everything was working, packing the grab bag and cooking some meals for the first 2 nights at sea. However, as we approached the anchorage things didn’t seem quite right.  The weather had got worse not better and it was a lot windier than the morning forecast had suggested that it would be.

Nicky pulled up the latest forecast and sure enough, it had changed markedly.  The fierce-looking low pressure that had been forecast to move up the coast reasonably well offshore during the day had obviously stalled and changed direction somewhat.  Overnight the winds were now forecast to be up to 30 knots and from most directions, notably from the northwest, to which the anchorage appears to be quite open.  That didn’t sound very safe or much fun and so we ‘bravely’ turned around and returned to Cape Charles Town Harbour at a fast run under a scrap of headsail.  That proved to be a very good decision because the winds did indeed come from all directions and, despite the breakwater at the entrance, the long fetch between that and the marina pontoons made it a very lumpy harbour when the winds blew in strongly from the west.

We rigged extra mooring lines, did our cooking and other preparations, including checking that the heater works for our move north into colder climes, and generally got as much sleep as we could, ready for the following morning’s departure.

Cape Charles Harbour, VA, USA