Day 398 – 399
On Wednesday morning, 10/13/21, we awoke to gloomy weather in Crisfield, MD, with rain threatening on and off. Mid-morning the skies turned partly cloudy, which lifted our spirits for a few hours, before the skies clouded back up again. Still, we wanted to explore our new surroundings, so we rented a golf cart from the marina for four hours, then drove it all around the underwhelming town. I’m sure it was partly due to the bad weather, but Crisfield was the first Maryland town we’d visited that we were less than impressed with. We stopped at Fisherman’s Grille for lunch and beverages on the water, where we sat outside on the deck and watched sun-rays peeking out from behind the clouds and sparkling down onto the Chesapeake Bay. After lunch, Steve surprised me by driving our golf cart over to nearby JohnnySweets, where we bought two huge chocolate peanut butter shakes for dessert. 🙂 Not at all healthy, but certainly delicious! We continued driving around town while we enjoyed our sweet treats, trying not to be run down by Crisfield’s passing motorists! 😐
The annual Tawes Crab and Clam Bake just happened to be taking place at our marina on Wednesday evening. Supposedly 3,000 tickets had been sold for this event, and not all participants were able to get food. This Bake is a big fund-raiser for the town of Crisfield, which wasn’t held in 2020 because of Covid. Fans were out in droves this year, but we didn’t purchase tickets, which were $60 each, since by this time I had tired of eating so much seafood and they weren’t serving anything besides crabs and clams. Steve said that was too much money to pay if I wasn’t even going to eat, with which I agreed, so we watched the festivities from the sidelines.
Thursday morning, 10/14/21, the weather stayed gloomy and a bit chilly, as we walked over to board the Steven Thomas Ferry for our scheduled day trip over to Tangier Island, VA. At first we’d thought we were making the trip by ourselves with only the crew for company, but slowly our group began to increase, until there was quite a crowd of us tourists. We were both grateful we’d carried our jackets with us, as even though the sun appeared periodically, it was COLD riding across that water. Tangier Island, VA, is located 13 miles from the Maryland mainland, so our trip over took about an hour and fifteen minutes, where we passed the tiny island of Port Isabel before reaching our final destination.
Tangier Island, VA, is a small island of 900 acres (though only 83 of those acres are suitable for habitation) with a long history of watermen, who fish and crab the Chesapeake Bay. At one point, the island had as many as 1500 residents, but it has since dwindled to about 400. Tangier Island is only accessible by boat, helicopter, or small plane. The island is self-sufficient, but does receive mail and package deliveries from the mainland once a day, six days a week. Some of the island’s first Anglo-American settlers, the Thomas family, has run the ferries to and from Tangier Island for generations. Other original settlers arrived in 1770.
After a satisfying lunch at Lorraine’s Seafood, one of two operating restaurants on the island, several of us employed a young Tangier native to drive us around on a short golf cart ride for a brief tour of the island and description of its history. He told us he had just turned 18 years old and the golf-cart tours were one of his ways to earn money, since he never leaves the island. He spoke with the thick, Tangierman accent, for which the islanders are famous. The accent is described to be a combination of Old English and southern U.S., and stays intact because the closest-knit islanders rarely visit the mainland, and only have each other for company, which keeps the accent alive. As the young man spoke, those of us on his tour had to really strain to understand what he was saying. For example, when he said the word “tide”, he pronounced it as two syllables that sounded like “taw-WEED”. The word “side” is pronounced as “saw-WEED”, and the word “time” is pronounced as “taw-WEEM”. At first I thought this young man must be embellishing, until I heard other islanders using the exact same brogue. Very strange, indeed!
We learned that John Smith discovered Tangier Island in 1608, when it was already inhabited by the Pocomoke Indians. The very first permanent Anglo-American settlers were the Crockett family, who harvested and sold soft-shell crabs for a living. In fact, still today – hundreds of years later – crabbing, oystering, and some light tourism sustain the Tangier Islanders. After our short but interesting golf cart tour, we walked through a very small town, visiting the island’s museum and several shops, where Steve actually bought himself a t-shirt, which rarely happens. Score for Tangier Island!
Position: N 37° 58.631, W 75° 51.386
Total marina nights: 375
Total nights at anchor: 23
Locks today: 0
Locks Total: 28