Madison Bay

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's) 

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 47 - May 17, 2017

We left Smith Island this morning intending to get to Cambridge. We depend on Garmin Blue Chart to estimate distances, and it has consistently underestimate distances! So by 4 p.m., when we were ready to stop, we were still 20 miles short of Cambridge!

Active Captain has been our consistent go-to resource for anchorages. It actually shows marinas, anchorages, bridges, boat ramps and hazards, and here the operative words were "boat ramp"! There are many, many anchorages that cruisers without a D-O-G can use, but we have to be able to land Baxter twice a day!  Madison Bay was about 10 miles out of our way on the LIttle Choptank River, but there is a county boat ramp there. I know, first, that I can legally land at a public boat ramp, and second, that I can just paddle the kayak up onto the ramp and let Baxter jump out (I usually catch up with him before he has gone too far, because being male, you know what he has to do first!). So we followed the channel in and anchored in about 3 feet at low tide - a shallow draft C-Dory has so many more options than a four foot draft trawler or five foot draft sailboat! We were about 100 feet off the channel, because the reviews of Madison Bay had mentioned the lights and wakes from the workboats that go out every morning at 4:30 a.m. We did hear the workboats go out in the morning, but we were far enough away that neither noise, lights nor wake bothered us.

Madison Bay is not a place you would probably pick as a destination, hence no photos, but as a convenient one-night stop-over, it was a life-saver! I got the kayak down as soon as we got there, paddled Baxter to the boat ramp, he did his business and then I paddled him back. There is a marina in the same basin as the boat ramp, but it must not accept transients - it was full of workboats, and is not listed in Active Captain. I had to take him across the street to the grass along the street, as above the boat ramp there was only a blacktop parking lot. On the way back, I noticed a little sandy spot just behind the breakwater, much closer than the boat ramp, so that is where I took him in the morning. There was a big grassy field above the sandy spot, perfect for dog duty!.

This was a short stop, in at 4 p.m., out again at 9:00 a.m., but it was just what we needed on our way to Cambridge!