My husband is an experienced sailor. He first crewed aboard a 50' Morgan regularly off the coast of San Francisco at age six, with an old sailor who believed in assigning duties to everyone regardless of age. Over the years he's sailed in various lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. He is, however, unfamilar with the Chesapeake Bay.
The little sailboat was in Seaford at Mills Marina, which is located on a large creek. There are sailboats there. I wonder if they trucked them in. What I remember of the charts is that the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay is shallow. REALLY shallow as in two to six foot deep. Our boat's draft is only 3'2", but considering that sailboats can't be sailed in a nice straight line down the middle of a channel what happened next is not surprising.
It ran aground; the motor pulled it free of the drifted sand. Again. Two groundings later attempting to make it out of the channel, he came aground on rocks, rather than shifting sand and called for a tow. The man who towed him to Dare Marina a bit further south in Yorktown, informed him that the sand bottom does considerable shifting, is extremely shallow in spots up to five miles from shore and is not adequately reflected in the charts.
That was a big "Ouch!!" It didn't go anywhere for two weeks.
There were however, priceless moments including several minutes when a pod of dolphins accompanied the boat.
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