Downtown Market

 

If you haven’t checked out the Saturday morning market in downtown Elizabeth City, you’re missing a delightful experience.  Between May and October, white tents adorn the waterfront lawn on Water Street at the city docks.   Local farmers and bakers tantalize our senses with a plethora of selections.  The current season defines the bounty…..spring offers up asparagus and lettuce while we patiently await the season’s first berries.  As soon as the strawberries are gone, we’re getting  blueberries.  And everyone waits for the summer’s first vine grown tomato.  Good-bye to hot-house, cardboard, no color, no taste tomatoes.  Hello Better Boys!  There’s squash, corn, green beans, butter beans, zucchini too.  One booth sells herbs for “grow your own.”  Do you like lavender or mint in your tea?  Try sprouting it yourself.

The best chocolate chip cookies I have ever eaten are offered at Sydney’s Café, table.  They' re a tad pricey, but I am known to splurge on occasion.  Those cookies just flat out beg.  I usually  buy one for now and another for later.  The bread and baguettes are baked fresh on market day  as well. 

Other vendors are offering up jams and jellies, cucumber pickles, watermelons and cantaloupes, cakes and pies.  You can even buy a necklace or pair of handmade earrings.  Some Saturdays, John Peel sets up shop and sells his top shelf pottery, and the SPCA often brings the “puppy of the week” hoping it will find its new owner. 

The scene is friendly and just plain wholesome.  Folks mill around with their babies in backpacks and their dogs on leashes.   In a few scarce weeks, fall will be upon us and the bounty will change again. Pumpkins will replace watermelons.  It’s a social event.  Everyone’s invited.

 Come one, come all, come often.

There’s something for everyone.

 

The Applejack

The Applejack is third in birth order of our children.  She arrived just two years after John, 1976 to be exact.  She joined our family much like her siblings; much thought about but not planned, and powerfully loved once delivered.

Our Skipjack was designed and built by master boat-builder Curtis Applegarth at his boatyard in Oxford, MD.  Applegarth, a fourth generation boat builder, build skipjacks for pleasure cruising, taking design and dimensional liberties with the full scaled working Chesapeake Bay Skipjack model.  Our best guess is that our vessel was crafted in mid-1960’s and christened with a combination of Skipjack and Applegarth….hence Applejack.  We liked the name and it stuck.

Pleasure cruising is what the Applejack is all about.  It’s hosted a couple of overnights before, but it’s best at entertaining a few friends for a late afternoon sail on the Pasquotank.  If the weather is particularly cooperative and the winds are fair, cocktails and a picnic supper are usually in store.

George manages the tiller and main-sail with confidence and ease, and while I used to handle the jib….I mostly just watch it luff now.  Trimming the sails is tough work and I’m quick to recall the last time the captain asked me to “cheat the jib,” I fell overboard.  I’m better at pushing us off the pier to get underway and securing lines when we return to dock.  I pack a pretty good picnic basket too.

The Captain is cautious  and holds a mighty respect for the water and the dangers that face all mariners.  The Applejack doesn’t sail in blue water; she plies the brackish rivers and local sounds that keep her in safe territory. That’s not to say she hasn’t kissed the bottom a few times.  Wooden boats can sink…fast.  I’ve never been aboard the three times this has occurred.  Umm.

We’ve been lucky, she’s been lucky. She’s still moored in front of our home in Forbes Bay most of the time.  She winters with the O’Neal’s where she can enjoy calmer waters, and when a hurricane threatens, she rides it out in a secure “gunk hole” across the Pasquotank.  Recently she enjoyed a deep-pour cleansing and a minor face-lift while resting at Riverside Boat Works. 

She’s back and better than ever.  She’s ready to go.  Give us a shout and a wave when you see us heading out for a sunset cruise.  Or better still, come along for the ride.