windward is the only way down the Bay. The race is sponsored by St. Mary’s College and culminates in what has been called one of sailing’s top 10 parties.
It was time for us to move on—we still had one more saint waiting in the wings —so we took a final scenic look down at the river from the Margaret Brent Gazebo. (Brent was named executor of the will of colonial governor Leonard Calvert, Lord Baltimore’s son. In 1648 she went before the General Assembly to ask for two votes, one as executor and one as landowner in her own right, and received nothing in return but huffy male disdain.) Back at the college waterfront, we danced inelegantly across the coal-hot sand and returned to Hal’s boat. Special Olympics sailors by this time were off the water and had gathered with friends and families in the shade for the awards announcements. The sound of cheers and applause wobbled through the humidity to follow us down the dock.
Once out in Horseshoe Bend, Hal opened the throttle a little more than careful tourism might recommend, but we reveled in the resulting breeze and turned south for St. George Creek. We made two concessions to speed along the way. The first was to admire Porto Bello, the historic estate built in the 1740s by William Hebb II and extensively restored over the past several years by former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, writer Sally Quinn. The estate sits on a bluff above the river’s western shore. (Porto Bello, like Carthagena, was named by Hebb for yet another battle in the War of Jenkin’s Ear—this one a British victory.) Our second tangent was to trace Carthagena Creek past Josh Point, where the creek seems to end before it begins, around the dogleg to the right that