Five hours and 35 miles later, we arrived at the Smith Island Marina dock in the town of Ewell and tied up next to another catamaran that had arrived shortly before us. We were on the cruise boat dock which did not have electricity available, so the marina owner allowed us to stay overnight without a fee – as long as we ate in his restaurant, The Bayside Inn. We found out the restaurant was only open when the cruise boats were “in town” which was from 1 to 4 pm and we had already had our lunch, so we checked out the gift shop, looked into renting bikes or a golf cart and stopped at the “take out” snack shop at the other end of the restaurant building. We were trying to spend some money but there wasn’t anything we needed in the gift shop and the guy in charge of the bikes and golf carts told us there really wasn’t any point in renting them because we could see the whole town in a 20-minute walk and they couldn’t allow anyone to use the carts to see the rest of the island because the tide was so high it was covering “the road.” OK – so we promised to come back before 4 pm and pick up a couple pieces of the famous “Smith Island Cake.”Smith Island is a remote fishing community located approximately 13 miles offshore and accessible only by water. The island has 250 residents who live in the three towns of Ewell, Rhodes Point and Tylerton. Smith Islanders are direct descendants of British colonists who first settled the island in the early 1700’s. The local inhabitants retain a distinctive speech pattern — a strong holdover of the Elizabethan/Cornwall dialect — due to the isolation of the island.
On our walk around town, we saw a community struggling to survive. There was a lovely church and cemetery and a very modern Smith Island Center Heritage Museum, where we learned about the island’s history and how the Smith Island Cake came to be. The origins of the cake can be traced back to the 1800’s when watermen’s spouses would send them out with quilts, provisions and cakes. Traditional, thicker cakes would become stale far too quickly, so the islanders took to making cakes with thinner layers (typically ten) and replacing butter cream frostings with fudge. We made sure we returned to the snack shop before the 4 pm closing time and brought home three slices of the famous cake – orange, banana and chocolate.
We also learned more about crabs and crabbing. A crab can be a hard crab (crab is feisty and in order to grow it must shed its shell), a peeler crab (green peeler – ready to molt in 5 to 7 days or rank peeler – will molt within 3 days), a buster (has begun breaking out of its shell), a softie (has shed its shell and is temporarily defenseless – brings highest prices), or a buckram (if a crab that has shed its shell isn’t removed from the water within a few hours, its new shell begins to form – it will be returned to the Bay to finish its shell). An adult male crab is called a Jimmy, an adult female is a sook, and a mating pair is called a doubler or a “Jimmy and his wife.”
In the evening, we saw that our boat neighbors, Dicky and Dixie on the catamaran Me’ Nou, were visiting with another couple up on the dock. Dicky and Dixie, from Lake Arthur, Louisiana, were on the first leg of their “Great Loop Adventure.” They planned to have their boat hauled out on the Chesapeake and leave it until next spring when they will continue their journey. The boat name, Me’ Nou, is Cajun for little kitty or “meow.” The other couple we met was aboard a monohull sailboat and hailed from the Chesapeake Bay area. We swapped cruising stories until the no-see-ums drove us inside.
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