This was a short-notice ride, as the weather situation was touch and go. Only Sandra and Allen did this ride, leaving from Springfield VA to ride about 120 miles or so to Slaughter Beach DE. Why did they do it? To see the famous spawning American horseshoe crabs of course. Sandra and Allen spent about an hour flipping the poor creatures back over so they could make their way back to the water. Apparently the tide brings them in and they sometimes get flipped over on their backs. They are unable to right themselves, so they bake in the sun and eventually die. I hope we saved some of them from that fate.

Here is an excerpt from a local writer that provides some history of Slaughter Beach and the horseshoe crabs:

Homes line the gently curving shoreline like a string of skyboxes. Residents here have four-season tickets to some of nature’s most spectacular shows. The first performance begins in the spring with the influx of thousands of spawning American horseshoe crabs. A misnomer, really, the crab (Limulus polyphemus) is actually more of a kissing cousin to the spider than kin to the crab. Bobbing in the surf like cast-off army helmets, the cinnamon-colored females make their way each spring from the chilly waters of the Atlantic Ocean to the warm sands of Slaughter Beach. Each crab lays as many as 80,000 tiny sea foam green eggs to be fertilized by waiting male crabs.

Enter the birds. As if on cue, countless hundreds of migratory shorebirds famished by their flight from the tip of South America arrive at the shore, blanketing the beach in search of the tapioca-sized eggs that lay buried in shallow nests in the sand. Experts from the Delaware Division of Wildlife estimate that as many as 30 different species of birds flock to Slaughter Beach each spring to participate in the frenetic peck-and-swallow ballet. Hugely territorial, their raucous squabbling is both awe-inspiring and deafening.

The gang met over at Jamie's General Bean on Sunday (April 22nd) around 10AM. While we waited for Woody to gas up his bike, Jamie's husband Tom showed up on his Dyna Low Rider, and soon Woody arrived followed by Tom's sister Joan, who arrived on her Dyna Low Rider. Jamie helped us take some pictures before we headed down Route 28 to Catlett and south on 806 to 616 and some other backroads down into Fredericksburg. It was a beautiful day with the sun shining and basically no wind to slow us down. We stopped over at Big Daddy Leather to see if we could hook up with Gary and Kathy (they were busy with a home improvement project), so we then rode over to Mile Long's American Ironhorse for the remainder of the afternoon. There were so many bikes there, and talk about cool choppers! We were even allowed to sit on them if you made sure no metal was hanging off your body. We ended up riding back up the way we came down, and while the traffic backed up on I-95, we had clear sailing on the backroads of Virginia. This was truly one of our favorite rides down to Fredericksburg!

Check out our new WORMS screensaver. This is an executable file built by Allen using Screensaver Builder, and it's self-installing. The file is zipped so you won't have problems downloading it. Once you extract the file, you probably need administrator rights to run the executable and successfully install it. Download the screensaver here.