I have fallen far behind in writing about our adventures. The Hinckley yard seduced me with its boats and threw me off track. Having been thrown off track, I have decided not to return. So, this post will be disorganized, rambling and will do an erratic job of bringing this blog up to date. To really update on our last few weeks, I would have to reach all the way back to Nantucket and burden the reader with all sorts of prattle about having gone here and there. I won’t do it. Instead, it will be more of a stream of consciousness update.
First, I have intended to write something about our visit to Westport, MA. We would not have gone there except that it allowed us to rendezvous with my old college friend Kevin Convey and his wife Kathy. I met Kevin at Colby College in 1973 and we became good friends immediately. After I finished college in 1975, we shared a flat in Dublin for a semester while Kevin was doing his junior year at Trinity and I was wandering around Europe and doing a little bit of aimless writing. Kevin is a journalist who teaches at Quinnipiac Univ (not likely I spelled that right) after many years in the newspaper business, eventually becoming the editor in chief of the New York Daily News. He and I picked up right where we had left off and I can’t believe we let all these years slide by without staying in better touch. The four of us have had many of the same life experiences over the past 40 years or so and there was no lack of stuff to talk about.
Too quickly, our time ran out and the launch needed to return us to the boat. We invited them to meet us again and stay aboard. Fortunately, they were able to join us in East Greenwich, RI. We had a very nice afternoon sail -- mainsail and staysail only -- happy hour and then Kevin cooked dinner for us. He is an avid cook and has never lost his love of music and literature, so we asked him to cook and to bring some of his favorite music to play for us. Sitting on a mooring in the lovely, placid East Greenwich harbor, we had a grand time and I hope we see them again very soon.
Our parting was a little unfortunate because the next morning we were headed to Hinckley for various repairs. We were actually excited to go there, so you can imagine that when we started the engine that morning and heard a new noise, we were more than a little upset. I have already written about that! In our concern about that new issue, we hardly had a proper goodbye to Kevin and Kathy.
Skipping ahead, after Hinckley, we went to Newport for two days. By this time, our daughter Lindsay and her friend Jessie were aboard. They are writing their own blog for this site, so you will read what they have to say about being aboard. Lindsay brought a very large suitcase full of clothes and shoes. It was a challenge to stow, but we did it with love. With all three of our kids living in California, we don’t see nearly enough of any of them and so it was wonderful for us to have her with us.
After a great sail out of Portsmouth, tacking all the way down the East Passage to Newport, we took a slip at Bannister’s again, right in the heart of Newport, because we knew Lindsay would be pleased to be where all the action is. But, this time, unlike our prior visit to Bannister’s, I did not slide the boat into the sardine-sized slip like a pro. Instead, my first pass ended with the anchor tapping the pilings of the wharf across from us, while the dinghy was nudging the piling of our slip. I had to back up, try again, fail again, and attract a large crowd of spectators, before the third time proved the charm. Lindsay congratulated me on getting it in, but I had a different feeling about it.
Almost immediately, the girls were off to explore the waterfront of Newport. Jae and I tended to some boat chores. That night, we went to hear a band at the Newport House of Blues. The band was terrific and we had secured a great spot at the bar by arriving early, until a rather nasty looking old woman arrived, flipped up a placard showing she had a reserved spot at the bar, and rudely elbowed us away from her chosen spot. It made me so mad that I went over to the bar where her placard was sitting upright, picked up the placard and slammed it down on the bar as hard as I could, right in front of her. I never said a word to her, just walked away. She came up to me a few minutes later, giving me the finger, and uttering the f*&^% bomb a few times. I ignored her. It was proof that she is as nasty as she looked. There is something really unsightly about a person in their 70’s behaving like that. We stayed a little longer, but the bloom was off the rose and we left shortly afterwards.
Jae and I had two must-do items for Newport. First, we wanted to visit the International Tennis Hall of Fame and second we wanted to do the Cliff Walk. We did not do either on our prior trip to Newport, thinking the girls would like to join. They were interested in the Cliff Walk, but not the Hall of Fame.
The Hall of Fame is in what was once called the Newport Casino. It is a great example of the Old World in the New World. I believe it is Tudor architecture surrounding a lovely grass tennis court with gardens. Very English. This was my first visit to a sports hall of fame, and likely my last. I enjoyed it, but it is not like a museum, and I learned little of interest. I was reminded that Major Wingfield had patented tennis in the 1800’s (and I will read that patent) I learned how court tennis is played. Of note among the tennis exhibits is the fact that you once could buy 12 tennis balls in a pressurized can.
We then reserved a grass court for later in the afternoon. I think these grass courts are pretty well kept and in fact we played on one of their tournament courts. Nonetheless, the bounces are not all even and the ball really skids with volleys and slices. It is easy to see why Roger Federer’s and Pete Sampras’ slices and volleys were so effective and why Steffi Graf only needed a slice backhand to win Wimbledon. The club’s rules require all white tennis clothes, which we had, but they play with yellow balls, not white balls, as I did growing up. We will have many photos of this event because the girls showed up in time to photograph it.
From there, we did the Cliff Walk. This is a walk along the cliffs facing north from Newport, where all the very wealthy people built their summer cottages. The scenery is terrific and the beach below it seems well worth visiting. I am sorry we did not have time to do so. Lindsay and Jess had met some girls in the bar the night before who invited them to go to the beach the next day, but we did not realize a beach was so close. Jae and I are already planning a return to Newport, at least by car, if not boat.
That same afternoon, Quantum delivered a headsail for us to use for the rest of the trip. Quantum retrieved this sail from our shed at home, found mice had munched on it, stitched it to close holes made by these hungry mice, and shipped it to Newport. I have previously written about it. It still has a few mouse bloodstains on it and is certainly homely. Jae and I have joked that we are channeling the movie Captain Ron, which we require all crew to watch so they will know the important principles of seamanship for their time aboard Sirius.
Despite the sail’s unsightly appearance, Jae and I hoisted it early in the morning in the slip and furled it before easily dropping our lines and sliding out of the slip, bound for Shelter Island, NY. No crowd was there to watch our departure.
The east end of Long Island is an area that none of us had visited. Unfortunately, there was no wind, so we motored the whole way, taking about 7 hours to get there. Along the way, we discovered that the work done at Hinckley had brought the autopilot to full operational status and the boat steered the route, adjusting course at each waypoint in the route. That was a very welcome discovery.
As we approached Shelter Island, fog set in. This is something that we treat with great respect. We turned on our running lights, retrieved the ship’s whistle, fired up the radar and started keeping a close watch. It is nerve wracking to come into a strange port in the fog, despite the instruments. We were about the only sailboat around, but there were fishing boats zipping every which way, producing large wakes and no one was showing running lights or using the whistle. We pulled out the old whistle we found on the boat, see earlier photo, and had the girls up on the foredeck, giggling and blowing the whistle every two minutes. I am sure visibility was under 2 miles, and some boats were hard to see in the distance, but no one was ever close and there was never a risk of collision.
We took a mooring at Shelter Island Yacht Club and walked around Dering Harbor. Jae and I will return in a couple of days and explore it further and take advantage of the public clay tennis courts. The girls chose to return to the boat pretty quickly after our walk, I think Jess was not feeling entirely well, but Jae and I decided to ride the ferry across to Greenport and walk around. We liked Greenport – I think it is the bluer collar alternative to Sag Harbor, the Hamptons and so forth. After walking through most of the town, we ended up at a waterfront bar for a drink. We were discussing our schedule, when a woman seated near us overheard and interrupted, saying she had just come from Sag Harbor (our next destination).
We assumed she had come by car, but it turned out that she and her husband are sailboat liveaboards. We had a very nice chat about their adventures over the past 2 years and we made numerous suggestions to them for their upcoming visit to the Chesapeake Bay, where they have never visited. They have done a season in the Caribbean, including five months living in Grenada.
We could have talked far longer, but we needed to ride the ferry back to Shelter Island, where the girls were cooking dinner. How nice for us to have them take charge of dinner. After dinner, we all laid on the foredeck and tried to watch the Perseid meteor shower, but there were too many clouds. We never saw a shooting star.
The next day, we motored out of Shelter Island, fighting huge power boat wakes all around us. We were rather shocked at the transmissions we were hearing on the VHF. For the landlbubbers, VHF channel 16 is the international hailing and distress channel that the Coast Guard and all boaters should monitor. It is Ok to make contact with another boat on 16, but you must then switch to another channel, so that 16 is left free for emergency broadcasts. Even in this modern era of technology, we must all share this one channel. It necessarily follows that boaters transmitting on 16 should be polite and observe proper decorum. That is not what we heard. Instead, we heard boaters complaining about large boat wakes in no wake zones, very profane language and some really nasty exchanges. Repeatedly, the Coast Guard would admonish people to remember the purpose of 16, to no avail.
It was tempting to characterize all of this as a “welcome to NY” type experience. We had not heard really any of this elsewhere. But, as I listened to the descriptions of some of the complaints, it appeared to me that most of it was coming from across the Sound – from genteel Connecticut. At one point, after one guy had let loose a series of F bombs, another guy came on and reminded him that children can hear these broadcasts. And to emphasize his point, he then put a mike next to a crying baby, almost as if to say the baby was crying because of the foul language. We were sorely tempted to turn the radio off. It was that ugly.
But, once we had motored well into Gardiner’s Bay, a large protected bay and a lovely sailing ground, the radio traffic seemed to die away. The wind piped up and we unfurled all the sail we had on deck, including the staysail and Captain Ron’s mouse fatigued genoa. I think the genoa is about 90% so the word genoa does not really apply. It certainly does not provide as much power as we would have liked for 12 knots of wind, but it did a pretty good job and soon we were clipping along at 7-8 knots, in a hurry to go nowhere but eager to ensure the girls had one last fun sail. If anyone was laughing at our Beverly Hillbillies headsail, we could not tell. The girls first sunned on the foredeck and then Jess took the wheel and did a fine job of steering and tacking. After a few hours of sailing all around Gardiner’s, we took our slip at Sag Harbor.
Sag Harbor is the most expensive place we have been. The slip was oversized for us, which might explain some of the cost because we were in a canyon of huge power megayachts, each of which had professional crew who were constantly waxing, washing, polishing, and whatever. There was wind in the harbor, but these multi-level boats blocked our wind and view. We only took the slip to facilitate the girls’ departure the next day.
The girls again launched off to explore Sag Harbor, which had intrigued them after reading the cruising guides. It is a very nice town, easy to walk, and has all the provisioning we needed. I did begin to despair about buying beer, however. We had run perilously low on beer and it seems that New York regulates who can sell beer. Just in the nick of time, as the last had been consumed, I found more.
Sadly, the girls left in the morning to return to Los Angeles. We miss them, just as we miss everyone who has been aboard. They took notes throughout their stay and have promised to write a post that I am sure will be fun to read.
After one night in the canyon of megayachts, we moved out to a mooring in the harbor, the most expense mooring we have seen, and plan to stay here a few days. Today, we will bike to East Hampton.
Our plans are a little unsettled for the rest of the week, except that we will be in Norwalk again by the 21st, and will catch the tide down the East River on the 23rd, weather permitting.