This morning, we are motoring down the Long Island Sound back to Norwalk after a week in very eastern LI, exploring both the South fork and the North fork.
As I write, waves are 3-4 feet with very short intervals and the wind is on our nose. Perfect sailing conditions, just the opposite of what we encountered going out the Sound. And that reminds me of home on the Chesapeake Bay.
We arrived in Sag Harbor last Sunday with Lindsay (daughter) and Jessie (FOD). As I have previously written, we were swallowed up by the mega yachts in the slips around us. The Sag Harbor slip was the most expensive ever for us and the yacht club offered virtually no amenities for that high price. I don’t really wonder at the lack of yacht club amenities because the yachts tied up at the club are big enough to be yacht clubs in their own right. They do not need onshore facilities.
Sag Harbor is an agreeable enough town, pleasant, easy to walk and not overbearing. We wandered among the shops. I bought a bottle of coconut water, which Lindsay thought would help with my chronically chapped lips. It was nothing very special until I saw the cash register read-out. $8.00. Ouch. The groceries were all the same high price. Before we left Sag Harbor at the end our visit, we used the very nice Laundromat that is close to the dock, enticing those boaters who don’t have Laundromats aboard. A load in the washing machine was $9.00, payable by credit card, and the dryer was just as expensive. We were efficient in getting the laundry done by using several machines, but it was no bargain.
For Lindsay and Jessie’s last night, we went to dinner at a restaurant that Lindsay’s friend Ross had recommended. It was very busy, nice atmosphere and interesting menu. It was priced like my coconut water. Welcome to NY.
After the girls left to return to California in the morning and Jae and I immediately escaped to a mooring in the harbor – the highest priced mooring we had ever picked up at $100.00/night. As we were leaving the slip, the female dockhand asked if we had a bowthruster. Jae said yes. The dockhand then asked if we had a sternthruster. Jae said no. She seemed surprised when Jae told her no. It was just another confirmation that we had landed in the wrong ‘hood. I suspect she was glad for us to go.
You might ask why we persisted in staying in Sag Harbor where we spent three nights on the mooring. The reason is that we wanted to visit East Hampton and Montauk. Sag Harbor is closest to East Hampton and its beaches. We could reach Montauk by water, but we had encountered difficulty booking something there (there is no anchoring there for deep draft sailboats), and it is quite expensive as well. So, we decided to base ourselves in Sag Harbor and visit these places by land.
For East Hampton, we determined it was a reasonable bike ride, so we trotted our Bromptons ashore and rode.
There was no bike path, but the road did have a wide shoulder. As we rode, it seemed to me that the road to East Hampton was all uphill. On one long incline, I was puzzling about how it could all be uphill since both Sag Harbor and East Hampton are at sea level and I don’t think a mountain range runs between them. Perhaps someone can explain this to me. Having worked all the way to East Hampton, I was really looking forward to the trip back to Sag Harbor – all downhill.
East Hampton is a fine place to visit if you are a woman who forgot to bring the right dress shoes to the beach. Or, perhaps you are planning to attend a gala event and New York City just did not offer a sufficient selection of dresses. The ladies who are reading this post can rest assured that such a wide selection of exquisite attire exists in East Hampton, so don’t worry about bringing too much luggage, like my daughter did. I would guess it might be wise to notify your banker before going there, however. No prices are shown in the windows, too gauche I am sure, so I cannot be sure of the cost because we did not go inside. This affluence is not really surprising; this is the toniest of NY beach resorts as far as I know.
Apart from seeing the town, we had two purposes there – the beach and the possibility of getting solar eclipse glasses. We did not find the glasses in the library or in a convenience store. Perhaps we could have gotten a diamond studded pair in a boutique, but I did not think to investigate that possibility.
The main beach in East Hampton is not only public, but quite pleasant and low key. We spent $45.00 on two hamburgers, chips and water (no coconut water) and watched the surf, which was quite strong. When it started to rain, we decided to bike back to town.
Now I have to stop and explain the title of this post. East Hampton and some surrounding towns, have the tallest and best manicured hedges I have ever seen. I doubt there is anywhere in England that can compete. These hedges are massive, ranging as high as 15 feet, I think (I forgot to bring the tape measure) and deep as well. You can see nothing through them. They line the sidewalks on both sides of the road, with an occasional driveway interrupting them.
While cycling past them I was thrown back to The Great Gatsby and the lavish worlds of East Egg and West Egg, thinly veiled pseudonyms for the Hamptons. Behind these massive hedges, Tom and Daisy Buchanan entertained and lived the lavish life, perhaps making periodic trips to town to buy more shoes.
We visited on a Tuesday. I don’t know think the Toms and Daisys of East Hampton were home that day. I say this because there was a prodigious amount of hedge maintenance going on all over town and you could hear the angry whine of gas powered lawn equipment everywhere; it was inescapable. Trucks were in the driveways with large arrays of lawn care tools, including the biggest gas powered hedge clippers I have seen, lawnmowers and so on. Crews of men were using these tools and they were all wearing clothes with the name of their companies. All of the workers that I saw were Hispanic as far as I could tell.
I am sure most of those Hispanic workers are legal with a documented right to be in East Hampton. But, they cannot possibly feel very secure in the current environment and I can’t see where all the East Eggers are going to keep finding hedge workers: not from the President’s voter base, I don’t think. I would assume the hedge industry will grow in this Administration and there will be greater demand for hedge workers. The hedgers who live in these houses are the President’s people and he needs to ensure they are well maintained and prosper; I am sure he has some high hedges of his own at his various properties. Yet, his stance on immigration threatens the whole hedge industry. I have included some hedge pictures to give you sense of them. I should have done a better job of photographing them.
With our accidental hedge sightseeing complete, we started biking back to Sag Harbor. At a vegetable stand, we stopped for fresh produce. It started raining harder and we decided to call Uber for the trip home. I could not disagree with Jae that we should Uber back, but I was sorry to miss the all downhill ride back.
Our next day’s destination was Montauk. I was hoping that hedgemania might not be quite so overwhelming there. We took Uber to Montauk Village and from there planned to ride our bikes to the Montauk Lighthouse at the very tip of the South Fork. As soon as we arrived in the village, I could see it was much more our kind of place-- not a hedge in sight; everything was open and visible. We found a taco place with fresh ceviche on the sidewalk for lunch. No shoe stores in sight either, unless you want a basic rubber flip flop. Even I have higher standards than that.
After eating too much lunch, we rode to Montauk Light. This lighthouse is well worth visiting in my opinion. It is the oldest lighthouse in New York State and was commissioned by President George Washington in 1796. They built it in 5 months, something we could not do now, and it has been in operation ever since. It is about 100 feet tall and sits on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. From the top platform, you can see Block Island, a mere 17 miles away, and the Connecticut and Rhode Island coasts farther away. Of course, you can also see Gardiners Bay and the eastern features of Long Island. It is a great view. And offshore, you can see many fishing boats, hanging out in the swirling currents and looking for fish. I would definitely recommend it, at least on a sunny day like we had.
Back in the village, we found a low key place for ice cream – we had earned it after about 15 miles of riding that included a detour to the harbor. We then went to the very nice public beach, intending to swim. But the surf was far too rough and the lifeguards forbade swimming. So, we watched the surf for a while, particularly people who were flirting with danger. One boy was nearly swept in. Eventually, we called our friend Uber to deliver us back to Sag Harbor.
The next day, we motored the few miles around Shelter Island to Dering Harbor. Along the way, we stopped for a lunchtime anchor and a paddleboard jaunt to the nature preserve on the Island. We picnicked ashore and then paddled back to the boat where we swam around. Eventually, I laid on a paddleboard and tried to clean up our waterline/boot stripe, where the hull meets the water. Somewhere at the beginning of the trip, we acquired a bunch of nasty looking seaweed stuff that stuck to our white waterline stripes. Jae and I had assiduously cleaned the boot stripe before leaving, so this had been a long lingering insult that I attributed to New Jersey’s water. Despite my efforts, the boot stripe still has a brown smile, as our friend Michael calls it, but now at least it looks a little better.
The Shelter Island Yacht Club is in Dering Harbor. This club has a lovely location, along with the strictest rules on cell phone usage of any place that I know. Use of a phone on the launch is prohibited, for example. We managed to suppress our growing addiction to CNN news alerts while ashore long enough to have a delightful dinner that night with our new friends from the Corinthians, Bob and Anne Whitcomb and their two crew Paul and Judy.
The next day brought some terrific rain, scrubbing the boat decks pretty clean. We waited it out and then walked to the Greenport ferry. We had already explored part of Shelter Island and were more interested in Greenport, partly to get a few supplies and also to explore the town more thoroughly.
Greenport is the blue collar antidote to East Hampton. I did not check real estate prices, but I saw almost no hedges or shoe stores, so I am pretty sure there is a big delta in price between East Hampton and Greenport. Ironically, Jae and I did buy shoes in Greenport – water shoes to allow us to walk on the rocky local beaches.
While in Greenport, we decided we wanted to watch a movie that night with our DVD player. The only problem is that we did not have a new movie onboard to watch. Buying a movie is difficult because no one sells movies anymore; everything is streamed. We eventually learned that we could buy a movie at the 7-11 located outside of town. So, laden with groceries and other purchases, we trudged to the 7-11 and pored over their bins of used and old movies. We found some good things to watch and bought 5 movies for about 20 bucks.
For our last day, we motored out to Orient Bay, dropped the hook, had lunch and then paddleboarded ashore for beach time. Back on the boat, we motored up farther into the harbor, dropped the hook again and dinghied into Orient, NY. Jae had read about a pie shop in the little village. So we walked the streets, largely residential and very quiet. The pie store is a charming little place, set in a village that seems a time capsule from the past, just as the cruising guide informed us. I did note and photograph incipient hedge growth, but I think it is very manageable there.
Jae went wild at the pie store. She bought scones, a Cornish pasty and a whole nectarine pie. I did not remind her that we are too old, with slowed metabolism, to be trucking around with a whole pie. For dinner, I grilled more tuna from the Block Island fishing expedition and we had nectarine pie for dessert. After staring at the stars for a while, we went to bed. This is why people go cruising.