Pizza or Bagels?

What do two people do on board a small sailboat for months at a time? I’m sure that is a big mystery to you non-boating people, so let me enlighten you.

Rick and I have developed different routines while living on our boat. When we are at anchor, we entertain ourselves separately with different pastimes. Rick’s main focus is on writing, and he sits at his little desk for hours at a time, quite happily tapping away at his computer keyboard most mornings. He also spends an inordinate number of mornings swearing at his computer because it never seems to be working right. I try to stay out of his way on those occasions.

I brought sewing and weaving projects along, but have hardly touched them this year; I’m not sure why. I seem to be much more interested in obsessively reading the political news online, looking at the latest polls, etc. This has been a particularly stressful time, with a highly consequential election coming up in just a few months, and even though the fantasy is that we leave all our troubles and responsibilities at the dock, in this age of cell phones and non-stop news cycles, it has been difficult to unplug. 

Cooking with any imagination is somewhat difficult on a boat, with a small galley, limited gadgetry, and a marine environment that doesn’t work well with fresh fruits and vegetables. Yes, we have an icebox with refrigeration, but only the most hearty produce survives in there. No food processor, blender or microwave. We do have an oven, but it has never worked. Those boat ovens are notoriously bad anyway, so most boaters don’t use them, and we never bothered to get ours fixed. But on a cold day, I get cravings for baked goods, muffins or banana bread. Years ago I found a little fifties-vintage stove top baker, aptly called an “Ovenette”, that sits on top of a burner and uses convection to create a small circular space in which to bake whatever you want. It’s pretty hard to regulate the temperature though, and it tends to burn things on the outside before they are done in the middle. 

Pumpkin nut bread baked (burned) in the Ovenette

We also have a thermal cooker; a giant thermos that uses retained heat to slow-cook soups and stews. Basically, you put everything in a pot, boil for five minutes, and then put the pot inside the thermos and let it sit for four to eight hours. The only problem with this method is that it works best if the pot is full. I made a delicious lentil soup using up all the remaining veggies in the fridge, but there was enough soup to feed an army. There was so much of the stuff that we could have eaten it every night for a week, and you know, almost nothing is that delicious. Good thing we had burned pumpkin bread to go with it.

Leftover Lentil Soup

“What about laundry?” you may ask. The solution to that is that you need to bring LOTS of clothing, and wear the same thing over and over, only changing when it’s just too disgusting, even for you. I brought enough underwear to have a fresh pair every day, for the whole summer, and that has worked out pretty well. But as wonderful as it is not to have to do laundry that often, there is a stickier problem; what to do with all of that dirty laundry as it builds up? A summer’s worth of undies, shorts, tee shirts, sweatshirts, sheets, towels, pillow cases, dish cloths, sleep wear, swim wear, ugh, ugh, ugh. We haven’t quite figured that one out. We stuff it all under the v-berth and into cupboards, where it stews until we can get to a laundromat.

The Joads go in to do laundry

For me, the best thing about sailing is when we stop. I know that sounds facetious, but it really is true. When I am no longer hampered by the threat of seasickness, I am free to appreciate the  constantly changing marine environment. I love to drink in the scenery when we’re anchored in a beautiful remote spot, and I love swimming off the boat on a hot day. We go ashore whenever we can, walking the beaches, visiting shops and restaurants. 

We had a particularly wonderful stay in Onset, a charming little town at the southern end of the Cape Cod canal. In addition to getting our laundry done, we stopped in to Marc Anthony’s place for their signature pizza and steamed clams. We love their pizza so much, we ordered an extra to take back to the boat. Then two days later, we came in again for beer, and couldn’t resist bringing home another large pie.

But what about when you’re underway? Surely there are a lot of sailorly tasks to keep you busy? Well, Rick takes care of all of the “sailorly” things, like setting and trimming the sails, and navigating. I’m always valiantly trying to stave off seasickness by gazing out at the horizon and listening to audio books. Once in a great while, we see a pod of dolphins, or even more rarely, a whale or two, and that is very exciting to be sure. But most of the time, we are looking at a vast seascape for hours with nothing to do. 

I do a lot of daydreaming. We have meandering conversations about, say, how amazing it is that whales and dolphins evolved to have blow holes on the tops of their heads. How does that even work? Rick does frequent stretches and pseudo knee bends/squats, trying to get his injured knee to recover quicker. 

Recently we tried out a little game, the idea of which came about years ago from my old friend Christian Colberg. I call it “Bellybutton Bagel”, and it goes like this: Take your two hands and join the thumb and forefingers together to make a circle. Use that shape to encircle your bellybutton and the tissue surrounding it, creating what looks like a bagel. Then compare with other players. Rick’s bagel was a lot hairier than mine. Okay, that used up about five minutes. What’d ya wanna do now? Is it time for lunch yet?

Is there any leftover pizza?

Old Kids on the Block

Great Salt Pond

We finally made it to Block Island. The last time we were here was three years ago, one year into the pandemic, and things appear to be mostly unchanged since then. Oh there are small things that are different now; the ice cream place at the Maritime Institute is no longer (Damn!), and the cute little farm store called the Depot appears to be permanently closed. There are no more weekly “Bingo Nights” advertised on homemade signs at the volunteer fire department. But everything else seems like it’s just the same as we remembered it. The crowded anchorage, the tooting of horns at sunset, the beautiful crescent beach, and of course the tourists. And yet, it feels different to us. Not quite so charming. Not quite as much fun. Something rather basic has indeed changed and I’m pretty sure I know what it is.

It’s us.

We’ve gotten old.

Okay, that's not us... Yet.

Going to the beach used to be an every afternoon occurrence, one we both looked forward to. We would bring beach chairs and cold drinks, read, swim, and walk the entire beach together. Now… Rick’s knee bothers him when we do too much walking. And do we really need to drag those heavy chairs with us? I’m not even sure I want to get all sticky with sunscreen and salt water. Again. That necessitates a shower, particularly when you have long hair. Couldn’t we just stay on the boat today? Take an old lady nap and don’t bother with the shower?

Which is older, the slipper socks or the man wearing them?

To be fair, the weather has not been great since we’ve been here. A few nice days, yes, but more rainy ones, wet and soggy with somewhat low temperatures. Also, I ate something that didn’t agree with my tummy and I didn’t feel like doing much of anything for a few days. But even so…

Our friends Rick and Lynne arrived a few days after we did, and they got us out of our doldrums. They took us birding one early morning, and we shared dinners on both of our boats. Chef Rick (Lynne’s Rick) made us an unforgettable bouillabaisse using fresh clams and mussels he had harvested himself, all the more impressive because he made that heavenly concoction in his galley kitchen on their boat. They joined us on the beach a couple of times as well, bringing their little dogs Ginger and Louis. No time to feel old with these two around!

At the Bird Beach

But there are other signs that we are a bit behind the times. And I’m not just talking about the whiteness of Rick’s beard. Our dinghy, the Yalma Kan, is an old lady herself. Hard dinghies were already on their way out of fashion when we bought her seven years ago, but they weren’t an unheard of anomaly. Now, we are the only hard dink at most dinghy docks, the lone traditional boat among a sea of inflatables.  

From our anchorage in the Great Salt Pond, one can dinghy in to the beach, or going the other direction, you can land at Payne’s dock and be within walking distance of town. Either way, you need to dodge all the boats on anchor or on moorings. It’s a pretty crowded place, especially on weekends. As you pass by, the semi-expected protocol is to exchange silent hand waves with any inhabitants on these boats. One afternoon we are headed in for dinner at Deadeye Dick’s, and we pass a large sailboat on a mooring. A little boy, maybe eight years old, shouts out, “You have a COOL dinghy!!!” 

“Why thank you!” we reply, sharing a laugh or two with his parents. That kid has spent his entire life in the age of ugly gray inflatables, so I wonder if he’s ever even seen one like ours before. Our dinghy is obsolete, going the way of the Model T, black and white TVs, typewriters and pay phones. And we are going right along with it! But of course, it is very nice to be called “cool”.

🎵"One of These Things is Not Like the Others" 🎶

Lynne and Rick have sailed back home on their boat, leaving us to enjoy one last dinner at The Spring House. We may be old, but we still know how to have fun.

This Old Boat

 

The whole country appears to be experiencing a heat wave. We know it is much hotter down in Baltimore so it’s hard to feel good about complaining, but without air conditioning, it’s pretty hot here in Port Washington too. We swim off of the boat, several times a day, and it does help. A lot. We had planned to go ashore and take in a movie, any movie, just to spend some time in air conditioning. But the two movie theaters that used to be within walking distance have both closed, casualties of Covid I expect. We go in for groceries instead and go nuts with all the fresh fruits and vegetables, rare commodities on a sail boat. Our eyes are much bigger than our icebox, and having stuffed our foldable cart to bursting, we are forced to buy a couple grocery totes to handle the overflow. How we think we’re going to eat all of it before it goes bad, I have no idea. We take the boat to the dock to fill the fuel and water tanks, and offload some trash bags. After three nights on a mooring here, we are ready to move on. 

I have been using scopolamine patches to ward off seasickness, and it has been mostly successful in that I have not actually gotten sick. But many of the passages have been pretty uncomfortable, leaving me queasy and wrung out even after we stop. We had planned on making it to Port Jefferson in one go, but Rick could see I was struggling and pulled us in to Oyster Bay instead. I know we anchored in a beautiful spot for one night, and I even took some pictures of an adorable sailing school armada, but I don’t remember much beyond that. I think I just went to bed.

The next day was beautiful, a clear cloudless sky and a calm sea. We should have known this day was too perfect. Continuing with our summer theme of way too much or almost no wind, we were forced to motor all the way to Port Jeff, and that’s where the trouble started.

The signature smoke stacks of Port Jeff

Having passed inside the channel and into the harbor, Rick picks a spot off to the side to anchor and slows the boat, putting us in neutral for a moment. As he pushes the throttle into gear once again, he realizes that he has no thrust, no forward motion at all. The engine has not cut out, and it appears to even go into gear, but the propeller seems totally disengaged. We are dead in the water. 

Thankfully we have already coasted into a choice anchoring site, off the main channel and out of boat traffic. “We are so lucky!” Rick exclaims, after letting down the anchor. “Imagine if this had happened just a few minutes earlier when we were out in the Long Island Sound, deep water and no wind. Or much worse, if we had been in the East River, riding the current through Manhattan with no way to steer, running into other boats or the embankments on the sides. Wow. We were born under a lucky star alright!” This is the battle cry of optimists. I bite my tongue and keep myself from replying that if we were truly lucky, this wouldn’t have happened at all. 

Rick goes to work on the problem, first trying to figure out exactly where the problem lies by removing all the gear and storage items from the engine locker, then attempting to take apart the throttle and gear assembly. There is precious little space to move and work on the boat under ordinary circumstances, and now the cockpit is awash in detritus. I try to move inside the boat to get out of Rick’s way, but it’s pretty bad in there too. 

No closer to finding a solution, Rick calls the local marina to see if one of their boat geniuses might be able to help us. It is now almost five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and it is looking like we will need to be towed in, and then spend at least the next two days at the dock, waiting until Monday for someone to even look at our problem. This could be extraordinarily expensive.   Still hoping to avoid such a fate, Rick makes a few other calls, and manages to get our old friend Eric on the line, the mechanic we have relied on more than once back in Baltimore. Eric knows exactly what’s going on, and after perusing a few pictures sent via email, gives Rick some pointed instructions on how to fix it himself. A cable has come loose and simply needs to be reattached. Of course, what sounds so easy on the phone ends up taking Rick hours to accomplish. Our boat has an outsized engine, not the original that the boat was designed around, and it fills the engine room so completely that there is almost no room to physically see what you are working on, let alone maneuver tools and such. I am amazed at Rick’s stick-to-it-iveness; he continues long past the time when I would have given up. But with a little help from me (I held the flashlight, very difficult and requiring much skill) Rick emerges triumphant. We have a working engine at last!

The morning after, we celebrate by going ashore to the gorgeous sand hills at the entrance to Port Jefferson. We'll head for Block Island this afternoon!

Skyline Drive

We are finally moving again. After almost a week in Barnegat, the winds have finally died down enough for us to venture out. Of course, that means there is almost no wind at all. This seems to be the theme of the trip this year. But - with the help of scopolamine patches - I have been wonderfully free of seasickness so I am not complaining.

Our nine hour trip to Sandy Hook was long, but uneventful. There was a small bit of wind in the afternoon, allowing Rick to put up the sails for the first time and motor-sail for a couple of hours. And once in the anchorage, there was a nearby raft-up of eight power cruisers, annoyingly blasting techno-pop that could be heard for miles. Why do some people think they have the right to aggressively overpower their neighbors with their own egotistical noise? And in such a beautifully natural environment too. (Certain political flags could be spotted on some of those boats as well, which should come as no surprise to anyone.) But they did leave eventually, and we had a lovely late cocktail hour on the deck.

The next morning I needed to refill a prescription - running out of those scopolamine patches already - so we ventured in for a lovely wooded walk to a pharmacy. It’s complicated getting prescriptions filled when you are cruising. Out of state, no car, can’t get an actual person to answer the phone, etc. But it turned out to be a very welcome excursion ashore, and after some much needed exercise, we were ready to take on Manhattan.

I love this leg of the trip. The East River is such a busy waterway, with huge oil tankers and commercial freighters, tugboats and ferries, helicopters buzzing around gigantic sky scrapers on both sides, dwarfing everything in the water. And then there’s me and Rick, bobbing around in our tiny boat, Lilliputians in a world made for giants, wending our way around enormous barges and under massive bridges. It takes my breath away. Every time.

When we reach the junction with the Hudson River, just past the disheartening sprawl of the prison at Riker’s Island, we come very close to Laguardia airport, and planes come in for landings at regular intervals, like clockwork. They fly low, right over our boat, and for the brief moment that a plane is right overhead, the sound overwhelms everything, vibrating into your very bones. It is exhilarating! Although I don’t envy people who live here all the time.

After a long day, we pull in to the harbor at Port Washington and hook onto one of the town’s complimentary mooring balls. We’re going to grab some dinner in town, stock up on groceries, and basically rest up for the next adventure.