Boothby Bash

Well, it’s been a couple of incredible weeks with the Boothby clan. Whenever Rick’s family gets together it’s a high energy event, and this time around was exceptionally so.

Upon arriving in Portland, the first order of business had to be meeting up with Dick, Rick’s dad. Dick is a Maine native and octogenarian who belies his age by at least twenty years, and other than a little less height (and considerably less hair), is the obvious genetic source for his son, particularly his smile. Dick has heard a great deal about our new boat, but has yet to see it in person so we pick him up at the dock with a plan to take him out for a spin around the Portland Harbor. He is obviously very excited and comments on how much bigger this boat is than the Alberg, but these exclamations of size pretty much stop upon boarding Valkyrie and going below. I’m suddenly aware that we haven’t been very careful about what politicians call “managing expectations”. Seeing the boat through Dick’s eyes makes it seem like a very modest craft, and perhaps not quite up to the task of accommodating all members of the family for an important event he has planned for the following week. Oh well, we’ll just have to make it work when the time comes.

Dick is a graduate of the Maine Maritime Academy who served with the Navy in the South Pacific during the war, and proves that he still has the right stuff by taking the wheel and heading us out past Fort Gorges to Portland Head Light. He and Rick chat about various things and eventually get around to probably the most talked about and controversial topic in the Boothby family – beans. Baked beans that is. Not being a Mainer myself, I have to admit that I don’t share in the family fascination with this humble dish, but whenever they get together the big question of the day always concerns the “authentic” recipe used by Rick’s grandmother, Pauline. Everyone claims to know the right one but no one agrees with anyone else. Who knew there were so many ways to make baked beans? None of them, by the way, involves opening a can which is the way my family always did it.

After our brief outing on the boat, we take Dick to a seafood restaurant just down the street from the Centerboard Yacht Club and get a table outside. I can’t resist ordering my first lobster of the summer, and it is fantastic!

After a busy few days, seeing friends at Rick’s fortieth high school reunion, and then doing laundry and re-provisioning, we take off for a four day sailing trip. This time we’re joined by Rick’s sister and brother-in-law, Barb and Jeff Perry who live here in Cumberland and have taken time off from work in order to go with us. The sleeping arrangements are a bit cramped but the Perry’s are remarkably adaptable, and they are such a fun couple that we know it’ll be worth it. The first night out we pool all of our spare change and play a highly competitive poker game in the cockpit.

Our plan is to head north up the Maine coast to Mt. Desert Island and beyond, but in the morning of our first real travel day I manage to thwart that plan pretty quickly by getting seasick. Welcome Aboard, Barbie and Jeff! We’re forced to abort that plan and go for the much less ambitious destination of Southport Island, near Boothbay (no relation).

Unlike the old Alberg, Valkyrie's engine propeller has a nasty tendency of getting fouled with floating plastic line and debris, and twice Rick has to dive overboard with his handy knife and clear it. After Jeff joins him on one of these expeditions we celebrate by using the shot glasses that Walter generously left behind when he sold the boat to Rick. Tequila Slappers!

Nature sightings are abundant on this trip – we see seals, harbor porpoises, terns, etc. I am astounded by the osprey nest situated high up in the top of a tree. I’ve become so accustomed to osprey nesting on the top of channel markers that I had almost forgotten that there must have originally been a more natural setting for these birds.

The most unusual thing we encounter is an ocean sunfish. Mola Mola, or “head fish” as it is sometimes called is a huge bony fish that has no tail. It looks a lot like a giant fish head with fins – hence the name. About six feet long and about the same in width, this fish tends to lay over on its side and lazily swim along close to the surface, soaking up warmth from the sun. With no natural predators, this guy is totally unaffected by our boat and we get right up close to him. The look of this thing is so weird that it takes me a while to get my head around which body part goes where.

The high point of our little voyage is meeting up with Rick’s aunt and uncle – Barbara and Frank – at their cottage on Southport Island. We are treated to showers and then a delicious dinner of lobster rolls while enjoying their spectacular ocean views. Aunt Barbara is an extremely vivacious, well read and interesting person and she acts as a lightning rod for discussion at any family gathering. Of course, the topic of beans still manages to come up once or twice. I manage to get a great picture of Frank seated on the deck of their cottage, but I’m disappointed to discover that I have no pictures of Barbara. Rick tells me that she mysteriously tends to find something to do in the next room whenever a camera makes an appearance.

When we return to Portland we leave the boat on a mooring and all four of us drive up to the family “picnic grounds” at Turner. There is no cottage on this little parcel of wooded land, but located right on the edge of Pleasant Pond, it makes for a great place to camp out. Barb and Jeff help us out with some camping equipment and we are joined by their son Ross as well as Rick’s two brothers, David (nicknamed Woody for some unknown reason), his wife Bonnie, and Jim. Jim drove up from Annapolis, MD and brought his daughter Rachel as well as my son Dewey. Dick doesn’t actually camp out, but he spends the better part of two days with us, canoeing, kayaking, swimming and sitting around the campfire (talking a great deal about beans).

The family is scandalized to hear from Dick that Pauline’s “secret” baked bean recipe can easily be found on the internet (Cooks.com?) - exactly the same as his hand written copy. It is of course IMPOSSIBLE that this is the real recipe. The Boothby beans take all day to cook, and whenever someone in the family passes through the kitchen they surreptitiously add another spoonful of brown sugar or molasses to the pot. By the time the beans are ready to eat everyone exclaims that they are the best yet, but the recipe has been altered by so many people that no one knows exactly what went into that latest batch. Hence the intensity of baked bean discussion.

After two nights of camping on land, Rick and I are anxious to get back to the boat. We bring the Annapolis/Baltimore contingent of Jim, Rachel and Dewey for an overnight on the water and we have a great time swimming to shore at Jewel Island and doing some exploring. It’s wonderful to have Dewey with us; I don’t have to feel guilty leaving him in Baltimore, at least for this week. Rick and Jim set him to work at the wheel, and later on they rely on him as a lookout for lobster pots and buoys that we want to avoid. Rachel sits up on the foredeck looking amazingly glamorous, just like a movie star. On the way back to our mooring we get treated to a real surprise – The Pride of Baltimore! What are they doing this far north?

Back on solid land, the Boothby's convene once again at Barb and Jeff's house for a Mexican dinner. We are missing a few people from these family gatherings. Barb and Jeff’s daughter McCall is living and working in Denver now that she has finished college, and Jim’s wife and their other three kids are busy working or are in school and can’t be with us this time. But there is a much more noticeable empty seat, formerly filled by Carolyn, Dick’s wife and the family matriarch who passed away two years ago. There was a memorial service soon after her death, but her ashes have remained in a canister at Dick’s house. Carolyn lived in Maine for most of her life and she loved to go for walks and picnics along the shore. Dick would like to spread her ashes in the waters that she knew so well, using Rick’s boat to carry the family for a simple private ceremony. It’s going to be a tight squeeze with so many people but we can work with that. The only real problem is that the boat is rather difficult to get in and out of and could be the scene of a nasty accident for someone who is approaching ninety. With mixed feelings, we discourage Frank and Barbara from attending this part of the proceedings and plan to meet up with them afterwards for the signature Boothby dinner – ham, brown bread and of course, BEANS!

The day starts out ominously cloudy, but just as we reach Great Diamond Island the sky clears to a beautiful blue. We all gather in the cockpit and each person takes a moment in turn to speak about their memories of Carolyn and what she meant to them. Dick has been working on his speech for weeks, yet his desire to give his wife the perfect sendoff caused him to awaken very early this morning and completely re-write the whole thing. There are tears of course, but also laughter – Carolyn would have loved it. Then Dick casts a handful of ashes into the sea along with a fistful of cut flowers, and one by one, Carolyn’s four children do the same. A sublime tribute to a wonderful person.

Light My Fire!

Wood Island Light near Biddeford Pool

We’re spending the night in Biddeford Pool. This was pretty much our final stop before reaching Portland and civilization last year and I remember it very fondly. The fact that at this point this year our trip is not even half over yet allows me to see the quaint little harbor with new eyes, and even though the feeling is different this time around I think I love it even more. From our vantage point in the water the little town is a closely spaced cluster of summer cottages, while the rest of the shoreline is more sparsely populated and mostly wild. But of course, the view is further enhanced by that iconic symbol of public good and safety – a lighthouse.

Portsmouth Harbor Light

We have seen many lighthouses on this trip, some more beautiful than others, most with some kind of house attached or nearby, but all built for the same original purpose; a navigational tool for ships at sea. Largely obsolete with the utilization of GPS systems, lighthouses are kept nowadays mostly out of nostalgia. The feeling of safety and permanence evoked by a lighthouse is almost universal. Wikipedia sites an urban legend about a radio conversation between a U.S. naval vessel and an unidentified ship on a collision course. The naval vessel insists that the other ship change course, but the other ship continues to insist that the naval vessel do so. After the captain of the naval vessel identifies himself and demands a course change, the other party responds with, “I’m a lighthouse. It’s your call.” It’s amazing how easy it is to believe this story, even though it has been thoroughly debunked by many sources (including the U.S. Navy).

Baltimore Light

Our own Baltimore Light was advertised “For Sale” a few years ago, and last year Rick and I met up with one of the couples who bought it. They went in on the deal with another couple who thought the lighthouse would make for a cool vacation house – two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, all with a three hundred and sixty degree ocean view. I’d have to agree, the only caveat being you have to have a boat to get out there.

Stage Island Tower

At Biddeford Pool you get an added bonus – an ancient looking stone marker. This is technically not a lighthouse (no light), but at least during the daylight hours it would have been used navigationally the same way. I think it looks remarkably like the Shot Tower in Baltimore.

Boon Island

On our way to Biddeford, we passed what is reported to be the tallest lighthouse in New England, the Boon Island Light. The storms are so violent there that all the lighthouses they tried to erect got demolished. They finally succeeded in building this extra-tall long-lasting one in the 1800’s, but before that there were a lot of lost ships and lives. Boon Island is a tiny barren island, six miles off the coast of Maine. It is so named because it was seen as a “boon” granted by God by a small group of castaways shipwrecked there in the summer of 1682. A more famous shipwreck happened in the winter of 1710, when a British merchant ship crashed there. The fourteen crewmembers survived the wreck but had to endure a month's worth of cold winter conditions with no food or firewood. Imagine being stuck on an island within sight of land and not being able to communicate your plight to anyone on shore! Two of the crewmembers died of injuries they sustained during the wreck, and two more drowned while trying to get to shore on a make-shift raft. The remaining ten survived until they were rescued, but not before having to resort to cannibalism - a gruesome story that Rick's father loves to tell.

Determined to stick with our newly-renewed cocktail hour ritual, we sit out on the foredeck with our drinks and watch the sailing students in their cute little turnabouts. It has gotten rather cold now that we’ve made it to Maine and we had to really bundle up just to watch the sunset. It’s actually kind of a welcome change.

Our problems with the boat have mostly worked themselves out by now, but a couple weeks back when we were still having so much trouble we got some advice from one of our good friends Sally Swift. Sally is a very energetic and almost manically hard-working radio show producer, as well as a cookbook writer and foodie, who has a thing about lighting fires. I don’t really understand it, but Rick shares her love of pyromania and has many stories to tell from his childhood about fires that were started because of him – all accidental of course. Sally insists that to rid a new domicile of bad spirits one must burn sage and disperse the smoke all around. We have been desperate to rid ourselves of the spirit of Walter, the former owner of the boat, so we bought some sage and have been drying it for the past week in anticipation of a Walter-exorcism. It is finally ready for burning, so we put on some Stones music and crank up the stereo. Go Mick - “Get out of my life and don’t come back!”

Tomorrow we push on to Portland, Rick’s old stomping grounds. Let’s hope we are now Walter-free!

Portland Head Light

Balls!

I love Portsmouth. Located in sort of a crossroads between New Hampshire and Maine, the mouth of the Piscataquis is actually the confluence of a number of rivers , making for a very picturesque shoreline. One of the points of land jutting out into the river is occupied by a giant, castle-like structure that overlooks the rest of the harbor. We learn later from some of the locals at the yacht club that it is an old navy prison, built on an island and modeled after Alcatraz. It has not been used as a prison since the seventies and remains empty.

 I find quite a contrast between this beautifully crafted piece of early twentieth century architecture and the modern, ugly, garage-type storage bin right next door. The time and attention, not to mention money, that was obviously lavished on this older building is astounding compared to the lack of care and pride that is evidenced in many more modern efforts. The degree of aesthetic detail is particularly impressive considering that this building was meant to house military criminals.

The current is notoriously strong in this river and we decide that it will be safer and easier to take a mooring at the Portsmouth Yacht Club. Most moorings are denoted by an air-filled floating ball that keeps the mooring line near the surface, easy to pull up and then attach to your boat. This yacht club is particularly well endowed with enormous mooring balls – the small motor boat moored next to us is almost outgunned by its own ball. This provides a wonderful opportunity to come up with all kinds of size related jokes and we take full advantage.

We plan to go in to the club and take showers, but I think it would be fun to go for a quick swim first. Rick warns me that the water is cold – he got a small sample of it when he grabbed the mooring line – but I convince him to join me anyway. I mean, we’ve been swimming in ocean water all the way up the coast. How cold could it be? As soon as we touch the water I realize my mistake – big balls no more, this water is COOOOLD!!! Rick is taking his time getting up the ladder and I’m screaming for him to move so I can get out. The water must always be this cold because when we finally make it in for our mercifully hot showers, it is clear that we’ve made some points with the staff of the yacht club who saw us diving in.

Now cleaned up and ready for a night on the town, we hop in the dinghy and start up the river. It’s going to be a long trek and the tide is going out so we will be working against the current. We make it up about halfway, but the current is so strong that our little motor is no match for it; we are pretty much treading water at full speed. We might just be stuck with hot dogs for dinner after all. Thankfully, we are somewhat near another yacht club and the driver of their launch takes pity on us and offers us a ride. We pull the dinghy behind us, but getting off turns out to be almost a bigger problem. Michelle, the driver, pulls up ahead of where we want to go so that we can drift back, but it still takes all of Rick’s skill to get us in to the dinghy dock. Thanks Michelle, we owe you a dinner!

Portsmouth is an old port town but, unlike New Bedford, they seem to have survived the decline of the whaling and fishing industries very well. We only have one night to spend here, but I like it so much that I make Rick promise that we can stop in here again on our way back south in August. He says we’ll have to time our shore visit a bit better next time though. After a short walk around town and a fabulous seafood dinner, we head back in the dinghy, this time with the current.

A Day in the Life...

It seems that time passes quite differently on a boat. I did bring along a watch, but I stopped wearing it sometime in the first week of our trip. No rehearsals to attend, no appointments to keep – heaven. Rick has needed to pay more attention to the time because of the tides – not paying attention could easily screw up his navigation efforts – and we sort of decide together where we are going next, but mostly we just let each day pass without trying to insert too much of a schedule.

For Rick, each day begins with a cup of coffee and then usually some time spent at his navigation station/desk doing something on his computer. He looks at the weather forecast and the tide schedule, and then figures out where we might take the boat to our next stop. After that he likes to spend some time working, answering emails and writing. This is his time to really get somewhere on his latest book project and he needs to be pretty much left alone to concentrate. When we are at home in Baltimore he has a study on the third floor of our house where he can close the door to me and the rest of the world, but here on the boat it’s a bit more difficult.

My day starts a little differently; I pretty much wake up talking. I’ve always been a morning person, finding coffee totally unnecessary. While Rick is trying to work I putter around the galley, cleaning up, making breakfast, chatting away. Then I get on the computer myself and give a running commentary of the latest news and gossip. Rick has had to ask for a moratorium on talking while he’s working and I mostly remember, but it’s really hard. I try to visualize “the cone of silence” from Get Smart. I have had to bring along a number of things to do, since I knew this was going to be part of our daily routine. I read, blog, sew, all things I never seem to have enough time to do at home. One would think that getting internet on a boat would be a big problem, but not in these modern times. Our cell phones work almost everywhere, even quite a ways off shore, and Rick’s Iphone is set up as a “hotspot”, acting like a wifi and allowing simultaneous connections from both of our computers. We are somewhat limited by our battery power though  - the more actual sailing we do, the less we run the engine and that means we have less electricity to run all of our little gadgets. It’s a good thing I brought a hand powered sewing machine!

After a couple of hours of “quiet time”, we usually ready the boat and up anchor for a new destination. The traveling part of the day can be fun and exciting, but it can also be kind of boring depending on the weather and the scenery. It’s always interesting to go through a canal because there are lots of other boats around, and often people on the sides to look at. Wide open expanses of water have a very relaxing effect. Sometimes we go for hours with nothing new on the horizon. That’s usually when I fall asleep.

When we’re underway, Rick most often has the boat set up with either the auto-helm or the wind-vane. Both of these devices are self-steering aids that set the boat on a specific course and keep it there until you change it. The auto-helm is run on electricity (more battery power), while the wind-vane uses the wind to hold the boat steady. The auto-helm makes more sense to me – the wind vane looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption – but Rick seems to understand both of them very well and utilizes them quite a bit. When either self-steering method is used, you still have to look out for other boats or large buoys, but you are pretty much free to wander about the boat and do whatever you like.

The Monitor Wind Vane

Even with the steering taken care of Rick likes to stay on deck, scoping the water for sea life. He alerts me whenever he sees anything interesting, and I scramble about, grabbing the camera. Taking seascape pictures from a boat is really quite easy with a good digital camera; you pretty much point and shoot. The camera does all the work. Capturing wildlife from a boat though is an entirely different matter. The subject of your photo is a moving target, spending only a second or two above water or else very briefly perched somewhere. You and your boat are of course also moving, and on a day with big waves you are moving a lot. I have gained a whole new appreciation for those guys at the National Geographic. I was able to get some very ill composed dolphin photos a few weeks back, and yesterday we spotted some very far off whales that photographically look like black lumps and a puff of spray. In two summers of sailing I have seen many, many seals, yet I only have ONE very blurry, unrecognizable photo to show for it.

Meals aboard the boat are of course limited to whatever we’ve managed to bring with us, but we have a surprising amount of variety in our diet. In fact, sometimes we are able to come up with meals that I think are positively gourmet! The other day we had a dinner of grilled pork tenderloin with a watermelon/feta salad that we could have served to the most discerning of guests. Our lunches are a bit more mundane – hot dogs, liverwurst sandwiches, leftovers from dinner, etc – and are usually prepared while underway. I have to say though, even a tuna sandwich tastes extra special when enjoyed on a boat. The stove is gimbaled – that’s when something pivots in order to rock with the motion of the boat – so we can cook even in the worst weather.

We’ve been through a few storms now, mostly in the evenings, and they can be pretty exciting. The other day in South Dartmouth we had a nice front blow through and decided to stay on a mooring there and ride it out on the boat. We saw a couple of young fellows heading out in a small racing sailboat, and wondered what they were doing with a storm about to hit. They were looking the other way, so maybe they didn’t see that half the sky was black?!! A bit later we saw them coming back, apparently frantically searching for their mooring ball. With no engine on their boat they were forced to use the now screaming wind to move their sails along, and they had to keep tacking between all the other boats in the mooring field. We finally saw them struggling to take down their sails, but the wind was too strong and their mast broke in two! A police boat came blasting out into the field to get them and we watched it head more slowly back to the docks, towing the ailing boat behind. We speculated that the fellow in that sailboat was a kid trying to show off to his friend in his father’s fancy racing vessel. I don’t think Daddy’s going to be very happy!

 

In the evenings we usually head in and anchor somewhere, sometimes in a port city but usually in some little picturesque natural spot. My favorite part of our routine last year was the cocktail hour, usually spent on the foredeck. We would sit up there with our captains’ chairs and some snacks and watch the end of the sun, sometimes still in transit and sometimes at anchor. I hadn’t really realized until now, but that part of our routine has sort of fallen away. We’ve had better weather for sailing this year – more wind – and with the boat heeled over amid lots of deep waves, it’s not that inviting to be sitting on the foredeck. Rick would also like to suggest that the reason for our loss of the cocktail hour is that we’ve been drinking all day, so why bother? I’m sure that’s not true. Well, pretty sure…

We finally have begun our regular duet playing sessions which usually happen sometime around that now defunct cocktail hour. We got off to a late start this year with our music making, I think for several reasons. First of all, there were so many things going wrong with the boat that Rick was spending practically every spare moment working his magic and fixing things and there wasn’t a lot of energy left for violin/viola playing. Many people may not realize that playing an instrument requires a great deal of mental effort, even when playing for fun. The other main reason for our musical lethargy is much less forgivable; we have a really great stereo on the boat. How much easier it is to push a button and have wonderful performances of great music right in your living room! Or in our case, the cabin or cockpit. How demoralizing to pull out your fiddle and not sound like one of those recordings! It took us a few practice sessions to get our fingers moving properly again – and also to come to terms with lowered expectations – but now we’re in the groove and making our own music once more.

Going ashore is something we do to break up the regular routine. We went in for breakfast in Cuttyhunk, and although the meal was delightful, I actually got a little sea-sick just from being on land. Leave it to me to have something like that happen; now that I’m used to living on a boat I get sick by landing on terra firma.

We most often go in for dinner when we go ashore, but this last week we decided to visit the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA, and we spent the day there. New Bedford is obviously struggling financially, but the museum is top-notch. The focus of the museum is a bit schizoid in that half of the place is devoted to the glorification of the whaling industry, while the other half is devoted to education about whales and whale conservation, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I particularly liked learning about a certain whaling ship, the “Rebecca”!

We’ve had a number of great sailing days this past week and are making steady progress up the coast toward Maine. We’ve decided that the wind will be better tomorrow and the next day for our last few stops up to Portland, so we’re taking the day off to rest and recuperate here in Gloucester. We’re mainly following our usual routine – writing, reading, napping, etc. – but I think I’m going to insist on the reinstitution of our cocktail hour. Cheers!

Transience

We’re on our way to Block Island. We’ve really been on our way to Block Island for some time now. Located halfway between Montauk and Cape Cod, Block is the jumping off point for the northern waters. The question has never been, “where are we going?’ but instead, “How are we getting there?”

We could have gone straight up and across from Cape May, making a thirty-six hour off-shore passage and arriving nice and early in our trip, skipping all of those other stops. Since we weren’t sure how I would handle the ocean waves and swell, this was pretty much a non-starter. Another possibility would have been a shorter hop, an overnight from Barnegat, skipping Manhattan and going directly to Block in the waters south of Long Island. The weather would have been good for such a trek, but unfortunately Rick didn’t think of it until we were headed into Sandy Hook and by then it was pretty late in the day to change our minds. I think the memory of my seasickness episode the other day probably kept the possibility of an overnight, off-shore journey, even a modest one, strongly out of his mind. But neither one of us is looking forward to a repeat of last year’s fly-infested, stagnant-air run down the Long Island Sound. Unfortunately, it looks like we are left with no other choice. Once leaving Manhasset, we will need to make three or four stops before we can shoot through the Race and land on Block Island.

The wind is pretty nonexistent this morning, so we’ll have to motor until later in the day. Leaving Manhasset, we pass a giant mansion out at the end of a point. Isn’t this the mansion portrayed as Katherine Hepburn’s family house in “The Aviator”? Rick has heard that the Hepburns had a house around here and we start calling this one “Kate’s Place”.  It’s  pretty big and it takes us a while to get out of sight of it.

There is obviously big money in this part of the Long Island Sound. The houses that line the shores probably should be summer cottages, but they are gargantuan, even for houses to live in year round. At the end of the afternoon Rick pulls us in to Huntington Harbor, where he knows we’re not allowed to anchor but he likes the feel of this little upscale town and wants to look around. The narrow harbor winds around quite a bit, and the shores on both sides have a pleasingly diverse topography. Mansions or not, it is quite picturesque. Rick has a particular favorite building – an abandoned, churchlike structure that he thinks is the nicest house in the neighborhood. I think it looks like a smaller version of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and even though I think it’s a cool building I’m not sure I’d want to live in it.

There is a boat in the marina that appears to be sinking right on its mooring! They have it all roped off, so obviously we are not the first to notice.

We head out of Huntington and over to nearby Lloyd’s Harbor to find a place to put down our anchor. There are a few different ways to park your boat. The most protected and also the most expensive thing to do is to rent a slip at some marina. Rick has a slip for Valkyrie in Baltimore and he rents that slip on a yearly basis, but when you are cruising, taking a slip is usually prohibitively expensive. Some places will let you dock, but that is usually reserved for very temporary stays of a few minutes to refuel, or to load or unload. If you want to spend the night you usually have two options – take a mooring, or set your own anchor. Anchoring can be a tricky business. You have to be sure that there will be enough water for your boat when the tide is low, you have to know how much anchor chain (rode) to let out in different weather conditions, you need different types of anchors for different types of sea bottoms (mud, weeds, rocks, etc.), and you can never be absolutely sure that your anchor will hold in a storm or heavy wind. Moorings on the other hand are great because you can just tie up your boat and forget about it - go ashore, leave it for a week, whatever - you know it’s not going anywhere. So why anchor, you ask? Well, quite simply, anchoring is free.

Moorings can be relatively reasonable - $25 a night – or they can cost a lot - $3-4 per foot of boat per night. Three dollars a foot for Valkyrie would be a hundred and five dollars. Sometimes they are free as well and we take advantage of them when they are available, and when weather conditions call for it we think it’s money well spent. But most of the time we’re just too cheap to pay for a mooring ball and we anchor instead.

When we leave Huntington Harbor, we figure we’re leaving the hoity-toity neighborhood to park in a more welcoming area down the street. Of course anchoring in Huntington was never a question, but upon entering Lloyd’s, we’re slightly chagrined to learn from a prominent sign that we are relegated to a very limited area designated for “transients”. I don’t think I’ve ever been called a “transient” before. We swim naked and then hang out our laundry to dry just to fulfill the transient image, then have a drink and watch the sailboat race that seems to be happening right in our front yard.

Our close friend Marguerite Thomas came up with a sea-sickness cure for me, so when we were in Manhasset we just had to buy the ingredients and now we get to try it out. It’s a drink featuring plenty of ginger, the legendary seasickness cure: candied ginger, gin, bitters and ginger beer. A “Gin-gin”!  (You can read about it at Wine Review Online )  I’m not sure if it does anything for my mal de mer, but it does make a great drink. Tchin-Tchin!

Rick connects the interior speakers on Walter’s unfinished stereo system and then plays “The Ride of the Valkyries” at full indoor and outdoor volume, blasting out the other boats. I know it’s corny, playing music that matches the name of our boat, but what a thrill it is to hear that amazing music with waves at your feet and wind in your hair! We follow up with Mahler One.

“Transients” FOREVER!

The next morning the forecast for wind is not good for sailing, and it remains bad for some days. So far we have miraculously been spared any visits from those nasty flies, but with light air from behind us we know they are overdue. Rick thinks if we can get ourselves over to the Connecticut side of the Sound we will be at a better angle for sailing in these wind conditions tomorrow. We decide to head over to the Thimble Islands. The Thimbles are a truly unique set of closely spaced little islands, little haystacks of rocks that really look like thimbles, just off the coast of Connecticut near New Haven. Many of these tiny islands sport only one house, precariously built on stilts over the lava rock surface. Some of them have a few houses crowded in together. I remember being completely charmed by them last year and am really happy to be spending the night here again.

In the morning we head out once again, this time for Coecles Harbor. Rick is delighted because even in the relatively light air, Valkyrie sails beautifully. The old Alberg would have been a wet snail. We are followed for quite a ways by a boat with a spinnaker. These are the colorful balloon-shaped sails that you sometimes see; they are great in light air that is coming from directly behind you. We would probably have used one a few times on this trip, but unfortunately, Valkyrie doesn’t have a spinnaker. This is one of the things Rick would like to change in the coming years, but at least for this summer, we will have to do without one.

As we are turning into Plum Gut (love the name), a giant sea turtle appears right at the stern of the boat! His shell is probably about four feet in diameter, spotted with great clusters of white barnacles, and his head and neck stretch out another foot and a half, his mouth open and gasping for air. Rick quickly turns the boat around to go back and get a longer look, but our friend Mr. Turtle has already left the surface. Apparently a fellow transient.

Coecles Harbor (no idea how you pronounce this thing) is a sweet little place; basically a small, almost fully enclosed lagoon. There are few cottages in the immediate vicinity, but many boats have come in to anchor. A swim is absolutely in order after the hot day. We get seemingly little exercise on board, so I began our trip with the promise to myself that every time we went for a swim I would do five laps around the boat. It’s never boring because you usually have some kind of current to work against, at least in one direction. Also, Rick never seems to get bored by chasing after me for a goosing. Today I go for six laps!

We fire up the charcoal grill that is attached to one of the side rails in preparation for the two obscenly enormous steaks we bought in Manhasset. Four pounds of meat is obviously too much food for the two of us (maybe I should have done twenty laps), but the intention is that we will have leftovers, saving cooking time on another night. After doctoring them up with an herb rub, “the critters” are sizzling on the grill and Rick comes below to tease me about something-or-other, when we hear seagulls whooping it up outside. When we rush back out to see what’s going on, one of the steaks is missing. GONE. We keep looking at the grill in disbelief – surely the steak will reappear. The seagulls have swarmed around our boat, calling to one another and raising quite a ruckus, but none of them seem to have the steak either. We would absolutely know what happened if we had seen one of the gulls flying off with our meal, but probably that steak was too heavy (and hot!) for the thief and it is now sinking to the bottom beside our boat. We quickly get out the grill cover before they can grab the remaining steak, and two of the more aggressive gulls get in a real set-to with one another, right there in the water. “It’s YOUR fault!” “No, it’s YOURS!” It’s a good thing seagulls can’t seem to work together or we would have lost everything.

As it turns out, two pounds of steak is more than enough for two, or even three meals. Perhaps we got what we deserved for our gluttony. Anyway, I’m sure the crabs will have a great time with our steak.

The Patron Saint of Human Torments must be smiling down on us because we have had no flies over the entire trip out Long Island Sound. Now poised just at the end of the Sound, we have one more short day of travel before we can get to Block Island. Our decision to stay in Coecles has put us just south of the Race so we will miss out on that wild ride, but it was fun to visit a new place so I'm not sorry. In the morning we up anchor and head out once again. I kind of like being a transient.