Isn't It Great To Be Together

The month of August has completely gotten away from me. Between meeting up with family and friends, a quick business trip back to Baltimore, and the arrival of a very unwelcome virus with a wicked cough, I’ve left the blog to languish without a proper update. But not to worry, all is well and we’re still on the boat!

The highlight of the month was a week on Orrs Island in Maine. Rick’s family rented a cottage along the shore to house a large group, and we were able to anchor Valkyrie right nearby. The house is up high on a hill overlooking the water, which makes for beautiful views, but a bit of a climb from the water.

Rick and I slept on the boat and dinghied in each morning to join the day’s festivities. That in itself was somewhat of a feat; the tide goes up and down ten feet in that little cove, making the access to shore a dicey proposition. There is no actual dock, only a small platform at the top of the rocks. If you tie your dinghy to the platform at high tide, your boat will be stuck on the rocks when the tide goes out. Then you have to carry it sixty feet or so to get it to the water. If you left your boat at the water line at low tide, you won’t be able to retrieve it at high tide without swimming. And by the way, the water is COOOOOLD up here.

Rick rigged up a pulley system with a dinghy anchor so that we could send the boat back out to deeper water after coming ashore and, at least in theory, be able to pull it back in if we needed to at high tide. In practice though, the amount of line needed to handle the distance was never enough. Every day, Rick would bring more line, and still, every night when we returned to the boat, it was again stuck on land, and we needed to carry that one-hundred-sixty pound boat to the water over sharp rocks and slippery seaweed. In the dark. It’s a two man job, and I’m not very strong, so we would inch it along, trying not to scrape the bottom on those rocks, or lose our balance and fall. Finally, using three extra pieces of line, we had success – of course it was the last day of our visit!

Rick’s brother Jim, now the elder statesman of the family although only a year older than Rick, drove up from Maryland looking forward to an action-packed vacation with his now adult kids and the rest of the Boothby clan. I guess he got his wish, in a way at least. On the very first night of our stay, a group went out for a quick stroll around the island after dark, and Jim took a bad tumble down a slippery wooden boat-launch ramp and wrenched his knee and shoulder. He spent the rest of the week mostly camped out on the porch, with the occasional outside trip by car. Jim made light of it and participated in group activities as much as he could. Someone found an old cane in the house that made it possible for him to shuffle around. We even managed to get him out on Popham Beach with a comically fat-wheeled beach wheel chair, and the men had fun pushing him around in it. He really was a trooper. We’ve since learned that back in Annapolis, Jim has seen a doctor and unfortunately, he will need surgery to fix that knee, and we’re not yet sure about the shoulder. Not exactly the fun time he had in mind, I’m sure.

Boys will be boys (Jim isn't even in the chair yet)

There were other challenges as well, like shopping and cooking for fifteen people in a very tiny kitchen with no dishwasher. With so many people, groceries needed to be restocked just about every day. But everyone pitched in with the chores, and there were a couple of outings on the boat, a birthday celebration with a particularly memorable lobster dinner (or lobstah, as they say up here), and sunsets every night viewed from the porch. The family motto really says it all, and was displayed on a banner tacked to the porch wall: “Isn’t it Great to be Together!”

Just a little low in the water...

Fantasy Island

We’ve just spent two full weeks at Block Island. Beach walks, swimming, reading, eating and drinking, hanging out with our boating friends – what could be better? We’ve had marvelous times at Block before, particularly an unexpectedly long stay last August when the winds took their time coming around to the right direction for leaving. In the year since, we have fantasized about coming back, practically every daydream about living on the boat revolving around this special place.

When we first arrived though, our excitement about being here was dashed a bit by the actual experience. Having our anchor drag was completely unexpected, and we were quite sobered by the knowledge that only luck had prevented a costly accident. We were also irritated by the over-crowded anchorage. Somehow, in all of our fantasies, there just weren’t so many people here!  

 

Acacia

Notably missing among all of those people were our friends Lynne and Rick, whom we had met last year here in Great Salt Pond. Their boat, Acacia is a Southern Cross 35, a twin of our own Valkyrie. We seem to be simpatico in many other ways as well, and had spent some wonderful times with them on both visits here. Now they will forever be associated with Block Island, and although we’ve known for a little while that they would be up north in Maine with their boat when we arrived, it turned out to be a big disappointment not to hear Lynne call out to us with her characteristic New York/Italian accent, “Way-ow!” We really missed them.

It only took a couple of days to recover our love of the island though. Over this past year, Rick and I have gotten into walking nearly every day around our Baltimore neighborhood. We’re trying to keep that up - as much as that is possible while living on a boat – and Block has been wonderful for walking opportunities. We walk into town to visit the library, the post office and the grocery store. We walk along the beautiful crescent beach almost every afternoon. There are even hiking trails all around the island.

Sunsets here are a complete pleasure. We sit out in the cockpit of our boat, eating dinner and sipping wine while watching the ever-changing colors in the western sky. Who needs Netflix when you have this? The boating community has a Block Island tradition of blasting horns at the point of sundown, and often there’s a cannon blast too. It can be a little annoying while you’re trying to enjoy a sunset, but it’s very short-lived, and once I learned to put in earplugs ahead of time, I found it much more charming. We even participated on a couple of evenings.

Then there was the super indulgent pleasure of dinner at the Spring House, a long awaited meal preceded by drinks on the lawn. This experience from previous visits is so etched in our minds and so anticipated that we can’t seem to imagine ordering anything new from the menu. We’ve been salivating for those familiar dishes all year, and even though we peruse the possibilities with great interest, we end up ordering exactly the same items every time we are here. I’m guessing that we might be more adventurous if we came here more often, but this time at least, we went with the old tried and true, and it fulfilled every wish.

Amid all the pleasures of Block, we’re still struggling with the dinghy question. Although we love the Trinka, she doesn’t make our lives easy. We used to pull our inflatable up on a pebbly beach without a second thought, or motor it in to a dinghy dock full of other boats simply looking for a slightly open spot to cram ourselves into. Now we have to worry about scraping the bottom of our beautiful little boat, or scratching her perfectly painted sides when touching other dinghies or their motors. Rick has taken to anchoring her away from the other dinghies and then wading out to get her when we come back. The shame of it is, with all of that extra care and attention, we’re really not using her the way we had envisioned. Our fantasy had been that we would spend many happy afternoons sailing her around the anchorage here at Block. In the two weeks since we’ve been here, we have only sailed her once.

As it so often happens, the reality didn’t quite live up to this particular fantasy. It took Rick an hour or so to get Yalma rigged up for sailing, and once aboard, we had a difficult time getting comfortable. We had decided to take the oars with us on our maiden voyage in case of some calamity, and they take up a fair bit of space in this little boat. Then we had to seat ourselves in some way that would keep us out of the way of the boom. We both had a good time, but we weren’t out very long before we wanted to get back to our bigger boat where we could stretch our sore limbs. Then Rick had to take it all down again. In the week and a half that followed, we intended to go out sailing many times but somehow . . . it just never happened. One of our elderly neighbors in a cool old motorboat had a sailing dinghy, and we watched him take it out almost every day. He looked like he was having a blast, but I’m convinced it was just an act to make us feel bad.

During the past few days of our stay we were finally joined by Lynne and Rick. Sadly, we didn’t have time to go fishing or birding with them, but it was wonderful to spend a few evenings together, eating boat prepared meals and chatting. They served us an incredible Portuguese paella with mussels and clams fresh caught by Rick (Lynne’s Rick, not mine).  The Spring House has nothing on them, let me tell you!

 

Rick and Lynne

We left Block early yesterday morning, sailing all day to Onset, MA.  Pulling in late in the day, we anchored – carefully this time – and dinghied in to fulfill another fantasy, an army sized portion of Marc Anthony’s pizza and clams!