the wake

My last moment in the cockpit of the dear Scapegrace. If you're thinking the heeling angle is rather extreme, you're right: she's lying pathetically on her side, high and relatively dry, having been hauled up yesterday after almost three weeks underwater since Sandy sank her.

Or rather, Sandy and I sank her. Of course I blame myself. If only I had doubled up on the mooring lines, or picked a different slip to put her in.

There's a very sad photo gallery.

The cabin is full of Bronx muck. I picked up my snazzy inflatable life jacket and no kidding, a live crab fell out of it. Everything is tossed this way and that. We were able to retrieve a few sentimental objects. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the poet says. But it was clear that even before she sank, the Scapegrace was practically turned upside down.

This is, was, a boat that saved me many times from my own incompetence. My last attempt at competence -- taking her to Eastchester rather than leaving her in the Hudson -- doomed her, as it turned out. I don't exactly feel guilty about that, anyway -- I did what everybody thought was right -- but I feel very unlucky; and in the unjust arbitrary pagan world sailors inhabit, that's a very bad thing.

As another poet says, there are so many we shall have to mourn -- and so many we already have to mourn, come to think of it. So maybe it seems very shallow and selfish to mourn a boat.

I don't deny it. And yet I do mourn. I loved that boat. I claim the sailor's superstitious privilege: I believe boats have minds and souls, and I ask the dear Scapegrace's pardon. I will never forget her.

Scapegrace, 1979-2012, RIP

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I didn't take a camera when I finally got myself up to Charlie's boatyard today, to find out definitively what had happened to my dear old girl -- the first time I could get there, and Charlie has had his hands full, and for a long time he didn't even know which wreck was which. I wasn't optimistic, though hope dies hard; it was clear from earlier, fragmentary conversations, that the outlook was not good.

Since I didn't have the camera, I can't show you her spar, all that you can now see of her, still bravely bolt-upright above the water, in another marina a few dozen yards up-bay from Charlie's. Her hull is submerged, even at an exceptionally low tide, but she seems to have gone down plump on her bottom into the muck of Eastchester Bay, like a dowager duchess into an armchair. That was a hell of a boat. How I will miss her.

It was the storm surge that did it -- many feet over anything ever seen in Eastchester Bay. Waves -- big, solid, green waves -- were breaking over the asphalt in Charlie's yard, and undermined the pavement beneath the boats he had already hauled. His own sailboat, with all the rest, went toppling off her poppets, and ended up driving her bow through the windows of his house, before finally ending up on the riprap beneath. The yard looks like a demolition outfit has been at work on it with jackhammers -- big gaping voids in the pavement, a tricky shifting surface underfoot that feels more like quarry rubble than anything meant to be walked on.

Scapegrace had not been hauled yet, so what seems to have happened to her was that storm surge and wind and wave either tore her away from her float, or indeed may have torn the whole float away from its pilings, and she drifted -- bow to the wind, of course -- up the bay until somehow she grounded in this other marina. I have to assume the hull is holed, or she would have gone farther, with the water so high, and been beached at the head of the bay; wind and swell, I'm told, were driving right in from the south at the height of the evening tide, about 9 PM or so on that dramatic Monday, the 29th of October, 2012.

The map above shows you her resting place, at the arrow -- not, alas, her final resting place.

I would rather she had disappeared without a trace, somewhere in the ships' graveyard of Long Island Sound, among other respectable and long-lived vessels, finally and honorably done in by the insuperable greatness of sea and air. Strength and courage will take you far, whether you're a boat or a person, but there are divinities in the world much mightier than any virtue of ours, and when those divinities hand down their judgement, we can only kiss the rod. Complaint, somehow, seems more feeble and undignified than acquiescence. If you contend with the gods -- as all sailors do, ex officio -- you had better prepare to accept defeat like a man.

But alas, to disappear without a trace -- that noble fate was not Scapegrace's. She is now blocking traffic in a Bronx marina, and though I greatly approve of blocking traffic, in general, this means that her passing will be attended by squalid negotiations with insurers and the folks who will haul her out of her muddy armchair and off to -- what? I don't even want to think about it.

The Boat Dudes at Charlie's yard were very kind. More than kind. Oh, they weren't effusive; there weren't any man hugs, or anything like that. Not their style. They too were men who had had losses, many much greater than mine, and took them in a fine heroic spirit; they even seemed to find a certain pleasure in rehearsing the spectacular horrors of that unprecedented night. Tony took me on a tour of the disasters, and hard-bitten Emil softened his expression momentarily and made a cell-phone call to somebody I needed to talk to. It doesn't sound like much, I know, but for the first time I felt like one of the boys, rather than a merely acceptable, polite, and well-tolerated outsider.

I have learned a lot from these guys, at a time of life when learning isn't so easy.

On the mooring at last

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I don't suppose that's actually the Scapegrace in the satellite photo, though it could be; I have pretty much the same mooring I had last year -- right in front of the Normandie apartment building, and less than half a mile from the 79th Street marina, which is convenient. Here's the Normandie building (not my photo):

Named, I gather, after the ill-fated luxe passenger liner which burned and capsized at Pier 88, now the Passenger Ship Terminal, in 1942:

I assume they named the building after the ship before it sank.

I hate to see pictures of sunk boats, though there is a certain gruesome fascination in it. And I may have mentioned that my own poor dinghy -- almost brand-new -- sank at Charlie's dock, sometime in the week between the day I inflated it and put it back in the water and the day I came back to take Scapegrace and dinghy back to the Hudson.

Naturally I thought the project of taking Scapegrace back had been scuttled by the loss of the dinghy; how would I get back from the mooring to the marina?

Fortunately I had enlisted the company of an individual more resolute than myself, a friend of some years' standing -- let's call her Ariela. Ariela is a keen sailor and a great problem-solver. Her brother Pete also keeps a boat at 79th Street, and Ariela, upon receiving my dismal email canceling the trip, called up and said, Don't be silly; when we get there, Pete will come and fetch us in his dinghy.

So last Sunday morning Penelope drove Ariela and me up to the Bronx, and I'm sure she heaved a sigh of relief, as she drove home, that she, at least, did not have to spend the next six hours or so on the boat. Ariela had brought much nicer provisions than I usually get for myself, and the day was warm and sunny. We managed to get the Scapegrace out of her temporary slip and out into the bay without mishap, and sailed pleasantly south down the bay with a ten-knot west wind.

Then of course we hung a right at the Throgs Neck Bridge and the wind was in our teeth -- and it had freshened, too. If I were single-handing, would I have tacked all the way to the Brothers, or would I have motored?

Who knows? But certain it was that with Ariela on board, there was no question of motoring. So we did tack from Throgs Neck to Brothers, Ariela at the helm and me working the lines, and I got quite a workout, particularly with that balky mainsheet traveller -- can't recall whether I've mentioned it before, but it requires some serious manhandling. All quite exhilarating though, heeling fifteen degrees and more, and spanking along at six knots plus.

The wind kept backing southerly, and by the time we got to the Brothers -- the gateway to Hell Gate -- I really didn't feel bold enough to tack through those narrow waters, particularly with the current running four knots or so. We furled the jib and let the main free and just motored through the tricky bits. Ariela had brought along some homemade Bloody Mary mix -- with fresh horseradish -- and the other necessities, so on the principle that the sun was no doubt over the yardarm somewhere, we hoisted a convivial glass to the East River, not ordinarily my favorite body of water, but much pleasanter with a cheering beverage in hand.

Down the narrow river, current strong in our favor but wind fluky and mostly foul, so we just idled the motor -- enough for steerageway -- and let the river take us down to the Battery. Needless to say, as soon as we cleared the last pier and headed west -- under sail again -- for the Hudson, my old nemesis the Staten Island Ferry leaned on its direful horn -- tuba mirum spargens sonum, as the song says -- and even though it was Sunday morning, leapt at us from its slip, fangs bared, seeking whom it might devour.

This was the first time Ariela and I had sailed together, so our attempt to do a few 360s until the ferry got well clear were highly comical -- missed signals, fouled sheets, a certain amount of decent profanity directed at no particular target. The jib managed to wrap itself fiendishly around the forestay, but we somehow got that sorted out, and once the ferry had gone its dismal way to Staten Island -- facilis descensus Averno -- we headed up the Hudson.

Encountered a blustery cold wet squall at about Canal Street which lasted maybe fifteen minutes and left us both drenched and cold but did no other harm. We were a little early for the turn of the tide, and there was a half-hour or so after the squall when the wind wasn't strong enough to stem the current and we had to motor again. But as the current slackened the wind picked up, and we ended up making our way up to the Boat Basin in fine style, under sail and looking very competent, I think.

Picked up the mooring without incident, and Pete came out in his dinghy and took us ashore. The sort of day that reminds you why you like sailing.

Take nothing for granted

No images for this post, alas, and no background. I should have chronicled the whole arduous process of getting the boat water-ready this year, including a preposterous comedy of errors in connection with the notoriously worn Pearson 26 lower rudder-post bushing, which I shimmed up in a very ghetto fashion. It might last the season; let's hope.

Finally, everything was ready. I inflated and re-floated the rubber dinghy. I retrieved the outboards from Sheila's Home For Wayward Motors on City Island(*), put one on the dinghy and one on the Scapegrace, and gave Charlie the green light to put Scapegrace in the water.

Came back a few days later, ready to take the boat around the Horn -- I mean the Battery, of course -- and into the Hudson. What should meet my eye but the dinghy deflated, sunk at the dock. Some kind soul -- I think it was Emil, whom I have mentioned before; I know his knots -- had tied a lined around the outboard and cleated it to the dock, so it hadn't been immersed, and that was OK.

But the dinghy -- a downscale rubber-ducky -- was a dead loss. It appeared to me that somebody had pinched it hard against the dock and driven an aluminum floorboard right through the walls of the starboard and port pontoons, making a foot-long tear in each. Maybe somebody could patch wounds like that; but I cannot.

I felt like cutting my throat. But the Boat Dudes soon made me feel better. I was invited onto one boat for meatloaf and mashed potatoes -- which were delicious, let me tell you -- and given some sage advice there. And I got plenty of other sage advice; the most creative was to fill the pontoons up with two-part foam and you'll never have to worry about inflating it again. Emil showed me a three-quarters-sunk dinghy which the cops had found floating in Eastchester Bay and dragged into the marina three years ago. A few bolts, and a lot of 5200, and it would be fine.

I'm sure Emil was right. In an afternoon he could have made that dinghy a thing of beauty. Bit too much of a project for me, though.

I had lined up a couple of prospects to come along on the trip from Eastchester to the Hudson, via Hell Gate and the East River and the deathly lair of the Staten Island Ferry. But this disaster seemed to have knocked that project on the head; once we were on the mooring at 79th Street, how could we get to dry land without swimming(**)? So I called my pals up and told 'em "indefinitely postponed".

As it happened, things worked out a bit better. But I'll save that for another post.

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(*) Sheila doesn't have a Web site: this is the best I can do: http://www.switchboard.com/business/ultra-sports-center-bronx-ny-3

(**) Which would be quite easy, actually. The mooring is maybe 30 feet from shore. But it seems unthinkable, somehow. For one thing you'd have to walk home starkers for a mile and change. I wouldn't mind if I were in better shape. But I'm not.

Spring is... springin'

So work has begun, belatedly as always, on the Scapegrace, who survived a remarkably mild winter remarkably well. The picture above kinda makes it look like she's in the water, but that's a ways off: bottom needs scraping and painting, the ugly blue patch of duct tape covers a hole where the thirty-year-old Ritchie compass came off the bulkhead to be sent home for reconditioning, and there's more work to do than I even want to contemplate.

Oh, and the human girl is my dear daughter who kindly accompanied her dad to the yard today.

It was a good day.

There are dirty days to come: here's the bottom:

Hibernation

Scapegrace is sleeping quietly on her poppets in the Bronx, and the outboards are sleeping quietly at Sheila's place on City Island, and the fishy-smelling folded-up rubber dinghy is stinking up our storage locker in Harlem. But the weirdly temperate February weather has started up the old itch, an itch that wouldn't have shown up for another month in a normal year: time to go out and scrape the bottom -- especially that dismal boot stripe; I owe you a picture but I'm almost afraid to take it. And the sails need some stitching, which I could have done two months ago and haven't. And I should take the covers off the cushions and bring them home and wash them; two sweaty bachelor weeks in Long Island Sound last year left them smelling like the lion house at the zoo.

Being a sailor is a bit like being a Mormon: you have more than one spouse, and strangely, the voiceless boat has her ways of invading your dreams too.

Another season over

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The Scapegrace turns into a pumpkin, as far as the 79th Street Boat Basin is concerned, on November 1. So this weekend I finally bowed to seasonal necessity and took her around to the Bronx, to Charlie Evers' wonderful boatyard, for the winter. I was expecting a milk run, having done this trip now a number of times. But I should have known better. Dat ole debbil, sea!

Here's the first odd thing. Getting out of the boat basin's crowded mooring field in a three- or four-knot current is a little tricky. One of the things you learn, after you've done it a few times, is what an mooring buoy looks like when it's been pulled mostly underwater by the current. (You do not want to run into one of these.)

They're round, the buoys, and they're never far underwater -- barely submerged, at most. So the water pillows up into a little smooth mound over the buoy, and there's a little turbulent wake downstream of it.

I worked my way through these menaces out of the mooring field into the channel -- or so I thought -- and started to breathe normally again, when I noticed, slightly off the starboard bow, a little lump of water, smoothly pillowed-up over something round, way further out into the channel than I would have expected a mooring buoy to be. And the wake looked different -- not just a patch of lumpy disturbed water downstream of the buoy, but a distinct vee-shaped wake, like what a boat would leave, or a rock in a fast-flowing freshwater stream.

Ten seconds' observation revealed that this object, whatever it was, was not stationary. It was forging upstream, at maybe two knots over the ground; five or six through the water.

Mooring buoys do not behave this way.

It was a whale, of course -- clearly a deeply bewildered whale, headed for Rockland County, with very little to expect in the way of cetacean amenities when it got there.

I tried to follow this poor devil for a while. All I could see was the very top and back of his or her head -- grayish, or rather tarnished-silvery in color; smoothly rounded; a conspicuous blowhole, single, not twinned, as far as I could tell. No clear idea how big the the underwater part was. I'm guessing maybe twenty feet.

He or she was stemming the current a lot faster than I could do. If I could have kept up, I think I would have followed this critter till I ran out of gas for the outboard. But no way; Leviathan had the advantage of what, a few million years of evolution, and Leviathan meant business. After five minutes of vain pursuit, Leviathan was a mere indistinct bump on the water, two hundred yards ahead; and so I reluctantly turned and left Leviathan to his fate, and pursued my own.

After this memorable encounter, it was an otherwise uneventful trip. Night fell, as it is wont to do. But I know the Hudson River and Hell Gate quite well, now, and motored -- no wind, alas -- blithely around the island and under the bridges and through the crazy swirling currents of Hell Gate without even glancing at the chart. (Ordinary I am a compulsive chart-watcher, so this was unusual, and I felt rather smug about it.)

Got into Eastchester Bay, and dropped anchor at about the spot shown on the map above, around 10 PM. I didn't want to try getting into Charlie's yard in the dark. Here's a closeup that may explain why:

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Close quarters and tricky turns.

I have anchored for the night at more or less the same position before, at the entrance to the bay, and spent a quiet night snoring tranquilly in the vee-berth. But this was not to be a quiet night.

Soon as I turned in, a nor-easter promptly blew up, sent big rollers all the way down the Sound and into shallow Eastchester Bay, where they turned into steep peaky nasty choppy things. Tossing the boat around on the anchor rode like a tetherball; I was worried that the rode might actually snap.

That big bruiser of a Bruce anchor wasn't going anywhere, though, not in that gluey muck of a bottom. Not a hair of anchor dragging, according to the trusty GPS, confirmed by my worried eyeball popping out of the cabin every half hour or so, into a very nasty cold damp night.

It was nasty damp and cold even in the cabin. When I noticed that my hands were shaking, I finally cranked up the little propane heater I bought two years ago, while marooned in Kittery, Maine, and that helped a lot.

Thirty knots of wind, gusting a lot higher. Crazy. Finally got so worried about the anchor rode that I pulled it up and went motoring further up into the bay, looking for a more sheltered spot. While I was doing that it got light.

Still didn't want to try going into the marina with a thirty-knot tail wind -- it's very confined in there and sailboats aren't that maneuverable in tight spaces. But as I was casting about for a suitable anchoring spot, there was a lull in the wind -- down to a reasonable fifteen knots or so -- and it started to snow.

So I nipped into the marina and if I do say so myself, got the boat into a vacant slip rather neatly.

Why is there never anybody watching when you do it right for once, I'd like to know?

Exhausted. Took a little nap on the boat, not having had much sleep during the night, then walked to the subway. Downed trees in the park, garbage cans blown all over the homely streets of the bungalow Bronx, and fat damp snowflakes landing on the hood of my jacket with an audible thump.

There's no such thing as a milk run.

And now for something completely different

That's the Scapegrace, looking almost as out of place at Fire Island Pines as her skipper. (Click to enlarge as usual). Note the ugly sludgy ring of gunk at the waterline; that's the Hudson River for you.

Penelope has friends staying here at the Pines, so she wisely took the train and ferry out, and I sailed the Scapegrace -- probably my last hurrah this season -- and joined them. I expect it's a pretty lively place during the season, but it's very peaceful now.

Took off from the boat basin about five PM yesterday; motored down the Hudson. Once past the Verrazano Bridge we picked up a light northwest breeze and moved along at three or four knots. A bit after midnight I got so cold and so tired that I hove-to on the starboard tack -- just off Long Beach Island, I think -- and took a nap.

Awoke about three, a couple of miles farther out, but having lost no ground. The wind had strengthened a good deal and so we bowled along at five and six knots. Reached Fire Island Inlet about eight, and motored in against the current.

Once inside Great South Bay it proved to be possible to sail (under jib alone) most of the way to the Pines, though I went slightly aground once, on the soft sand, trying to creep from buoy to buoy in the twisty channel. The motor backed the boat off quite nicely.

Then a squall blew in, and the jib sheet jammed on the winch, and I went in circles for about ten minutes in alarmingly shallow water, swearing at the top of my lungs the whole time. Finally got the jib sheet free, and decided the better part of valor was to motor the rest of the way to the Pines marina:

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The marina is a very nice spot:

Photo gallery

Click to see full-size, as usual.

Aquambulists at Milford, mentioned earlier. A close look at the satellite view in that original post -- you may have to zoom in -- will unravel the mystery.

The electricity perplex.

I've had the terrible experience of having the nav lights go dim and then dead at the Hour of the Wolf, in the middle of Cape Cod Bay. This is a bad feeling. I replaced my inherited battery -- a starting battery, actually, which I don't need -- with a more capacious deep-cycle battery; but I'm still very paranoid and Pere-Goriot about amps. So I've embarked on an amp-saving campaign. Among other things, I've replaced the incandescent cabin light bulbs with LED versions. Here's the old inefficient bulb:

And here's the nice new efficient LED bulb, consuming, what, a tenth of the current the old one did. It's shown in situ:

It may be more efficient, but it sure spoils the retro Jetsons look of that original-equipment 1970s light fixture, doesn't it? Looks like some ill-bred child sticking his tongue out. The light quality is colder and less homey, too.

LED replacements for the nav light bulbs are next, though that may have to wait till next year.

I also sprang for a solar panel to charge the battery whenever the sun shines:

This image also shows the new dinghy -- I have yet to tell that story -- and a weird cylindrical object on the rail, over to the left, which is the receptacle for an imposing seven-foot LORAN antenna, now languishing in a Harlem storage locker.

You don't want to touch that antenna without gloves on -- it's made out of somewhat sun-degraded fiberglass, and it's like handling a cactus. Tiny splinters of glass fiber work their way under your skin, and itch for the next week.

There's a LORAN unit in the cabin, which actually worked when I first got the boat, and of course works no more, because the Coast Guard finally shut down the LORAN system last year.

I only once ever navigated a boat using LORAN, and that was, what, twenty years ago? The charts then used to have a Cabbalistic LORAN overlay.

Ah, progress. GPS is a lot easier(*). So I ought to take the antenna receptacle off the rail, and remove the obsolete receiver from the cabin. But I probably won't. I have a kind of preservationist mentality. I like the Scapegrace's period feel and won't change it any more than I can help.

Finally, here's the sort of thing you can see off your starboard quarter, at anchor in Port Jefferson, if you happen to wake up in the middle of the night:

It's not quite as scary as it appears. There's a big industrial mooring buoy a hundred fifty feet or so from where I anchored in Port Jeff, and tugs and barges use it a lot. This particular tug came in, during the wee hours, and tied up to the buoy. The subdued rumble of its idling engines woke me up, and I took the picture. The next morning, shortly after sunrise, a huge fuel barge came majestically into the harbor, bound for the Port Jeff power plant, and my neighbor cast off and went to help it dock.

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(*) Though the FCC has apparently given GPS' adjacent frequency band to some fella called Sanjiv Ahuja, proprietor of an outfit called Lightsquared, whose business plan is to sell wholesale wireless data channels; not to people like us, but to "people" like Apple and Verizon. The sages predict extensive interference. I can't wait. Groping my way into Buzzards Bay at three AM, in the fog, and suddenly I've got no GPS because Sanjiv just cut a deal with Rupert Murdoch.

All downhill from here

When I took the dinghy out of the semi-idyllic Sand Hole, there was actually some wind. By the time I got back on the Scapegrace and got the anchor up -- dying, dying, dead. So in the heat of the day I anchored again and tried to nap, a couple of miles west, off Oak Point:

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After several uncomfortable and steamy hours there, a bit of a breeze came up, from the north-northwest, and I was able to make a long board on the starboard tack past Sands Point and finally anchor, in the dark, in about twenty feet of water off Barkers Point:

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In the morning the gloomy vista of Hart Island, mentioned here before (scroll down), was visible a few miles across the Sound. Hart Island is New York's potter's field, where our penurious dead are parsimoniously salted away in six-deep tenements. But at least there, they need no longer fear being rousted by the forces of order or the the indignant proprietors of property. The place is a sort of memento-mori for me, in a way that a more ordinary graveyard is not, and I can never set eyes on it without falling into a very thoughtful state of mind.

A discovery

Attempting to leave Oyster Bay, I found myself becalmed, as usual on this trip, at the very mouth of the harbor. So I decided to improve the time by exploring a place I have often wondered about: the Sand Hole, on the west side of the outermost part of Lloyd's Neck (which forms the eastern side of the Oyster Bay/Cold Spring Harbor complex.) You can see the Sand Hole in context, a little vermiform appendix of water, bounded by sandbars, at the top of the satellite photo on the previous post. Here's a closeup:

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The chart shows enough water for the Scapegrace (which draws four feet) in most of the Sand Hole, except at the narrowest part of the inlet, just after you round the tip of the long rock jetty on the west and head south for a couple hundred feet. At low tide the chart shows three feet of water just there. High tide, of course, would be no problem -- the tide rises about seven feet in these parts -- but then the jetty would be submerged and invisible, a scary idea.

It was low tide when I decided to do my exploring, so I anchored the Scapegrace in the slightly shallower (lighter-colored) open water you can see to the west of the jetty, and take the dinghy in.

The throat of the inlet was indeed very narrow and very shallow -- certainly no more than three feet, maybe less. The current was still running out of it, creating a pleasant little bumpy rapids over the bar. It's one boat at a time -- if somebody's coming out, you wait before you go in.

Once inside, there's a nice Lost World feel, somewhat impaired by menacing signs around the first (southern) baylet you enter: PRIVATE NO LANDING PRIVATE NO ANCHORING PRIVATE PRIVATE PRIVATE GODDAMMIT HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU. But once you round the point that forms the eastern side of the inlet, and head north into the second baylet, it's all public land, apparently.

This was a Saturday, and the Lost World had apparently been re-found by some denizens of Stamford and such places. But there weren't many -- three or four boats when I came in, and they were all pretty well-behaved. Nobody playing music or shrieking with mirth.

I went to beach the dinghy in the little corner pocket on the west side of the northern baylet, and found to my surprise that you can't. The shore climbs at a forty-five degree angle, or nearly, and the bottom drops off an what appeared to be an even sharper angle below. So you don't slide up onto the sand; you bump into the bank, and your bow is nuzzling it while your stern is in maybe eight feet of water. But there was some kind of wrecked framework of big timbers a few feet up the beach -- the remains of a pier, perhaps? -- and the dinghy's painter extended far enough to secure it to this picturesque ruin.

I walked along the shore toward the east and north, exchanging civilities with a well-spoken small young family -- mom, dad, and tot -- paddling in the water near their motorboat, which they had backed up to the shore; that tells you how fast the bottom falls off. They had brought an anchor twenty feet or so up the shore, buried it in the sandy gravel, and put a big flat rock on top to keep the boat in place. Perhaps there was another anchor out in the water; I didn't notice.

There's a path that leads up into the scrub woods toward the north. Twenty feet from the water and all the smells change: dry, spicy, a little sweet and floral. There were some kind of cactus, or what looked like cactus to me, growing rife in little clearings, with very showy complicated big yellow flowers. Somehow I don't associate cactus with Long Island. I wish I knew the names of plants and birds, but alas, it's a closed book to me.

I wandered up a couple of the little ankle-deep rivulets that drain the big salt marsh to the east; this was really a lost world -- not a human sound; just the distant growl of the surf on the outside of the sandbar, the trickle of the little streams, the various cries of birds, so unintelligible and meaningless to an ornithomoron like me; it was like walking down the sidewalk in some parts of Queens and hearing languages that you can't even begin to identify; couldn't even tell what part of the world they might be from.

Had a quick and refreshing swim in the northern baylet. It was starting to get crowded -- some idiot even had a jet-ski, though he hadn't started using it yet -- and I packed myself into the dinghy and returned to the Scapegrace. I'd like to come back, on a weekday perhaps, after Labor Day, and try to bring the sailboat in -- though that initial entry would have me chewing my knuckles.

Ruled by the wind...

... and circumstance.

An east wind this morning, after very discouraging progress toward Maine. And much to do back in New York. I hate a ticking clock -- they make me utterly miserable -- so I took the hint and turned back toward New York.

The Gods, acknowledging my submission, were kind.

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all, 
But will its negative inversion, be prodigal!

The east wind remained steady and whisked me across 24 miles of Long Island Sound in an afternoon, a very pleasant ride -- the sort of thing that might make a sail-hater reconsider.

But then the sail-hater would have re-reconsidered. Just outside Oyster Bay harbor, the wind died, and the rain came; but I motored in, glad for the coolness and the wet -- wearing a bathing suit and a ratty old cotton polo shirt for the first hour, and loving it, till finally I had to put on a jacket.

Oyster Bay/Cold Spring is a much-recessed harbor, a hassle to get in and out of. I want to be out soon, and I'm not expecting any heavy weather, so I dropped the hook in a non-standard anchorage:

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Weird waters -- the depth goes from sixty feet to twelve in half a second.

I continue to be amazed by the relentless voracious beach flies -- "greenheads", I think they're called, at least on Cape Cod. Sunset, temp in the sixties, rain pouring down, I'm scrambling around trying to dowse the mainsail and start the motor and keep the dinghy's towline from fouling the motor's prop; and a dozen greenheads are circling my naked shins like, I dunno, bail bondsmen at The Tombs. Every five seconds or so, one darts in like a dive bomber, grabs a chunk of high-fed Upper West Side flesh, and flies away before I can even start thinking about swatting him (or her? I can't tell).

The rain does slow 'em down. But even so, they're too fast for me.

About last night...

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Here's where I spent it, anchored behind Charles Island off Milford, Connecticut, a pretty spot. The town of Milford is a mixed bag. The public library (for fast free Wifi) is within walking distance of the town landing, as are several restaurants and the Metro-North suburban rail station, but apparently no grocery store, at least according to the pleasant girls in the restaurant where I ate dinner. (Of course suburban notions of "walking distance" are problematic and highly variable.) Anyway, no orange juice for me in the next couple of days.

While I was dining in high Milford style, another boater had come into the anchorage and situated himself far too close to me. I monitored the situation at intervals for a couple of hours, and finally concluded that we were going to bump into each other during the night. So I hauled up the anchor and moved.

It wasn't as difficult as it might have been, since the little anchorage has a nice even bottom with no nasty rocks. I had to put-putt around for a quarter of an hour so so, to find a spot that was reasonably sheltered by the island, and far enough from the other eight or nine boats, and far enough from the island that I wasn't likely to swing into shoal water.

Considerable rain and thunder during the night, which brought the temperature down nicely -- I was still sweating when I went to bed. Now a gray and cooler morning, with muttered threats of thunderstorms on the weather radio and a wind from the southeast.

What is to be done?

Escape from Port Jefferson -- sorta

When last heard from, your correspondent was languishing on a windless Wednesday in Port Jefferson, New York, which is a nice anchorage and not altogether an uninteresting place. There is a ferry which runs from there to Bridgeport, Connecticut, a place that will live in infamy as the home of Joe Lieberman.

I regret to say the ferries are car ferries; but as a result they are impressively large craft, and it's quite something to see them surging in and out of the narrow harbor. One of them is named the P. T. Barnum, which tickles me when I hear it calling on the VHF: "Securite securite, P T Barnum leaving Port Jefferson." I want to call back and say "This way to the egress, PT," but so far I have restrained the impulse. Wisecracks don't seem to be much indulged in on Channel 13.

Anyway, I ended up spending all day yesterday (Wednesday 6 July) and last night in Port Jeff. No wind in the morning, and then I had to wait for high tide to bring the Scapegrace up to the fuel dock and fill up the water tank. That was about 3 PM, and once it was accomplished, the weather radio was uttering dire threats about severe thunderstorms; and I don't love sailing at night, anyway. (I was planning on heading for Mattituck, which is about 24 miles away, and there's really nothing resembling a harbor or an anchorage anywhere in between.) So discretion -- or laziness -- triumphed and I dropped the hook again in Port J and spent the night.

The thunderstorms never materialized, though it did get a little breezy for about an hour.

This morning the wind situation looked a little better, so I fared forth. Of course, half a mile out of the harbor, the wind died.

Okay, I thought, I'll wait and see what happens. It's really quite unpleasant being out on the boat on a cloudless day in July, with no wind; the sun beats down into the cockpit, the cabin is an oven, and the sweat runs off you in rivers and literally pools under your ass if you sit down, and drips off your face if you bend over.

Finally a breath of breeze -- but dead foul; from the east; so I decided to modify my plan and head across the Sound to Milford, Connecticut, a place I've never been.

The little easterly breeze moved me along at two knots or so for a couple of hours -- then, you guessed it, died. In disgust I motored the last eight miles into Milford harbor, which has its charm. I'll write more about it anon.

Two hours of motoring full-throttle with my little Tohatsu 6 hp outboard consumed a gallon and a half of gas (or maybe a little less). It moves me along at four and a half knots and a bit, if I'm towing the dinghy (as I am). It's nice to know these stats but I never seem to take note of them.

Being in Port Jeff reminded me of a crazy windsurfing incident when I was much younger (though still old enough to know better). Maybe I'll write that up one of these days.