>We covered a decent amount of ground on our first week out on Easter Long Island. Since my last posting the weather improved as we headed from Greenport to Essex on the Connecticut River. That evening in Essex we had a great dinner as guests of our fellow Corinthians Rodney and Genie Devine. Rodney has crewed for me a number of times and is always a pleasure to have on board. Essex Yacht club is a very friendly place, quite a contrast to the clubs in Sag Harbor. This is a shot of the mooring field outside of the club, which is right down town Essex from our boat in the anchorage. Yes, it’s really this quaint.

While our trip over from Greenport began with a downpour, it ended up with a run some 10 miles past Essex in a beautiful afternoon cruise up to Haddam and the Goodspeed Opera House. Along the way we also passed Gillette Castle, the home of an excentric actor who played Sherlock Holmes back at the turn of the last century.

Here’s the Goodspeed Opera House and Gillette’s Castle.

There’s also a small airport at Goodspeed Landing and we were treated to a flyover and touch and go landing by a great little pontoon ultralight. Watching him weave down the river just 50ft off the water was a sight to behold. That would really be fun to do sometime. There are lots of really quaint homes along the river and it’s fun to just enjoy as we motor by.

On Saturday morning we motored down the CT River again and headed East to Mystic, catching a great SW breeze and an ebbing tide. We covered the distance in really great time going some 7+ knots most of the way. We sailed right up the river to pick up my friend Keith’s mooring right near the swing bridge. Keith and Rose own a SAGA 43 like Pandora and they travel South each winter to spend a few months in the Bahamas. Since they won’t be back until the end of June they agreed that we could use their mooring.

After a really great sail it was time for payback when I started looking for Keith’s mooring which had sunk over the winter when the stick he put in place instead of the float sunk. I thought that I was all prepared with a grapple hook to find it but it turned out to be a much more difficult project than I had envisioned. I did find three other moorings fairly quickly it took many hours of dragging back and forth, often in the entirely wrong place it turned out, until I finally found it. Keith was very patient with me on the phone as I called him many times for encouragement and direction finding. I am sure that he would have found it rather quickly. Here’s a shot of me untangling the lines and getting it ready to use.

What a mess.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well and we had a great morning and afternoon in Mystic on Sunday prior to catching Amtrak to Bridgeport late afternoon.

Now Pandora is safely on her mooring for two weeks until I head back up to spend a weekend with my son Christoper and one of his friends. Hopefully the weather will cooperate so we can make a weekend visit to Block Island.

Things are a bit unsettled at work these days who knows what the rest of the summer will hold.

That’s all for now.

>We had our first week of the season on Pandora beginning last Friday when we went from Norwalk Yacht Club out to Mattituck LI. We have visited this small harbor a number of times over the years and decided that we would make this our first stop of the summer. The channel is a long way in and winds past homes, boat yards and osprey nests. It’s very pretty.

While we were there the weather was great. We even walked out of town about 2 miles to visit a vineyard. Shinn Vineyards a great little vineyard on the North Fork of Long Island. We took a tour given by Barbara Shinn who is really passionate about her farm which she keeps in a way that goes way beyond organic. Her current push is to get approval for a large wind generator on the property that will power the vineyard and tasting room. What a great place. Check out this view.

After that we went further out and spent a few days in Sag Harbor. What a contrast with all the big yachts. I counted a dozen over 100′. What recession? SAG isn’t very friendly if you don’t have $$$ to through around. Moorings are charged by the foot at $2/ft, something that we have not run into anywhere else. They are doing an excellent job of keeping their moorings open and unocupied with that policy. Odd as you’d think that they would want to attract more dollars from the “little people” too.

Since leaving SAG on Tuesday we have seen nothing but rain and cool weather. It’s Friday morning and we have been on the dock in Greenport checking out the town. It’s really a very nice town with lots of historic homes. Very nice. We even found a marina that would give us a free (almost) spot to tie up for two days. There wasn’t another boat around due to the weather and the fact that it’s still early in the season.

Very different than SAG Harbor, I would say.

The main street in town isn’t exactly hopping. We were told that Memorial Day Weekend was very busy. You can’t tell here. Also, Claudio seems to own much of the town businesses and is said to be the oldest family owned restaurant in the US. We ate there the first night because of the really cheap doc space. It was the least that we could do.

Hard to imagine a marina with only one boat. Yes, it was just us.

Well, have to sign off now as we are headed over to the CT River for a visit with some friends tonight in Essex.

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I have not been keeping up with my blog for many months but it’s been a busy winter working on Pandora. I put an automatic Espar cabin heater on the boat, upgraded the jib travler, modfied the companionway steps and completely removed and re-varnished the cabin sole. I did lots of other things that are too small to mention but here are the larger items.

Here’s the cabin sole all laid out in the cockpit prior to the final installation. Yes, that’s 26 individual pieces. I used an interesting product called “Ultimate Sole” to finish it and it’s supposed to be non-skid even though it’s shiny. So far, so good.

Hee is the finished sole in place! I like it.

Here’s the new traveler. The old one came out to the side of the cabin and didn’t provide a good sheeting angle so the new one goes out an additional 16″ or so on each side. The better angle with the wider set makes for better performance. I had to get new brackets made to provide support for the extra overhang but they fit perfectly. I got this idea from my friend Keith and confirmed it with the boat’s designer, Bob Perry. It does make a big difference. The boat’s faster and heels less.
This is a closeup of the new brackets. Really nice work by Klako Marine in Canada.

I also added wedges in the companionway steps so that it would be easier to enter the cabin when the boat is heeled. This gives us a “level” surface to stand on when the boat is on an angle. Very nice to have and gives much better footing.

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It’s been a while since I last posted and Pandora has covered quite a bit of ground since then. Following the weekend in Block Island, Pandora returned to Shelter Island for a Corinthians rendezvous, went to New Bedford for a few weeks, over to Martha’s Vineyard with visits to both Edgartown and Oak Bluffs as well as Newport, Wickford and East Greenwich RI. For the last few weeks she has been in Wickford where she will now be until late this month. As I write this we are on a mooring in Potter’s Cove on the eastern side of Prudence Island, Narraganset Bay. The island is located a bit South of Bristol and Providence but quite far up the bay.

The last month has been very busy for us in getting Pandora ready for the upcoming race to Maine which leaves from Stonington CT on Sunday, July 27th. Ken Appelton, my “crew boss” has done a tremendous amount to help keep things moving forward. He has, perhaps more than anyone else, kept me focused on all of the items that need to be done to be sure that we are well prepared for our offshore run and in compliance with all the regulations. Last week I placed an order with Landfall Navigation including a whole variety of safety equipment to be sure that we have whatever we need in the event of a problem on the race. The list includes various strobe lights, both for the boat and for individual users (it’s hard to find someone if they fall overboard after dark and a bright strobe makes it much easier), dental repair kit (I’d hate to break a tooth 150 miles from shore), fire blanket to put out galley fires, various weatherproof flashlights, emergency VHF antennas and just a blur of other products that the race safety inspector would be absolutely certain that I can’t live without. Well, being on a boat out with knowone around to help does suggest that we should have whatever we might need to fix a problem with the boat or crew.

Ken and I spent a few day on board with another friend a few weeks ago and went through the boat to get as many of the safety issues worked out as possible. One example is that every thru-hull (where a hose goes out through the bottom of the boat) needs to have a softwood plug secured with a lanyard that can be hammered into the hole if there is a failure in the hose. This is just one of a staggering number of details. The storm sails, for use in winds over 40kts were also set to be sure that they would fit and that the sheet leads ran clear. We also ran up the spinnaker, the big colorful sail designed to catch the wind when we are running down wind, to make sure that we understood how to launch and retrieve it quickly.

As I mentioned, we have been keeping Pandora in Wickford RI where we have some good friends. This is a town where we would love to live some day. The town has a very quaint downtown area with lots of really nice historic homes and a somewhat “artsy” look to it. The harbor is well protected and convenient to Block Island Sound which is just a few miles up the bay toward Newport.

As I mentioned, we are in Potter’s Cove now and the last time we were here was nearly 30 years ago in TAO, our first boat. The boat was a 20′ Cape Cod catboat, and a lot smaller (ask Brenda) and much, much rougher (you can ask Brenda about that too). No running water on that boat and that was the least of it. They say that you should not do long distance cruising on a boat that is shorter than your age. Well, that might not be completely realistic as given my growing years but there is some wisdom in it.

Here is a shot off of the plotter of the cove as well as the larger bay so you can see where it is relative to Block Island Sound which is at the top of the larger scale shot.

The last time we were here I don’t recall there being any moorings. Well, there are lots of them now and boats galore. There are just mobs of boats including a number of large groups of powerboats all rafted together. It seems that powerboats are, more than ever, congregating in local harbors near to their marinas so that they don’t have to burn much of that precious fuel to get there. At $5/gal it isn’t hard to run up quite a bill at the filling station from a few hours on the water. Pandora only burns about 1 gal per hour but that still translates into about 6 miles per gallon at cruising speed. Even a small powerboat can burn 30-40 gal per hour, a staggering amount of fuel.

When we were here so many years ago on TAO we were sitting in the cockpit having an evening cocktail, a gin an tonic if I recall while dinner cooked on the grill. I should note that the grill was one of those $15 cheap hibachi grills that are designed to be used a few times and tossed out. Well, I had rigged a little wooden bracket to hang out over the transom and had placed our dinner (two chicken legs with thigh attached) on the hot grill to cook. Now, keep in mind that we didn’t have a fridge on the boat like we do now so our storage for food was very, very limited. We kept our food, water and our precious ice in that little cooler and there wasn’t much room for much beyond that one dinner. Anyway, out of the blue, a particularly aggressive sea gull swooped down and snagged one of our two, now piping hot, chicken legs right off the grill. Now remember that I said that the leg and thigh were attached and as the gull gulped half of our dinner down his neck assumed the shape of the leg and thigh. As we sat there in utter amazement, we watched him fly away with his neck bent about 35 degrees as he forced down his dinner in one gulp.

This visit, nearly 30 years later, was very different but a lot less peaceful. However, even with all the other boats around us we were able to enjoy a really beautiful sunset.

Brenda always says that it “blows a gale” in Narraganset Bay and today’s no exception. With south winds gusting over 20kts it will be a spirited run back to Wickford this afternoon.

The next time that we will be back on Pandora will be a few days prior to the race so there will be plenty to do as we make last minute adjustments to the boat. While there will be plenty of gear on board for the race, the plan is to remove as much as we can to lighten the load. All of the gear that we remove will go into two cars for to be driven up to Maine and then put back on the boat after the race.

>Brenda headed home on Wednesday night and my younger son Chris and his friend Dan joined me in Mystic to spend a few days on Pandora. On Thursday morning we headed out to Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island. Block is a great spot and while it feels like a world away, it’s just 15 miles from Watch Hill Passage at the most eastern end of Long Island Sound.

I have mentioned my solar panels in past postings and here’s a shot of them in action. I am getting up to 20amps mid day and nearly 10amps even in the early AM hours. This is terrific as it is allowing me to be much more liberal with my electrical consumption. I could probably leave the cooler on when I am away from the boat for a week but I am not willing to try that out quite yet.

We had a really great trip over on a beam reach in about 18kts of wind. Pandora raced along in moderate seas at 7.5 to 8+kts. With the tide pushing us along a bit faster, we made it in about 1.5hrs from Watch Hill Passage. By the time we got to Block it was blowing about 20 from the southwest but was still a really nice day. The guys and I rented bikes and rode all over the island and came back in time for dinner I have to say that I did OK for a guy of my relative maturity against a few 22+ year olds. Having said that I felt a bit of pain in the rear when I eased myself onto the bike seat again today.

Now, here’s something that you don’t see every day, a Llama and an Emu. And, to top it off, a sign that says “don’t feed the camels”. I guess that means that it’s OK to feed the Emu but what do they eat?

Today we biked out to the North Light which marks the most northern part of the island, while the rest of the island is fairly built up, this area is still quite wild and protected as a bird nesting place. And given the fact that we visited so early in the season gave us a first hand look at nesting gulls. I have never seen a baby gull and just assumed that they popped out fully grown or at least grew up from rats that turned into gulls when they got big, a sort of metamorphosis like a butterfly, if not quite so pleasant as the caterpillar to butterfly thing. It was quite amazing as there were gull nests everywhere including some places that were right on the path to the lighthouse which suggests that there hasn’t been much in the way of foot traffic lately.

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I have been coming to Block for nearly 30 years and have never been there so early in the
season as my visits usually are in July and August when things are really hopping. I was just stunned when we entered the New Harbor to see that there were less than 5 boats. It was just amazing to see a harbor where you usually have to standby with your dink to race toward a mooring when a boat leaves. With moorings first come, first served, that’s the only way to get one in the busy season. For those of you who have been there, this shot will surely strike you as abnormal and very vacant. While I normally anchor I decided to get a mooring close to shore given the Strong winds when we arrived yesterday. While it’s not yet busy it wasn’t too early for the harbor master to come and get his fee first thing on Friday morning. Our original plan was to head back on Sunday afternoon but with the weather forecast calling for rain and thunderstorms all day Saturday we decided to just head back to Mystic on Friday and catch a train on Saturday morning, rain or not. As much as I like the boat I am not inclined to spend a day on board in the rain if I can avoid it.

As I write this we are headed over toward Watch Hill Passage under power as the forecast of 10-15kts from the southwest has not materialized. The Sound is a glassy calm with just a hint of a breeze. The wind ultimately picked up and we had a great sail back to Mystic.

It’s now Saturday and it is indeed raining but we are headed back to Norwalk and our car via train.

Well, no time on Pandora for two weeks. Our next trip will be over to Shelter Island for a Corinthians rendezvous and on to New Bedford MA.