>The end of our Memorial Day week out

>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.