>While I am between cruises on Pandora I follow a number of sailing blogs and also listen to a terrific podcast from Martinique.

Speaking of Pandora, I am looking forward to next weekend when my younger son Chris and a college friend will join me for a weekend out of Mystic, where Pandora is now. The plan is to head out to Block Island for the weekend. I can’t wait!!

Two world class sailors, Steve and Linda Dashew are prolific writers, designers who have sailed all over the world. They have since traded in their sailboat and are cruising on a 90′ powerboat, the latest in their long line of fast, narrow energy efficient yachts. Their current boat “Wind Horse” is a 90′ very narrow, easily driven aluminum yacht that they are traveling the world on. They keep a regular blog and their most recent posting on June 2nd has them in Norway. Their blog has some really wonderful photos and some great tips on ocean cruising. Check them out at http://setsail.com/category/dashew-blog/ . For some really great photos of Wind Horse, check this out. http://dashewoffshore.com/fpb_first.asp What a boat.

What a terrific looking yacht Windhorse is…

Susan and Tom Maddigan have been cruising between New England and the Bahamas for several years and while they don’t post very often, they do have quite a bit of activity from their time on Brilliant. Check them out at http://www.sailbrilliant.blogspot.com/

Tom and Susan have covered a lot of miles with Brilliant. The are on their way north now.

Listing to podcasts is a relatively new activity for me but I absolutely love Yacht Blast which is a weekly radio show from a station in Martinique in the Caribbean. What a great thing to listen to while thinking of warmer climes. The host Gary Brown covers a great many topics including local sailing news and major events and races around the world. Great fun. You can go to I-tunes or to this link. http://www.yachtblast.com/#/podcasts/4526520265 Gary posts each Monday and I have subscribed by doing to I-tunes and it automatically loads onto my I-pod each week.

I am always on the lookout for fun sailing podcasts to listen to so please let me know of any that you like.

>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.