September 1-19 2021
The theme for the last few weeks has been reconnecting with friends before leaving our home waters. If our plans of a circumnavigation starting in 2023 come to fruition, we won’t be back to Long Island Sound until 2024 at the earliest. That feels like a long time from now, so I’m getting a bit nostalgic about our departure. We’ve had so much fun with the crew of Sing to Me, Comanche, Arrows, Sabotage, and many others. We are grateful to Jonah, our favorite Amazon delivery man in Oyster Bay, who was kind enough to receive and deliver to the yacht club an unreasonable number of packages for us. Happily, were able to have a fabulous Mediterranean meal with him and his wife before we sailed away. Xxoo.
We reconnected with old college friends too. There was a really terrific day sail with “Fuzzy,” Jeff’s best friend from college, and his wife and son. We all enjoyed sailing in NY Harbor and up the Hudson a bit. In fact, Fuzzy’s son liked it so much, he’s added the Coast Guard Academy to the list of colleges he’s considering! The call of the sea! I just got back from the Bar Mitzvah of the youngest son of one of my dearest friends from college. My “date” was actually my “mom/big sister” in Chi Omega, so it was a huge treat to spend the whole day with her. We went to the very well done service, and then had all day to hang out on the boat on the Hudson River, before heading back to the party in Tarrytown that night. It was so nice to have a relaxed, in person catch up. Also, my friend has a car, so it was cool to get to ride around at will, without an Uber driver!
There was also a terrific family event. We sailed over to Greenwich to go to my cousins wedding reception at the Greenwich Country club. The day was one of those perfect, shining September days, and looking out over the 18th green (critiquing putting form is always fun), and the rolling hills beyond was wonderful. Even better, my cousin married a terrific guy with a cool family of his own. We got to meet new people in addition to reconnecting with my side of the family. In discussions with people at all these events, it seems that everyone one we encountered was vaccinated, so I feel good that our friends pass this important IQ test. It’s also kind of funny that every family seems to have the one hold out – the crazy aunt or uncle somewhere who doesn’t believe in science, the government, the pharma industry, or COVID itself.
Today, the tide turns at 11AM or so, when we will up anchor and head south. Our plan is to get to Cape May, with a possible overnight at Sandy Hook, depending on what the wind is doing when we get there this afternoon. Sailing down the Jersey coast without wind is actually a long, boring motorboat ride. Ask me how I know this? We will try to catch some good wind. Fingers crossed.
Oh, to keep it real, I am in a hurry to raise the anchor because we’ve got a lot of wind blowing north, kicking up some chop against the tide coming up from the south, so the boat is moving all over the place. I was trying to wake Jeff up this morning and he told me to “give the bucking bronco some oats so it settles down.” Not every morning can be Mimosas on the Lido deck!