Month: August 2019

It’s old home week for this crew. Some old posts are linked multiple times because we tend to do catch-up posts…yeah, kinda like we’re doing here. From Hamburg Cove to Essex to Old Saybrook, we really experienced the Connecticut River on this trip. And from there, we took the first available east wind over to New Haven, CT, home of the Yale Peabody Natural History Museum. It was a surprise to us once, and it continues to be a joy. So many of the original paleontological expeditions were undertaken from those halls; so many madmen sending rocks (bones?) back via 19th Century railway car or somewhat-human skulls back on steam ships in the early 20th. The creepy side of natural history, done in the usual way, is fully on display as well…pinned butterflies, stuffed birds, posed bison and jaguar with eyes of glass… But also? We rented bikes to ride there after anchoring in the one free spot near the main part of town, off Long Wharf, home of the Mystic Seaport-built reconstruction of the sailing ship Amistad, itself the vehicle for a lucky few Mende from Sierra Leone who took the ship from the slaveholders in 1839 and won a series of court battles, culminating at the Supreme Court, for their freedom to return to their homes. To be precise, 53 abductions; 35 safe returns. A few seafood-heavy meals (Lenny and Joe’s Fish Tale – yawn, Clark’s – my new home, Brazi’s – delicious…wait, what did that cost?!?) and we were done with New Haven. Then we took another east wind south-southwest to Port Jefferson, which we remembered fondly. However, it wasn’t all that this time. The charts are wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Do you have any idea how disconcerting it is to have a chart say it should be[…]

New London was a lesson in the reconstitution of our lives, breaking us down to life’s constituent parts once again. Walking, seeing, feeling, tasting, hearing and smelling everything as completely divergent from everything else in the universe, moving toward entropy, willingly. But then a plan hatched on an epic walk to rediscover southern New England on foot. A real plan…a plan of action, a plan of pro-active profound life change. …We’re going back to India to finish our co-written manuscript! This incredibly exciting and momentous decision was taken quickly, but we won’t leave for almost a month. Sure, there are plans to be made, but we also need to meet the Prakash family in NYC! But first we had to get some fresh water on our hull. We’d been anchored in the same place for a little over a month, without picking up and going sailing even once since Dean went back to Moses Lake. The 3 Mile bio-hitchhikers were a little more tenacious than the sail to the Thames could clear away so we still had some growth to contend with. The absolute best way to slough off salt-water growth is a good clean, fresh-water swimming hole, just like the one in Hamburg Cove, up the Connecticut River in Lyme, CT. We reached the Connecticut River entrance channel in a quiet moment, right after a stream of boats exited. We waited until after the weekend, so the boater playgrounds were emptying. And though the currents swept us swiftly along, we enjoyed the tree-lined river. Now, if you know us at all you know that we like to go nice and slow. To really let the local fishies do the job of scrubbing our hull for us, we first need to dedicate at least 24 hours of fresh water to[…]

Dena got back from Oklahoma on Sunday, and we went to work on Monday and Tuesday. We woke up on Wednesday and went for a nice long bike ride into East Hampton. On the way there I (James) snapped. We stopped right in front of the “totally awesome” fruit stand, home of the $23 buck 2 oz salad, and I just yelled, “We have to get out of this fucking place!” James had no idea of what I (Dena) had been thinking, but it was pretty much exactly that. After 10 days with my mom in ICU, after taking turns with Gary sleeping in a chair right beside the bed because she got so upset when she couldn’t wake us from the couch 5 feet away, after the ignominy that is modern air travel…coming back to Three Mile Harbor just to hate our jobs 20 hours a day? No. Dena pulled up next to me (James) and made the reality of what I’d just said stick. “To make that work, we’re not going to see Tarantino’s new picture. We’re going on a provisioning run/bike drop with an Ub return back to the dinghy. Then we ready the boat and sail away from all, um, this?” I (Dena) didn’t mean to make it sound like a question, but this is as quickly as we’ve ever even considered bouncing out of a situation. …yes. “Let’s do this thing.” …And that took all day, because it also included gathering all of our uniform shirts, hoodies, and fleeces, adding keys to the bags, and dropping the whole mess at the shop at Three Mile Harbor Marina. Back at the dinghy, we stripped “our” slip, which we had despised, of lines, electrical cable, water hose. We woke up the next morning like we’d been underway[…]