Our Long Island Sound "Summer" Sail 1

 

When Susan went off to her niece's baby shower in Ohio, flying through Boston from Nantucket to Cleveland, JP and I stayed aboard on our week-long mooring in Nantucket Harbor.  For fun, I wrote an account of our laundry day, reproduced here:

Laundry Day in Nantucket, Raconteur-style

We have been out on the water for nine days.  The laundry basket turned on its side on the shelf at the foot of the bunk in the aft cabin is getting full, mostly underwear and sailing clothes.  We’ve acquired a couple of items of clothing on the way, but it’s time to do laundry.

Nantucket boasts one or two laundry services, one provider of linen services for the island’s hotels and the superyachts that grace the docks at the Boat Basin, the island’s fanciest marina. The other is up-island, inaccessible without two round-trip taxi rides

Susan has gone off-ship – to Cleveland for her niece’s baby shower – so JP and I decide it’s a good day to head to the coin laundry facility we’ve discovered at the fancy marina. We’ve packed my 42 liter Cotopaxi backpack, reasonably water resistant in case of mishap - a lesson learned the hard way in our years in the Caribbean – with the laundry and we call the wonderfully convenient launch service to pick us up boatside and take us to shore. We make our way through the Saturday crowds coming off the tourist ferry and head to the Boat Basin a few blocks away.

Two problems present themselves immediately: One, the coin granting machine is on the fritz, and two, we have no laundry products.  I go off to the nearby Stop and Shop, hoping to buy a roll of quarters and to acquire small versions of detergent and dryer sheets. The customer service desk is staffed by a very young guy. He says, sounding sorry, “We’re not allowed to do currency exchange.” He mutters something about HR, and I don’t argue.  

I walk from the grocery story further into town and call JP to report my initial failure. The local bank with a lobby (not just an ATM) was open Saturday mornings – until Labor Day. JP is trying to find someone to fix the machine and meanwhile suggests I try Nantucket Pharmacy a few blocks up the cobblestone street. We had stopped in the evening before and knew it from our summer 2025 visit.  It’s that rarity: A genuinely local pharmacy, complete with a soda fountain lunch counter and prescription service, plus aisles of necessaries and things you didn’t know you needed stretching between the two.

I go to the back counter; the woman who helped us the night before appears.  I practically whisper, “The laundromat’s coin machine is out of service.  Do you know anywhere I might find a roll of quarters?” She smiles.  “I have a roll of quarters. I’ll sell it to you.” She laughs. “For $20.” “I will happily pay $20 for a $10 roll of quarters,” I say. “No, no. $10. BUT. Don’t tell anyone!” “My lips are sealed,” I promise.

I call JP to report success, and take my precious quarters back down the cobblestones, stopping back at the supermarket for laundry supplies. Back to our previously scheduled program, an hour later.

The guy arrives to refill the machine right after we made the executive decision to add all the clothes, tutti-frutti, to one washer, to save enough quarters to run two dryer loads simultaneously after, so as not to spend the entire glorious sunny day hanging out on a bench outside the laundromat.

Four hours after we set out, the clothes are washed, dried, folded and tucked back into the Cotopaxi. We ask the launch to wait while JP tosses it into the cockpit, then climbs back aboard for the return to town. Laundry day is over. We can go back to being tourists — although by now, having located the laundromat, negotiated the quarter economy and made friends at the pharmacy, we feel slightly less like tourists than we did that morning.

It was a summer of putting the house back together after the lightning strike on 11 June, just in time for our joint 70th Bossa Nova birthday party on 15 August, so we scheduled the longer sail to start just before Labor Day weekend. We had been invited many months ago by our friend Dianne to join her and her husband Art in Newport for a sail on the 12 Meter Americas Cup 1956 yacht Columbia, on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.  We left Guilford Yacht Club and overnighted at Fishers Island before docking at Newport Yachting Center (which doubles as a wedding factory) for three nights.  

7 November I see that I abandoned this at some point - oh well.  Let's try to remember the rest of the voyage.  We headed to Nantucket from Newport on Labor Day, did one overnight at Cuttyhunk, where we learned that one of the shoreside seafood shacks has a boat that brings oysters, clam chowder, clams casino and such around the harbor.  We indulged twice - on the way to Nantucket and again on the way back.  These always feel like tiny bits of cruising-only magic.

We ended up getting to Nantucket earlier than planned, and leaving a bit earlier as well, in service of the weather.  We had a great week - says Leigh, whose almost-favorite New England place is now ACK - and Susan even got off and back on by flying through Boston and back through New York to get to her niece Madi's baby shower - in Cleveland! 

When she got back, we decided to rent a jeep so that we could take the iconic drive on the beach (you lower the tires to 15psi or less~!) - it was a beautiful day, super windy, no temptation to swim - and that let us explore a bit more of the island.  We had taken bikes the year before.

In the end, we skipped a planned longer stop at Fishers Island, in part because the weather wasn't going to be conducive for the last few days of the original itinerary, in part I think because we were ready to be home.  So we were back on the 19th, so we were sixteen days and nights in the round trip.

We thought we might make it out once more, for a few nights in Mystic in the first week of October, but some boat work (new sails for 2027) and again, unpromising conditions, cancelled that plan for this year.  We actually hauled out on the 14th of October, and she's safe and snugly covered at Branford Landing once more.

We are off to Florida by car on the 12th, arriving the 16th or 17th after a few nights in Beaufort, SC, where we spent some fun days on Raconteur on our way down the ICW in 2010. Then, on to putting Third Flight back in the water - a different experience this year, as she is on a rack, just awaiting orders!

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Third Flight's new home

JP and Susan set off for Port 32 Marina in Lauderdale, west of downtown and in the vicinity of the airport, on the south fork of the New River, Third Flight's new home for the hurricane season this year.

They had a good run, with a little traffic excitement upon arrival, and a downright traffic jam in the queue for the lift.  It's a new thing for us: dry storage on racks.  They took the canvas down on Wednesday and then had to put it back for a few hours so our excellent canvas guy, Oscar, could come and take some measurements...and then take it down again.

Here's JP with the dry stacks and the crane/lift in the background.  Lots of small(er) boat owners keep their boats in this kind of storage year round; part of the service is to fetch it out on demand and then put it back.  We still have the option to keep her at the dock behind the building; we don't love the amount of wake she takes there, being directly on the ICW with its I95 like traffic and lax enforcement of the clearly posted no-wake, manatee crossing zone to the south of the Sunrise Bridge.  But we can just take the elevator down and go when we want to make a voyage, short or long.

Here she is, waiting her turn; apparently, the (bright yellow) Water Taxi - a consistent wake zone offender - also stores one of its ships there.

And that's a wrap for Third Flight until we fetch her at the end of the year.

One in, one out

 

This is Raconteur just after she hit the water at Branford Landing marina, where she was stored for the winter, on 3 June. Susan and JP took her back to our slip at GYC for the first time since summer of 2024 after the delayed dredging made getting in and out of their so difficult last year.

That said, the dredging they did manage over the winter was, shall we say, incomplete, but the controlling depths in the channel are good, the fairways are okay, and the C dock slips, while silted in pretty badly, are deep enough if we keep her out a few feet from the dock, which is what we did.

No immediate sailing plans - we've booked the key parts of a planned three-week voyage in September (Newport on Labor Day weekend and Nantucket five or six days later) - as Susan and JP are now in Florida to haul Third Flight out.

We'll be in a new place this year; the old Florida marina, Banyan Bay, where we've kept her for hurricane season since we brought her home in early 2022 has been sold to a developer and will now be something sad - warehouse space, we hear.

We did manage a nice trip on Third Flight in late February and early March; as we did two years ago, Susan and JP took her down to Marathon over a couple of nights via Elliott Key, and Leigh drove the car down [hitting a perfectly horrendous traffic jam after a bad accident closed Card Sound Road].  We stayed at a new marina this year as Safe Harbor Marathon originally had only a too-large slip available. We landed on the Bay side, at a place that was planned as a high end condo and marina for the owners.  That didn't quite work so now the multi-story townhouse units that were built - a dozen or so - have a large pool, clubhouse with fitness room, a pool bar and are rented by the week or month and the marina slips are available on Dockwa.  We enjoyed our stay; several of our Marathon favorite restaurants for breakfast and for dinner are in walking distance, the pool and bar were great, and since it was pretty cold and windy for March we were happy to be on the bay side.  Alas, ONE shower in the clubhouse, open only from 7am to 7pm, so that was less convenient (pool bathrooms 24/7 though).

Here's a shot of the pool, taken from the clubhouse; Third Flight was a few steps beyond all that, to the left, and stayed put the whole time we were in Marathon.

Susan and I took a side trip to her niece Caroline's wedding shower, leaving JP on the boat and driving to Miami on a Friday, flying back Sunday and driving back to Marathon Sunday night.  That's one of the nice things about bringing a car down. That and (this year) being able to get ourselves to what is probably our favorite dinner spot, Castaway Waterfront Restaurant and Sushi Bar.  From Safe Harbor, we could dinghy around, but it's worth crossing the Overseas Highway for. Castaway Marathon

Here's a snapshot of Castaway; probably have a better one somewhere.  The fish is the freshest anywhere.

JP and I will be 70 this year; Susan passed that milestone a little ahead of us.  I think we are all grateful we can still do this.  JP and Susan do the lion's share of the work - and it's a lot of work, as my mom always said when she heard our stories. Here's hoping the pleasures outpace the pain for a while longer.

Bill Buckley sold his beloved Partito when he was 78 - here's a gift link to the Atlantic article he wrote about it - 

Aweigh

after a lifetime of sailing (he was 12 or 13 when he got his first sailboat, about the age JP was when he started sailing and racing on Lac Leman).  

Here's to 8 more years?