We are underway eastbound in Long Island Sound, bound for the Connecticut side and the Connecticut River. We got a late start from Mattituck, New York this afternoon waiting for enough tide to comfortably transit out the channel and inlet.
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Vector looming in the compact anchorage in Mattituck. |
Tuesday after I posted we headed ashore and landed at Danford's marina, in our usual dinghy spot. I went to check in at the office and get the gate code, expecting a complimentary tie-up for eating at their restaurant, which is what we were told on our last visit, where we used the dock for a full week and the new dockmaster waived the fee when we told him we'd been in and out of the restaurant a few times. Evidently between then and now the marina sold off the restaurant and no longer provides dock & dine, but at least our $10 dinghy fee was good for a full 24 hours.
We walked into the restaurant and, sure enough, it was completely different. Somehow I had not noticed when I made the reservation that the name had changed from the Ferryman's Grill, a fairly casual joint, to the Black Pearl Seafood and Chophouse, which is a white tablecloth joint with stratospheric, steakhouse-style prices. However the entire staff, apart from the manager, is still kids on summer break, not the 40-something veterans you'd find at a real steakhouse.
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Both our brains initially registered this motorcycle helmet in Port Jeff as a ball fender and we did a double-take. |
Louise's burger, ordered medium-well, came almost raw, and my chicken Cesar was overdressed and limp. The server knew nothing about the menu. At least they comped us for the burger and also a dessert once the manager got a glimpse of the under-cooked burger, but we'll not likely be back. There are plenty of better choices in this town, and the dinghy fee is the same no matter what.
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Miniature version of the P. T. Barnum at the ferry dock, I assume a parade float. The real ferry in the background is her sister ship Grand Republic, backing out. |
Monday morning I was up early to have coffee, tender ashore, tie up, and catch the 7:50 bus up the hill to the Staples, a procedure I ironed out last visit as we waited in Port Jeff for our yard visit. I was expecting two items from Amazon, but I already knew one was delayed and would miss us. It was a long morning to pick up ten bucks worth of Wago connectors. Any regrets I might have had about not waiting around another half day for the other item, a clamp for lifting the engine, were put to bed when it was later delayed yet another day, and as of this writing it's still not there.
With a half hour before my return bus I looped through Shop-Rite looking for beer, and picked up a few bagels at a place right next to the bus stop. I was back at Vector by 9:15 and we immediately decked the tender and weighed anchor to catch what little was left of the ebb on the sound. The sound was again calm and we had a nice cruise.
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I caught this suburban deer as we passed on the bus. Sorry, best framing I could get from the moving bus. I thought it was a statue when I first spotted it. |
We arrived to Mattituck Inlet at a tide of +3', which made it very comfortable to be exploring a new inlet known to be challenging. We had a Corps of Engineers survey from November of last year, which made it all pretty easy. The navigable channel is very narrow in a few spots, and at low tide we would have mere inches under the keel, but we had no issues and now we have a breadcrumb trail.
We were pleased to find the anchorage completely empty on arrival, save for a small runabout on a permanent mooring encroaching on the designated anchorage, which is clearly delineated by four spar buoys. We picked a spot right in the middle where we had good swing room for our 6' draft (map); by nightfall three more boats were sharing the anchorage.
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We snapped this photo of the Erin Miller in Port Jeff for our friend, Erin Miller. The boats behind her and alongside her were both with us on the hard at Derecktor Shipyard. |
I splashed the tender and went ashore to have a look around. I had been told the dinghy dock was free, but there is a brand new sign this season with pricing and QR codes to pay. The fee is for "one weekend," whatever that may mean in the context of arriving on a Monday. That's still a bargain, considering anchoring is free but the marina not even a hundred yards away is (gulp) $8.95 per foot, with a two-night minimum. That's a whopping $465 a night for Vector, and they don't even make the beds. Trash, bathrooms with showers, and a water spigot are provided at the park with the dock.
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New fees for the dinghy dock. They were putting larger floats in place while we were there. |
Love Lane, the main street downtown, comprises a little over one block of shops and restaurants. I found a nice, surprisingly well-stocked hardware store, a very nice high-end bodega, a couple of restaurants, and an LIRR station. The Village of Mattituck is in the Town of Southhold (as I have written before, NY political boundaries are byzantine), and it feels a lot like the other villages in Southold where we have spent quite a bit of time.
A little further along are a brew pub, which does not seem to be open much, and a high-end Italian place. I did not walk the next half mile to the big shopping plaza out on Main Road, which sports a supermarket, drug stores, and a couple more restaurants.
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Quaint downtown Mattituck. |
In the afternoon we got a video call from our friend Tim, who crossed the Atlantic last month on his sailboat s/v Paquita and is right now cruising Spain. He spent a lot of time pumping up how nice it is and that we need to go ourselves, lamenting we are not there together. I've been providing some remote support and troubleshooting for his electrical system over there, and so of course the call ended with me looking up circuit breaker specs. In the evening we returned ashore together for dinner at Love Lane Kitchen right in the middle of town, which was pretty good.
At 1:20am we were awakened by the weather alert going off, and we staggered upstairs to see if we needed to prepare. The radar showed a severe thunderstorm headed right for us, and so we pulled down all the outside covers and put out another 20' of anchor chain. Of course that made it miss us altogether and all we got overnight was a sprinkle.
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Lombardi's Love Lane Market. It smelled really good in here. |
Our friends Dorsey and Bruce have been hanging our in Block Island, and every morning we've been checking the forecast to see if we could make it across to join them, maybe staying through the 4th. Tuesday was no different, but this was really our final attempt. When the weather turned out, once again, to be uncooperative (and getting worse) we had to wave off the whole affair and decide we'd be stuck on the Long Island Sound side of The Race until after the holiday weekend.
With that there was no reason to rush out of Mattituck, and given how hard it was to get there, we decided to just spend another night. We then turned our attention, while we were in a town with a Walgreens, to filling a prescription that, due to a controlled substance, must be filled every 30 days, and which we last filled in Hampton, Virginia. I'm glad we took the day off, because this ended up being a two-hour ordeal.
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These buoys put to rest any concerns about anchoring in what looks like a turning basin on the chart. |
Half of that time was spent fighting with the phone tree and being hung up on by the local branch three separate times. We finally decided it best to just walk into the store and speak to the pharmacist in person, and so I took off solo and make the mile trek down to the shopping plaza. While the store in Virginia had told me on the phone that it was just a matter of the pharmacist in NY calling them to effect the transfer, I learned that NY law does not permit pharmacy-to-pharmacy transfers and the doctor would have to send a new script. And the med probably could not be here until after the holiday anyway.
As long as I was down there I went in to the Mattituck Market grocery store, which turned out to be very nice, to see if they had any beer I liked and to replenish the strategic cream cheese supply, which had been exhausted by the morning bagel deployment. On my way back home I stopped into yet another high-end mini-market, Center Cuts Two, which includes a nice butcher department — North Fork people apparently are real foodies.
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These breakers give us more flexibility in using the smaller cord. The minuscule breaker enclosure had no room to make the neutral and ground connections so I had to add a J-box below it. |
With parts in hand I spent the afternoon finishing up my electrical project in the engine room. This is to improve our ability to use 30-amp or 15-amp shore power when 50-amp is unavailable. We have a marina stay coming up this month where this will come in handy.
With the Italian place dark on Tuesdays, we decided to try the restaurant at the fancy expensive resort marina, Windamere. The restaurant web site said they had free dock-and-dine Monday through Thursday, but this was apparently news to the marina staff. They honored it, because it was on the web site, but by this morning they had taken it off. Dinner was fine, if overpriced, which seems to be the norm around here.
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We're going to miss this kind of absolute calm. A view of the anchorage toward the park, from our flybridge. |
This morning we finally had to come to grips with the fact that we had no concrete plan for the holiday weekend. It's a bad idea to be driving aimlessly or hunting for anchorages on a holiday, especially this one where they close off parts of waterways for fireworks. We spent the morning ruminating about heading to Peconic Bay and maybe Greenport or Sag Harbor, but we expect both to be crowded and we've been there a lot.
After spending some time with the chart looking at where we can get that would be protected, interesting, and still keep us behind the protection of Montauk Point today, we decided to cross over to the Connecticut side and poke into the Connecticut River at Saybrook. We've managed to miss it on every previous pass, so it will be something new. And who knows, maybe we'll take the river all the way to the head of navigation at Hartford.