We are docked at the Steel House restaurant, on Rondout Creek in Kingston, New York (map). The waterfront here and for several blocks west is historic; west of Broadway it is so designated by the Park Service as the Rondout-West Strand Historic District. The town here was once called Rondout and has also been known as The Strand, both derived from old Dutch words (the former an unfortunate mis-transcription of a word for fortification, and the latter derived from the word for "beach").
We're here because our guide said this restaurant had a free dock for their dining patrons, and an overnight stay was permitted. The guide also said the restaurant was closed Mondays, so we were glad to be arriving on Tuesday. After we tied up around 3pm, however, we learned the restaurant is now also closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Some reviewers had indicated that staying when the restaurant was closed was OK, so we decided to just stay put and find someplace else in town to eat.
That ended up being Savona's Trattoria, on Broadway, which was quite good. On our way we passed the New York Trolley Museum, which offers rides on the weekends, and the Hudson Maritime Museum, where we saw a century-old McAllister tug boat. After dinner we strolled around the historic district a bit before returning to the boat.
Hudson-Athens Light from the Hudson side. Folks from the Preservation Society are hard at work on this fine day.
We are once again in a beautiful section of the river. Yesterday's cruise took us past Hudson and the other side of the lighthouse there, as we opted to come down the main channel in this direction. Approaching Saugerties Light from the north we observed many folks out for a swim, and reckoned it to be the local swimming hole -- it was crowded with bathers northbound, too, but on a nice weekend we thought they may have arrived from elsewhere by boat or car.
The ebb gets progressively stronger as we move downriver, and yesterday we clocked over eight knots, for a time, at our usual slow pace of 1,500 RPM. We made the whole 30 nautical miles in just four hours. Today we'll need to shove off at 10am, just past high tide, to have a favorable current for the next leg, most of the way to West Point.
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