Newport redux

We are underway westbound from Rhode Island, headed for Long Island Sound. We had a lovely three days in Newport, with good fall weather and calm conditions. Our new FlopStopper arrangement is working well, and we deployed it right after dropping the hook off Ida Lewis Rock (map), where our preferred spot was open when we arrived at 2:30.

Sunset over Newport Harbor from our anchorage.

We had watched the great post-Labor Day exodus on Marine Traffic, but we were still taken by how much emptier the harbor was than when we left six weeks ago. We saw plenty of available moorings on our tender ride ashore for dinner at The Smokehouse. As we approached Bowen's Wharf we could see the temporary docks already being built out for the Newport Boat Show that starts a week from now.

Tuesday after fueling the tender I landed at the Ring Park dinghy dock and had a nice walk around the neighborhood. At dinner time we tendered to Long Wharf and met up with good friends Dorsey and Bruce at Brick Alley Pub. We always have such a good time with them.

This bench is alongside St. Augustin Church.

Yesterday I dropped Louise off at the Elm Street dock, which is now sporting a 20-minute limit sign, new since our visit in July, where Dorsey picked her up to run errands. Dorsey also dropped off a pair of charge controller from Bruce for my upcoming solar project, and of course I ran right back home to learn all I could about them.

Rochambeau.

In the afternoon I tendered over to Newport Neck and had a walk around the outside of Fort Adams and down to Sail Newport. As always, the area around the fort was gearing up for some sort of weekend festival, and prep was underway for a sailing race.

The small basin north of the fortification is lined with granite blocks. Something once tied to the iron ring embedded in this one pulled hard enough to move the block out of line. Not these lightweight docks.

We ended the day with Bruce and Dorsey at Harbour Court, the former gilded-age mansion of the Brown family that is now the Newport home of the New York Yacht Club, with a storied history here. To paraphrase Billy Joel, we might have been laughing a bit too loud, but we managed to make it all the way through dinner and a couple bottles of wine without being thrown out. We put our yacht club burgee on the dinghy before landing there.

The spectacular view from the NYYC, taken from one of the few places photography is permitted on club grounds.

It was a great three days, and we could have stayed longer, but our weather window was either today or sometime at least a week from now. And as much as I would have enjoyed seeing the boat show, especially since we already had a primo spot in the anchorage, we want to have enough time for both our boatyard stop and some enjoyable time in NY before the onset of winter pushes us south.

We would have decked the tender last night for our early start this morning, but we wanted to leave the FlopStopper deployed overnight, and loading the tender would have meant retrieving and re-deploying it, so we just left it all for this morning. We had a great push with the ebb out of the harbor, and seas are calm, but the price we will pay for beating the weather this afternoon is to claw our way through Fishers Island Sound with over a knot and a half against us.

Vector in the harbor as seen from the old stone pier. Those enormous cranes behind her are actually part of a ship, we think to service wind farms.

Tonight we'll be anchored somewhere off the north shore of Fishers Island, and then we'll be in the somewhat protected waters of Long Island Sound. We'll take a week or so working our way west to Derecktor Shipyard, where we will have some paint touch-up done and fabricate a rack for some solar panels.