Watch Hill

Sunday, July 31:  We woke to a cool, crisp morning with light wind and blue skies.  It is supposed to get to the upper 80s later.  After breakfast, Ted went for a long swim over to a rock pile jutting out of the water near our boat, Sheila read a book, and I worked on my blog.

We have a short distance to go to meet up with Stephanie & Lance on MerSea at Watch Hill, RI, this afternoon, so we can afford to spend a leisurely morning here in Fisher’s Island harbor.

After lunch, we weighed the anchor and set out NE across Long Island Sound for Watch Hill.  The wind had come up from the south to about 12 kt and gave us a nice reach under sails, alone.  There were lots of boats in the Sound, going every direction imaginable.  We had to keep a sharp lookout for crossing situations.  We also had over a knot of following current, which helped us make good time.  It was a glorious day to be on the water.

Stephanie had arranged a mooring ball for us through the Watch Hill Yacht Club.  As we approached the harbor, we called the club on the VHF to get a mooring assignment.  In a few minutes, we were securely tied up to the mooring.

 

MerSea was moored just a few boats away from ours.  The next thing we knew, here comes Stephanie rowing over in her dinghy to welcome us to Watch Hill.  We invited her aboard and after chatting for a while, we spent a few minutes discussing our plans for the rest of this cruise together.

Stephanie said she had a friend that has a little cabana within sight of our boats and they had invited us over for happy hour at 5:30.  We considered this for about 2 seconds and quickly accepted this gracious invitation!

The cabana couldn’t have been more than eight feet wide, but had a great view of the ocean out the front and of the harbor with all the moored boats out the back.  We enjoyed meeting and chatting with Stephanie’s friends and the great happy hour spread they laid out for us.  While we were there, we looked out on the ocean side just before sunset and saw two large classic schooners going by under full sails. 

The three of us, plus Lance and Stephanie then went out to dinner at the Olympia Tea Room and had a nice time catching up on our separate journeys up to this point.