June 28 -30 -- The End of Our Time with Sammie

6/28 -- I toured the furthest inward clockwise bay of Oyster Bay by dink with Sammie at the helm. Amazingly, on a Sunday morning close to July Fourth there were ZERO boats at or near the northern (beach) end -- where our Club has celebrated so many large memorable rendezvous -- and only about four boats in the entire western bay! That's the virus effect. There were some cars in the parking lot though.

The gentle eleven mile passage took 3.25 hours, mostly with low rpm motor and mainsail into light starboard headwinds. But for perhaps one hour near Connecticut we were under sail alone, moving toward Zieglers Cove at about one knot  --  because the engine died. The smaller rear fuel tank we had been drawing from since launch was empty of usable fuel. During the hour I switched tanks and bled air from the fuel line. Lene helped in this regard, pouring diesel from a small plastic cup into the bleeding hole while I pumped away at the small, impossibly located hand lever. (I raised a blister on the side of my thumb in the process. I need to get a thumb cover for the next time.) Sammie maintained a lookout for other boats and that we remained on track.
Ziegler’s Cove is a bit tricky to enter due to an unmarked channel guarded by rocks on both sides, those to the east being underwater. But it’s quite easy with the Raymarine Multifunctional GPS display. The thin purple lines on the screenshot shows ILENE's track into the Cove from the lower right past the two rocks that I have marked with a red pencil. Toward the top, the red horizontal line marks the "cliff" we aimed for, though the photos below show that while rocky, the cliff is not a high one.. ILENE's second stop is shown by the white "ship" shaped diagram with concentric rings (giving the scale of the place. The first such ring is 1/16 of a nautical mile from the boat, about 376 feet, but as can be seen much of its area is yellow (land) or darker blue (shallow water). The two red circles near the cliff have jagged purple lines showing how ILENE moved about getting to and while "hunting"on her anchor, to the right and a mooring to the left. The "14" in the upper right is our depth at that point in the tide cycle, and the dark blue arrow from the boat pointing to the lower right says our speed over the ground is our drift to the SE at one tenth of a knot. Lots of information available.

1. 

The small beautiful well protected cove was literally full of motorboats at every one of its 28 moorings. by my count. So we anchored for the afternoon outside the Cove proper, in twelve feet of water, under the cliff-like northern wall. But with potentially violent thunderstorms predicted, that was not a good place to spend the night. I predicted that some of the powerboats would be leaving. We had towed the dink, because of the short distance with light winds, and Sammie and Lene explored the Cove, during which they found a good empty mooring. They returned, put Lene aboard to help me, and Sammie went back and held onto the pickup stick of the vacant mooring while we raised anchor, and motored over and moored. Sammie and I explored nearby Scott Cove, off to the right -- bigger but rock strewn and shallow, good for the dink which draws 1.5 feet, but not for ILENE’s 5’ 10”.
In late afternoon the thunderstorm did come with lots of announcing noise and a short torrential rain, but winds were moderate. Several hours of light intermittent rain followed. The cold front pushed out the heat. Dinner aboard -- there are no restaurants or any other commercial services of any kind in the Cove -- was followed by card playing and a good night’s sleep.
My prediction that some of the power boats would be leaving was an underestimation; ILENE was the only boat to spend the night in the Cove. Here are views of the Cove from the mooring in the morning, looking in, looking out and of the "cliff".

The only negative about the Cove is the poverty of its WiFi signal.

Monday morning, Sammie finally got to taste my sweet potato-blueberry-mango pancakes that Lene had bragged about so much. Sadly, she is not a fruit person and did not like them, a first among the many folks who have had them.

I raised and drained the dink with Sammie’s help and we got underway for the  mile passage from Zieglers  back to the Harlem. But I made a mistake in figuring that the wind would be too light and from behind us to do much good. I put out the Genoa, on a lark, and was too lazy to take it in, head into the wind and raise the main. So we were under Genny and engine most of the way home, with only a short interval without the engine. I "wasted" a sailing passage. Once out of the Cove and headed home, the apparent wind was on our port side but after a while it was to starboard and stayed there. Auto steered easily and I whipped about fifteen line ends, mostly short stuff, looking up from time to time. We passed a bunch of kids learning how to race sailboats

and several fields of lobster pot buoys, a rarity in western Long Island Sound in recent years.

The afternoon was devoted to a car tour of some of Manhattan's many sights, down the length of Central Park's east side and Times Square, etc. They shopping for dinner at home, laundry and dinner with Ken and Mendy with more card playing, which I opted out of -- more fun to fold the laundry. 

On the final day of the three we dropped Sammie of at Laguardia with a bag of warm New York bagels and half a dozen good books, and returned to the boat for a day of paperwork interrupted by several rainstorms and joyously interrupted by visits, by dink, between the rainstorms, first by Bennett and his friend Jess (who we met at his birthday party a week before) and then by David and his daughter, Katya, who gave us a water purifier for ILENE. Thanks, Dave!