August 27-29 -- Kingston to Catskill and Two Lay Days There -- 20 NM

Well the passage was our first with all good tide, making between seven  and eight knots instead of the five we had seen earlier. We did this by leaving Kingston at seven a.m. We woke at six (as usual for cruisers with hungry cats) and it was still raining when we left at seven. The rain cleared but it was a grey day. and we arrived in Catskill early in mid morning, well before expected. 
The current causes seaweed, well actually river lily pads, to clump up around the somewhat unique river buoys. Catskill was on our itinerary because that is where Dean and Susan dock s/v "Autumn Borne" each summer, after their winter cruises to Florida or the Bahamas.

They live aboard her year round and have no land base. But they do visit near Buffalo, where they used to live and work, for about a week each summer and their married daughter and granddaughter live in nearby Schenectady and watch their car for them during the winters. Dean is one of those saintly people who helps everyone even without being asked. I told him that I'm trying to restrict my "Dean calls" -- whenever something on ILENE does not work. He is an engineer who can talk me through restoration. A retired Vietnam vet who is brave and strong as well as knowledgeable. He is the kind of guy who  jumps onto other people's boats that are drifting to save them. We first met Dean and Susan while circling and waiting for the Ladies Island Bridge at Beaufort SC to open in the spring of 2012 and have met up several times since them. 

His universal helpfulness and friendliness is what made my blood boil when I heard what the powerboaters at the Hop-O-Nose Marina, seen in the next picture from ILENE, fifty yards across Catskill Creek, did to them.

Autumn Borne has had the same slip there each summer for the past thirteen years but they felt compelled to move across the Creek earlier this summer, to the Catskill Marina, where we stayed with them. He committed the unpardonable sin of supporting Joseph Biden on Facebook. As a result they ostracized Dean and Susan, placed them at coventry, shunned, refused to speak to and glared at them. They made this gentle man and his wife feel so uncomfortable that they had to emigrate across the Creek. It's disgusting, what cruelty the mindless Kool Aid drinkers will do in 2020.

What with rain we spent most of our time talking with our friends and eating with them, including my blueberry/mango buckwheat/sweet potato pancakes for breakfast. They took us with them to several local eateries in their car and shopping and we hung in the Marina's pool..

We also took a stroll into town to visit the local antique shops, book store, etc. and ended up acquiring the newest member of our small collection of bird statues, believed to be a sandpiper.

Any birders out there are invited to more accurately identify the newest member of our menagerie. 

Taking advantage of the first syllable of the town's  name, it annually auctions off for the community fund  a collection of one of a kind fiberglass cat statutes which are mounted in the streets before the auction.   

                                                                We had planned to spend only a day and a half (two nights) in Catskill, getting here on Thursday afternoon and leaving on Saturday morning to go five miles further north, under the last of the high bridges, the  Rip Van Winkle, to anchor at Athens New York and dink across to Hudson New York to meet our friend, Lianne, who lives in Great Barrington, and possibly her son Adam, his wife Anna and their sons Jude, 5, and Rowen, 2. We hoped to take them for a day sail on Saturday. But Saturday was forecast as a rainout so we stayed at the dock in Catskill Marina for the third night and Adam and family came for the day sail on Friday, from Catskill instead of from Athens on Saturday. It was a short cruise --  out into the Hudson and a mile downstream before it was time to head back up.

Jude is up on pirates so he had a vocabulary of nautical terms which we added to. He held the wheel for a while, as did Anna.  They had a good time but it was too short, only an hour and a half including the half mile each way slowly in the Creek, and the wind was not strong. We put up the main and small jib, but going upstream on the way back we needed the engine as we were making only one knot tacking back and forth in the channel against the tide. 

It turns out the rain held off until 7:30 on Saturday when we had a brief "frog drowner"so the change of the plan against Athens was not needed. Also, sadly, Lianne had to cancel her plans for diner with us.

There were several nice looking boats in this marina including canoe sterned, European looking "Tulla" next to us,

"Elenor,"a wooden gaff rigged sloop built in 1903 and restored recently after twenty years on the hard,

and Bill's "Second Wind", which frequently travels south with Autumn Borne.