Cruising is essentially ending the day in a different port from where you set out. It’s that simple to define. ILENE cruises every year. She and we love it, and most of our cruises are much longer than the current eight days and we normally sail alone, subject to occasionally meeting up with old friends and making new ones in the ports visited.
Club Cruising is cruising in company with boats from home; so it requires a minimum of two boats. It involves compromises among the participants, more planning and less flexibility. But the trade off for these inconvenience is the friendships it creates. The first year that I joined the Harlem, more than 30 years ago, I took my little Pearson 28 on the 16 day Club Cruise. I was like the new kid in class; the participants on the other boats were all strangers to me when we set off — but became friends. In those days they helped me a lot more than I helped them and taught me the sailing ethic: help other sailors! We had our common interest in boating, and the time together permitted that initial common interest to grow into friendship. But time, with the aging process and other circumstances have taken those friends from sailing and in some cases from this world. And new converts to the love of cruising have been hard to find. Most sailors these days prefer either the thrills and adrenaline rush of competitive racing, or just hanging out in their mooring and day sails.
This year our neighbors on City Island, the City Island Yacht Club, offered to cruise jointly with us and despite this the number of participants has proven to be quite small. Only two boats, “ILENE” and “Gypsy Jake” (Serge and Julia), are planning to go the circuit, representing the Harlem and the Morris Yacht Clubs on City Island. For this first day, “Restless”, sailed by Roger L. who chairs the cruising committee of the City Island YC joined us, making us three boats, one from each of the three clubs on the western side of the Island. Several others boats plan to join us for a few days out on the cruise or toward its end on a “maybe” basis. Problems of vacation time scheduling (for the un-retired as I call them), of crew, of boat mechanical problems and of family emergencies sadly forced others to scratch.
We each got underway at the time of our own choosing in the late morning and the only problem was lack of wind on this hot and sunny day. What wind there was came from where we had come from, reducing apparent wind with its propulsive and cooling properties. Yet each boat sailed on broad reaches or wing on wing for substantial periods of time, before giving up the day’s dream and powering. For example, ILENE was underway about 4.4 hours, but with engine on only 2.2. The rest of the hours we were “speeding”along at about two knots over the ground, with average boat speed for the 19 mile track of 4.5 knots. Normally we go faster on passages by using sails, motor or both, but we all made it to our destinations by 4:45, except Roger L. on Restless, who took advantage of a bit of late afternoon breeze to sail a bit more, at the entrance to Oyster Bay
We anchored with sixty feet of snubbed chain about a hundred feet from Gypsy Jake. Restless, who was sailing solo, his crew having abandoned him, took a mooring of the Sagamore YC. We shared our dink with Serge and Julia, met Roger L. at the dock, and walked perhaps half a mile to Autentico, a restaurant none of us had ever patronized before. Good innovative Italian cuisine: Serge, Julia, Lene, Roger K. and Roger L.
It was on the dink ride home that the problems emerged. The first was that the tide had dropped so far at the dock where they had directed us to tie up that the outboard stopped us on a low underwater cable of some sort. Not a significant problem: we tilted the outboard out of the water, paddled fifty feet and then resumed with the outboard. We had caused the other problem, earlier, because neither boat is yet in mid season form: failure to light our respective anchor lights not only made us liable in the unlikely event that another boat hit us, but made our boats hard to find in the dark. An extra fifteen minute dink ride in the darkness. It was cool, relatively, out there. Tomorrow: Port Jefferson.
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