A day of interesting sailing. This screen shot from our chart plotter tells the story. I’ve marked Charles Island with a red “A” near the NE corner of the display.
ILENE is the white boat in the center of the five-mile concentric black range rings. She is heading a bit south of west. The dotted line from ILENE to the blue box with an “X” toward the left is the course to the waypoint, which is a buoy about about two miles from the orange “B” I marked at the extreme left - Zieglers Cove. So our passage was from “A” to “B” but not a straight line.
Serge taught me how to make Gypsy Jake a “buddy boat” so not only does his triangle, about five files directly behind me (down below the “A”) appear at his position on the chart, but her name appears above it. This only appears when Serge has his Automatic Identification System (AIS) turned on. The other green triangles are other boats, not all of them, but those broadcasting AIS. ILENE has only passive AIS, because I don’t like to spend money and dreaded hooking up another electronic component. We receive the triangles of broadcasting boats through our cockpit VHF radio, but ILENE cannot transmit so no triangle appears on Serge’s screen.
The blue lines leading from the bow of each boat shows its course over the ground and, the length of the blue lines represent each boat’s speed; the end of the blue line is where that boat will be in one hour. None of the other boats shown appear on courses coming close to a collision with ILENE. (When that happens the green triangles flash red and a beeper would sound, except that in LI Sound there are so many other boats that the beeper becomes a frequent distracting noisemaker so I have turned the audible warning off; it is useful in the ocean.) GJ is making better than 5 knots, based on the length of its blue line. . ILENE, the star of her own show, has a darker bolder blue line with “6.1” in an arrow at its tip, signifying that she was making 6.1 knots.
Behind ILENE is a thin lavender (or maybe pink?) line showing her track: where she has been, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs. There are so many tracks that I have identified today’s with thin black pencil marks just beside and below it, showing a big curve, first south and then curving slowly to west. And that curve is part of the story. We were sailing as close to the wind as we could to keep up speed. Coming out from Charles Island our track was a bit east of south, with the wind coming from 45 degrees off our starboard bow, from a bit south of SW. The curve occurred as the wind clocked gradually, a bit at a time to more from the west. As we got to the north shore of long island we would have had to tack 90 degrees and sail a lot more northerly - back to Connecticut - rather than west. But then the wind died so we started motoring to our destination for a while. But before this screen shot was taken, the wind came back. There is an “11” in a tear shaped symbol below and to the left of ILENE. This is not accurately calibrated but says that the wind is blowing toward us from the direction the tear is pointing and at 11 knots.
At this point we are still motoring and heading south of the shortest distance along the dotted line to the waypoint. I did this to give us room when the wind came up, to sail to the waypoint. The wind did come up, BIGtime, to twenty knots from just a bit west of due south, resulting in a great sail the rest of the way to Zieglers. That cove is well protected from winds from that direction. Here is the lighthouse at the western entrance to Norwalk Connecticut.
After a swim we cooked an informal dinner for ourselves and Serge and Julia on ILENE, based partly on what was left over. The change from Mattituck to Duck Island on Day 3 had one negative consequence: failure to reprovision at Mattituck meant we had a canned vegetable for dinner, beets, Harvardized. Our last meal with our new friends because tomorrow we head for home.
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