It’s always sad to say goodbye to Block, but after breakfast we slipped the lines and headed for Fishers Island. It was an easy sail in variable breeze, and we were in no rush – we were still very much on island time.
Chris picked a beautiful anchorage in East Harbor, which was quieter than the West Harbor anchorage we usually visit. I FINALLY broke out the hammock and spent some time being gently rocked by wake as I read (and the hammock works SO much better on Windara!). We had dinner at sunset and stayed on deck to watch the moon rise red over the anchorage and see the Milky Way.
We got moving relatively early, just as the last of the Vineyard Race boats were coming back through The Race. I took the first watch, partly because I was feeling lazy and the forecast called for no wind. It turned out that the forecast was very wrong. We saw high teens/low 20s all day and Windara ate it up. We don’t get to go upwind very often, and it was great to get some practice hand steering and feeling the velocity shifts.
We knew Windara could out-point Silent Sky, and we knew she was fast. But sailing her on Long Island Sound, in waters we know so well, was a real eye-opener as to how incredibly well she performs. Given that we were on a beat, I expected Long Sand Shoal to be a tackfest, but we easily cleared it in a single tack… and kept carrying that tack all the way almost to the Thimbles. Not only did we pass the back few boats of the racing fleet, we did a horizon job on most of them. We were neck-and-neck with Sawtooth, finally letting them pass as we needed to peel off to head into Huntington Bay. We anchored in Northport and took care of a few things ashore the next day before heading out to meet our friends Charles and Nancy on Rushmore.
We planned to pick up the club mooring in Lloyd Harbor, but because it was the long weekend and the Lighthouse MusicFest had been the day before, the harbor was a mess of raft-ups and one of the other club boats was already on the mooring, so we changed plans and anchored up at Price Bend. Unfortunately there was too much wake for us to raft up (which we learned the hard way), but we spent the afternoon/evening hanging out on Windara and had them over for breakfast in the morning. Getting to spend time with good friends is one of my favorite things about cruising life and it was the perfect way to wrap up our summer cruise.
We were going to race each other home, but there wasn’t enough wind to bother. After they left, I broke out the hammock for a bit, and we even hopped in for a quick (brisk) swim before we headed home ourselves.
As we were about to enter the channel to head back to Huguenot, Chris noticed a sister ship, Hamburg II, heading the other direction, so we turned around to say hello. Of course they knew our boat and her previous owners. Given that there were only 35 J/46s made, it was cool to find a sister ship in the wild.
Now that we’re back from our vacation, it’s time to kick boat work season into high gear!
