Passage West

Lotus
Fri 8 Oct 2010 23:39
Time was marching on and so it seemed were the seasons, Autumn was definitely upon us with cool Northerly winds and overcast skies.  At least this made it possible for us to sail south.  The predominant south-westerly winds would have made progress much slower and more difficult.  So we had to move when the wind came and so made our way down to the Cape Cod canal and overnighted in Buzzards Bay once more: this is the gateway to Long Island Sound and we were soon overnighting in some old haunts with a couple of new ones thrown in for good measure.  At one anchorage John asked me where we were so he could look up the phone number of a local marina as we needed gas.  Having made contact they put him in touch with a local hardware store who in turn gave him directions from the dingy dock, with the empty gas cylinder he set off on his mission only to find after 20 mins of wandering round the town, confused by his inability to find any of the landmarks described on the phone that he was actually in the wrong place as I'd told him the wrong town.  Ever resourceful he let himself be kidnapped by two elderly brothers who looked like zztop band members after helping them load lawn mowers and chain saws into their pickup (they had a small landscape gardening business), they took him on a very round about journey to the gas depot in the next town.  He only once thought that they were going to sell him into white slavery!
 
Fully refuelled we made swift progress towards New York doing very little other than sail, anchor, sleep and sail, with a little bit of eating in between.  At one point we thought we'd been blown miles off course and had been swept down to the Gulf of Mexico as one morning upon looking out of the boat we saw a huge group of Mexicans (who seem to make up 50% of the local labour market) on a fishing trip; the Vietnamese boat people would have had more space on board.
 
 
We also saw some strange architectural anomalies, whether some of the aforementioned Mexicans were trying to get a foot on the housing ladder, we couldn't tell, but we shared one anchorage with this floating monstrosity.  Whilst the picture doesn't show it very well, the house was listing to port quite severely, it was poorly moored and wandered about as the tide came in and out, at least this made for a completely different view at different times of the day, as it faced in every direction at some stage of the tidal cycle..
 
Our persistence soon had us arriving in the big apple once more, New York that is, not a local cider farm and we soon found ourselves cycling the streets of the big city once again.