Category: Summer 2023

For starters, we’re admitting up front that this post sucks.  We’ve been slow-playing things because we got down to the Chesapeake Bay a few days early but not enough days early to do anything noteworthy.  Plus we’ve been busy getting ready to head out west for three weeks.  But the blog is free, so we don’t expect an uproar.

Have we mentioned the heat and humidity yet?  It maybe hasn’t been quite as hot as Phoenix, but it’s also been as humid as someplace so humid you’d use it in a very exaggerated simile.  Just walking off the boat generated sweat that dripped into crevices where sweat shouldn’t go.**  But we’re of hardy stock, so we bravely carried on with all the important stuff we needed to do inside the air conditioned boat.

Anyway, from Rock Hall we popped down to Kent Narrows, which is a shallow and skinny strait that separates Kent Island from the rest of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The importance for us is that the narrows cuts hours off the trip to St. Michaels, albeit at the risk of getting stuck on a shoal or having current smash us into the bridge.  Before we reached the bridge, however, Narrows Pointe gave us a great one-night spot without boats or buildings blocking our view.  In the drone photo, we’re at the bottom left.

Although mostly we stayed on the boat so as to avoid near-certain death by heat stroke, at dusk things cooled down enough for a scooter ride along the most awesome Cross Island Trail.  We’re pretty confident that the people who put up the “No Motorized Vehicles” signs didn’t have small scooters with itty bitty electric motors in mind when they did so.

Friday night at bedtime—well into pitch-black darkness—a massive lightening storm lit up the sky like strobe lights at a nightclub.  We watched for about thirty minutes but then got sleepy because after all it was bedtime.  We’ve never seen anything like it though.  Multiple jolts per second.  Tesla coil-ish.  Crazy.

The other highlight of our brief stop was eating at the iconic Red Eyes.  Doug got a shirt.

The Kent Narrows Bridge in fact did turn out to be squeezy—and the funneling water did turn out to be churny—but we made it through.

Approaching The Town That Fooled the British, we bumbled into our second Chesapeake Bay Log Canoe Race.  Unfortunately, yet again we didn’t have a chance to buzz them with the drone.

About St. Michaels.  As previously documented, we love St. Michaels.  St. Michaels is near the top of our list.

And when you’re in St. Michaels, you get tacos or gazpacho at Gina’s, except for that one time when Gina was on vacation or something so it was closed and we were sad.

We do note one oddity, however.  For a town that revels in its history of thwarting British attacks, St. Michaels has an awful lot of flags honoring England flying around.***

We did a very poor job of documenting our stop at Herrington Harbour South, mostly because we did a poor job of doing much.  In our defense it was hot, humid, and rainy, and there’s not much around other than a very nice marina with a name that is spelled like it’s in Great Britain.  Or Canada.  On the way in we drove through a school of fish, however, and Dana got the best photo possible.  If you zoom in and look very closely you can see a few tiny smiley fish faces through the water.

Oh yeah.  We did find time to walk through the wedding venue at the beach, where we tooled around on a kayak and a paddle board, so there’s that.

Yesterday we cruised the whopping three miles to Herrington Harbour North, where Tumbleweed will await our return.  There’s even less to do up here, although here’s a photo of “Historical Village.”  That’s the sum total of readily-available information.  No signs saying “At this site George Washington once ate Indian Fry Bread.”  Nothing.  The four nondescript buildings don’t even look old.  But it’s all we got.

In theory, we need to be hustling down to Ft. Lauderdale to meet the ship that’ll be carrying Tumbleweed to new adventures in the Pacific Northwest.  Our insurance company, however, is a tad skittish about hurricanes and such.  Plus, we want to go to California to help the girls move.  Hopefully we’ll miss the storms and Zimmerman’s will get a few minor service items resolved.  The good news is that when we fire up the blog again in a few weeks, there’s no way future posts can be as lame as this one.

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*To honor the recently-departed King of the Parrotheads, we’ve littered the last couple of posts with Buffett lines like Florida laundry rooms are littered with jorts.  We’ll move on now, but if the Volunteers take down the lyin’, cheatin’, gang-bangin’ dirtbags from the cesspool that is Gainesville, Florida, this Saturday, we might work in a few more jort references.  Also, major props to Texas.  Nick Saban and Alabama fans being miserable always is something to celebrate.

**“Security isn’t a dirty word, Blackadder.  Crevice is a dirty word, but security isn’t.”  — General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett

***Only recently did we learn that the Union Jack is a combination of Saint George’s Cross (England), Saint Andrew’s Cross (Scotland), and Saint Patrick’s Cross (Ireland).   We previously just associated it with England.  Boy were we dumb.

Jimmy didn’t specify the ocean to which he was referring in “A Pirate Looks At Forty,” but we know from personal experience that the Atlantic can be a real mother.  Also, any trip that starts at 1:42 a.m. by definition promises to be miserable.  Whatever.  Just spin up the radar and keep the North Star off the stern.  The unexpected six-foot slow rollers weren’t too bad.  The day got even brighter after the sun came up through the big lens, which probably wasn’t coincidental.

Thanks to Dana’s expert planning, we rode a helpful current most of the trip, which eliminated a good sixty minutes of wishing we were there already.  Luckily we weren’t going too fast for the obligatory photo of Old Barney, although we were too far off shore for a good one.

Have we ever mentioned how much we dislike the Absecon Inlet?  The Absecon Inlet is no fun even if you time it properly.  Also, while we generally don’t mind Farley State Marina—after all that’s where we first bonded over fear with Second Wave—they didn’t have room because they were prepping for yet another boat show, which is why we spent a long Labor Day laboring to reach Cape May.  The point, of course, is that mentally giving Atlantic City the finger from two miles offshore on our way by absolutely was justified.

Fortunately, there’s this one particular harbor, so far but yet so near.  Almost exactly fifteen hours after slipping the lines at Atlantic Highlands we rolled into Utsch’s in Cape May.

Hey now!  Just like that we’re done with oceans for a good while.  Things are looking up.

Cape May is famous for its many Victorian homes.  This 1860 model is dubbed “Southern Mansion,” and “is set on one-and-a-half acres of award-winning gardens in Cape May’s historic district” according to the website we found.

Cape May also is famous for the cute downtown that has the cute shop where we always end up buying an item or two of apparel we technically don’t need.

Although we love Cape May and were damn happy to get there on Monday, summer decided to hit Tumbleweed with full vengeance, perhaps as karmic payback for three months of daily 70° screenshots Doug has been sending to buddies back in Phoenix.  So mostly we sat on the boat with air conditioners blasting until Wednesday morning, when we headed through the abandoned bridge that scared the crap out of us in 2018 but now we’re not sure why.

The Delaware Bay was teeming with huge ships, but with Buffett as the day’s soundtrack and a favorable current there was nothing but the oppressive heat and humidity to get us down.  Chewin’ on a honeysuckle vine indeed.

Getting from the east side of the bay to the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, however, did require some quick mental math: If Tumbleweed weighs 32 tons and is traveling at eight knots, and the 50,000-ton tanker Red Rum is a mile behind but closing at fourteen knots, when Tumbleweed cuts across her bow behind the two ships on a reciprocal heading, how much, if anything, will Mallory and Shannon inherit?

Normally through here we stop at Delaware City.  Great place.  Great memories.  Something must be up, however, because right now Tim and Delaware City Marina don’t seem very interested in customers.  No worries though, because we’ve always wanted to tie up at Schaefer’s Canal House.  We’ll just skip right over Delaware and go straight to Maryland.

The C & D Canal supposedly is one of the busiest in the world, which we don’t doubt.  Here’s the oddly-named tug McAllister Sisters towing over three hundred containers which may be empty or may be full of something or others.

Schaefer’s offered up a nice spot right in the artsy shadow of the Chesapeake City Bridge.

Ships carrying foreign cargo through the canal have to use local pilots, who get on and off without anybody slowing down.  On the Delaware Bay they need Delaware dudes, and on the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore north they need Maryland dudes.  Chesapeake City is the hand-off point.  Which is cool, because the pilot boarding Swift Ace did so right where we could watch.  How awesome is that?

Yes, dinner at the Canal House was delicious, and yes, we got a good sunset under the bridge.

Flawless day on the Chesapeake Bay today.  Sweet little six-hour ride down to Rock Hall.

Actually that’s not entirely true.  It was 95° with one million percent humidity.  Sticky.  Also, we’re back in the land of crab pots that generations of Maryland watermen have been setting out for the singular purpose of snagging one of our stabilizer fins.  And there’s a crap-ton of debris floating about, which stinks for the guy using the autopilot when he wants to be focused on football articles instead of looking up every five seconds.  If only there were more birds willing to mark the hazards for us.

Oh, and the coincidentally-named tug Rock Hall had the temerity to push barges into our path, which we sort of saw coming but at 7.5 knots were powerless to avoid so we had to slow way down for a good bit because the water was very shallow off the side of the channel where we foolishly pinned ourselves.  Grrr.

So basically the day only was somewhat flawless.  But some more birds welcomed us in to Rock Hall Landing, which made everything okay.

Our last time in Rock Hall we joked about it being the Rock Hall of Fame.  Since then we’ve been to Cleveland and visited the Rock Hall of Fame.  We now can confirm with certainty that the two are unrelated.

We also can confirm that we barely mustered the will to walk two hundred yards to the seafood joint.  Now that we’re back and have the ACs working overtime, we ain’t looking for more interesting stuff to add so we might as well wrap up this gem of a post and watch TV.  Despite all that weather funny business it looks like we’ll make Zimmerman’s on the 13th as hoped.

Wooo!  We’re not going to grow old and die in Croton-on-Hudson after all!  We may not survive the impending Atlantic Ocean run, but at least we moved.

A bit rougher on the Hudson than expected on Thursday, but certainly doable.  Past the urban Tarrytown Light and under the Tappan Zee Bridge.

We generally find ruins of all types interesting, and what’s left of the Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers is no exception.  Supposedly there’s a project—“The Plant”—with an absurdly ambiguous goal of “restoring and converting [the] former coal-burning power plant … into a home … where the world’s most innovative people will convene to imagine the impossible and invent the future.”  Riiiight.  That’s some impressive mumbo-jumbo right there.

Then past the Hudson Palisades and down to Liberty Landing.

The view from dinner was about as cool as it gets.

Although the moonlight view from our back porch was every bit as awesome.

We decided to check out the Liberty Science Center—finally—because it was close and because it’s home to the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium.  Largest one in the western hemisphere for anyone keeping track.

Sadly, it turns out we’re not science museum people any more.  It’s not the science—we love science.  It’s not the exhibits—we found some interesting ones.

The problem with science museums is that they allow in thousands of parents who seem completely unconcerned that their hopped-up-on-Dippin’-Dots offspring are running amok, wiping grimy fingers on every reachable surface and banging into those of us who don’t think it cute.  We aren’t complete curmudgeons, mind you.  We don’t blame the urchins and a few of them here or there would be perfectly acceptable.  But once they reach unsupervised critical mass, it’s a different story.

That said, the show about the Webb Space Telescope and the Artemis Program was awesome, so we discretely took some photos of the dome interior to sooth our senses, and then went to lunch.

Although we thoroughly enjoy the Manhattan skyline from the relative safety of Liberty Landing, we generally don’t cross the river.  New York City is crowded and dirty and intimidating to simple country folk like us.  Plus, we did all the touristy stuff in our pre-boating life.  We contemplated going over to a Broadway show this time but concluded that the crowds and the dirtiness and the hassles were too much for us.  But then we started craving cheesecake and someone said the best place is in Little Italy so we took a train and a ferry and a taxi and walked about four miles and ended up back at the boat with cheesecakes from Eileen’s.  Although all of that travel was pricey, we shrewdly spread the cost across a large number of them.

Today we headed down to Atlantic Highlands, because the next twenty-four hours look okay—not great, but okay—on the ocean.  Out of Liberty Landing we took the obligatory Statue of Liberty photo, although this isn’t it.  This is a photo of the rude rubberneckers in our way.  And no, we don’t find it at all hypocritical to complain about people getting in front of things we want to get in front of.  We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.

Back through the Verrazano Narrows, which means we’re done with New York.  Mostly we enjoy New York but we’ve gone from Clayton to The City and are glad to be south of her.  We have places to be.  Plus we do like Atlantic Highlands, although we barely had time for a delicious meal at the Thai place and ice cream and a drone flight and a sweaty 87° walk.

So that’s that.

If there’s a cranky tone to this post, it’s likely because we’re setting alarms for 1:30.  That’s A.M., not P.M.   Assuming we successfully get around Sandy Hook in the dead of night, hopefully we’ll reach Cape May some sixteen hours later.  That’s just gross, is what it is.

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*RIP Gram Parsons.  And RIP Jimmy Buffett.

Here we are, a full week after pulling into Half Moon Bay, with all of exactly zero nautical miles of progress to show for it.  Grrr.  We’ve adopted our buddy Jeff’s strategy of avoiding toilet bowls, however, and right now there are two of them predicted out and about off the east coast.

Although a week in Croton-on-Hudson promised to be a week of rank suckage, actually it turned out ok.  We knocked off some boat chores and the cute town has a bookstore and some good restaurants.

Things took a big upturn when Dave and Becky drove over for the afternoon.  It’s always big fun to catch up with them, even if Becky’s sense of the horizon is a bit slanted.

Sunday afternoon we awoke from our obligatory naps to a new temptation.  Actually a new Temptation, as in the 37-meter super yacht recently sold by the dude who served as CEO of Land’s End and Tommy Hilfiger, among other things.  This is our fifth time to Half Moon but we’ve never seen anything like this honker in here.  No offense to our pal Steve, but charter guests pay $80,000 per week and stop here?  Nut-jobs.  Rich, but nut-jobs.

The local Enterprise had a car we could rent, but only on Monday and Tuesday.  Hey now, this is promising.  We’ve done the Culinary Institute, Westpoint, Woodstock, Roosevelt’s House, and a winery, but let’s see what else we can find in upstate New York.

How about Sing Sing?  Lots of big names passed through here, with many of them expiring while seated in “Old Sparky.”  Albert Fish, Son of Sam, Lucky Luciano, and the Rosenbergs, for example, all were inmates.  Serial killer/rapist Father Hans Schmidt remains the only Catholic priest to be executed in the United States, although others may have deserved it.  One of us—but only one of us—felt the historical significance of the place justified a quick stop at the gate.

We’ve previously offered our general thoughts on “The Largest” this or “The Longest” that.  Often, things and places claiming world titles are silly.  But not always.  The “World’s Largest Cherry Pie” in Charlevoix, for example, is hokey.  That bridge in Poughkeepsie we walked across last post, on the other hand, isn’t hokey.  “The World’s Largest Kaleidoscope” in Mt. Tremper?  The absolute opposite of hokey.  It’s amazing.  They installed literal tons of precision-cut glass and mirrors inside an old silo, and put together amazing shows with narration and music.  One of the coolest things we’ve ever seen.

Basically you lie on the floor in the dark and look up at the dome while the show unfolds.  The photos we took may appear to be electron microscopy of colorful virus cells, but they’re not.  It’s inside The World’s Largest Kaleidoscope.  Incredible.

Newburgh is home to George Washington’s headquarters, from which he orchestrated much of the Continental Army’s final and successful push to keep British monarchs off our currency.  Supposedly it’s a great museum.  Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.  Of course.

Newburgh also once was home to Orange County Choppers, made famous through one of those dumb reality-TV shows.  Learning nothing from Icarus’s cautionary tale of hubris, OCC built a huge complex, only to lose it to the bank when said dumb TV show fizzled.  Now it’s closed seven days a week and grass is growing in the parking lot.  More pointedly, why is there an Orange County in New York?

When Google-mapping interesting places to visit, we spotted something called “Cornish Estate.”  We know quite a lot about Cornwall because we’ve finished the first season of Poldark, so were intrigued enough to hike through the Hudson Highlands State Park to check out the ruins.

The remnants of the old mansion and related buildings are cool enough, but seemingly without any connection to Ross or Demelza or the Wheal Ledger copper mine.  Instead, the property once was owned by Ed and Selina Cornish.  What a disappointment.

We’d planned to hike up past the ruins to an overlook with a breathtaking view of Storm King Mountain, but somehow New York botched the trail markers such that we ultimately gave up, returning to the car with only a view through the trees.

Actually, that’s more than anything named Storm King deserved from us.  Dave and Becky urged us to visit Storm King Arts Center—which consists of five hundred acres “including vistas, hills, meadows, ponds, stands of trees, allées, and walking paths, scaled to embrace both small- and large-scale works of art in a variety of mediums”—and got us all excited.  Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.  Of course.

The Village of Sleepy Hollow is famous for that night after the party when Ichabod Crane was chased by the Headless Horseman and disappeared by the wooden bridge with only his hat and a pumpkin left behind.  We stopped by.  The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at the Old Dutch Church is one of the more impressive graveyards we’ve visited, and not just because it has ghosts.

The wooden bridge by the cemetery isn’t the same one, of course, because the real bridge wouldn’t have survived for two hundred years and even more because the story is fictional.

We were so in the Sleepy Hollow mood that we drove out to see Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s historic home in Tarrytown.  Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and—because they were uncertain how long we might have the rental car—closed on Wednesdays as well.  Couldn’t even see anything from the road.  Of course.*

Fortunately for us the Croton Dam always is open.  As dams go, it’s hard to get much prettier.

Our plan now is to hop to Jersey City tomorrow, and then stage at Atlantic Highlands on the off chance it becomes safe to travel before we get old and the girls move us off the boat and into a Home for the Bewildered.  Either way, this quite likely is the last time we’ll visit Croton-on-Hudson so we’re glad we made the best of it.

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*At this point, judgmental people using a condescending tone might ask “Why don’t you research hours of operation before driving all over the state only to find places closed?”  The simple answer is those people should find a different blog.

Call us weenies, but we generally require pleasant uneventful cruising.  We’re not fans of pitching and rolling and stuff breaking.  No six-footers on the Atlantic Ocean for us.  So basically right now we’re stuck at Half Moon Bay Marina, potentially until we scuttle the boat for insurance money.

The next potential weather window is Labor Day weekend, but every marina between here and Miami is booked, because it’s Labor Day weekend.  Our best shot may be a 125-mile overnight run from Liberty Landing to Cape May next Friday, but that’s only marginally more appealing than the scuttling idea.

Since we’re just sitting around in the rain for a while, we might as well document how we got here.  Monday took us out to the Hudson River after leaving Waterford.  We’ve now cruised this river farther and more times than Henry Hudson himself, and unlike him we’ve made do without the help of blank charts or an astrolabe.  Dude only went as far north as Albany.  Never even made it to the Troy Lock.  What a coward.  We went through the lock for the third time, which basically means they should rename the river after us.  Then on through Troy, this time by water.

Albany probably looks different today than it did in 1609 when Hank and the Half Moon crew gave up there and turned around.

Or maybe it wasn’t the lock that scared Hudson off before he could get up to Burlington for some Ben & Jerry’s.  Maybe it was a vision of USS Slater, which is the only WWII destroyer escort that remains afloat.

Red barn?  Gotta take a picture.

Marine Travelifts—which as we’ve previously reported were invented in Door County, Wisconsin—won’t impress everyone, but at 820 tons of lifting capacity this bad boy is the biggest one we recall encountering to date.

We decided to stop at Shady Harbor instead of Coeymans, in part drawn by fond memories of the marina restaurant where we reunited with Forever Friday in 2019.  Except this time we stopped on Monday.  The restaurant is closed on Mondays.  Of course it’s closed on Mondays.  But everything turned out okay, because the courtesy car got us to a good place in nearby Coxsackie.  Which sounds like a dirty word but isn’t.

That little place in the back left with window curtains is a Yellow Deli.  The Yellow Deli people—technically the “Twelve Tribes”—are part of a cult founded by Gene “Call Me Yoneq” Spriggs in Doug’s hometown of Chattanooga.  They open these restaurants around the country as traps for the easily swayed.  Our waitress grew up in Coxsackie and said she avoids them because “they’re wacky and they beat their children.”  One outpost tried to recruit Mallory when she was on the AT, but she knows to be wary because she’s seen every episode of Forensic Files.

Tuesday morning brought an even better day, because (1) Chuck the Diver had cleaned out a hundred miles of fishing line and weeds that spooled up under us, and (2) we’re done with those famous low bridges so everything is back on the roof where it belongs.  And both the river current and the tidal current were with us.  Nice.

Here’s Coxsackie from the water.  Still not a dirty word.

New York may or may not have a law requiring anyone passing a Hudson River lighthouse to take a picture even if they’ve already done it several times in the past, but you can’t be too careful.  First up, the always picturesque Hudson Athens Light.

The Rip Van Winkle Bridge was named for, well, Rip Van Winkle.  Van Winkle was a slackard who got drunk with Hudson’s crew and passed out for twenty years—which hardly seems bridge-worthy—but it all happened in the Catskill Mountains so somehow that makes it acceptable to upstaters.

Speaking of the Catskills, here they are.  And speaking of Borscht Belt comics, Jackie Mason wasn’t funny.

We do love the Hudson River and the Hudson River Valley though.

The Saugerties Lighthouse was built in 1869 and now welcomes overnight guests as a B &B.  It’s probably nice inside, but we think it would make a much better showing if they removed the port-o-potty.

Here we see what remains of the Hutton Brick Works, abandoned decades ago.  Hutton’s claim to fame was supplying the bricks used to build the original Yankee Stadium.  Right nearby is a fancy-pants resort named Hutton Brickworks Retreat and Spa, but they screwed over a bunch of people after a flood in January so we didn’t stay there despite thinking the ruins are cool.

The day’s journey ended after hooking around the Rondout Lighthouse and finding the Hudson River Maritime Museum wall, followed by a delicious lunch in town.

The museum technically was closed, but the guy who handles dockage also works inside so he took us on a private tour.  The most interesting thing we learned is that Rondout Creek—which now is navigable for about a mile past where we tied up—was the end reach of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, used from 1828 to 1902 to ship Pennsylvania coal to New York City.  108 miles.  108 locks.  Crazy.  Those folks must’ve gone through lots of gloves.  Much other cool historical stuff in there as well.

How much fun can it be to go sailing without any personal space?  The correct answer is none.

This hulk is what’s left of a New York City floating hospital.  Hard to imagine it ever meeting even pre-historic cleanliness standards, which may be why they stopped using it.  In 2008 someone towed it to Kingston to be turned into a photography studio.  Yeah, that probably ain’t happening.

The Esopus Meadows Light—the last standing wooden lighthouse on the Hudson and the final stop on our lighthouse safari—is on the edge of shallow mud flats “where cattle once grazed.”  Definitely a good idea to cruise by on the correct side of this one.

We’ve been through here so many times that it’s hard to find stuff we haven’t previously dissected.  But we did find a few things that stand out when traveling south for the first time.  Like this castle-looking place.

We looked it up.  The Mount Community is “an intentional community of families and singles” who are sort of like Amish, except they have ornate crenellations on the “Academy.”  According to their website, “Anyone who has decided to become a member freely gives all property, earnings, and inheritances to the church community.”  Which sounds a lot like the Yellow Deli.  Often the main distinction between a church and a cult is the quality of their compound.

We pass under so many bridges that we basically ignore them, which means sometimes we miss something.  Like the old railroad bridge at Poughkeepsie.  We paid it no mind—including the time we stayed in Poughkeepsie—until we looked it up last summer.  At 1.28 miles, “Walkway Over the Hudson” is The World’s Longest Elevated Pedestrian Bridge, and apparently a big deal.  Better stop and walk that sucker.

On the way back from the bridge we stumbled across this plump fellow, who doesn’t look like he would chuck much wood even if he could but does look like he would bite.

The only bad thing about an unscheduled Walk Over the Hudson was that our careful plan to ride the current was for naught.  By the time we got moving again the tide literally had turned, and not in a good way.  But at least there still were things to see.  Like a cool old boat house.**

And Bannermans Castle, which still advertises the original owner’s military surplus business although the words on the wall are increasingly hard to make out.

Oh, and boats.  We passed some boats as well.

Maybe it’s just coincidental, but a few short miles from the big “Bannermans Island Arsenal” sign lies the United States Military Academy at West Point.  West Point looks about the same heading south as it does when you look behind you heading north.

That brings us back to being stuck in Croton-On-Hudson.  A nice enough place for a night or two, but not for a week.  At least it’s almost football season.

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*RIP Meatloaf.

**The old boat house shouldn’t be confused with the old goat house, where Sophie stashed all three of her dads to hide them from Meryl Streep, who in a strange twist also played Sophie.