We left Port Washington and moved up Long Island to Port Jefferson. We had a slow sail but we were in no hurry. The net morning we pulled anchor again and moved up the Sound to Old Saybrook CT. With light winds we were able to fly our spinnaker again. We picked up a mooring at the North Cove Yacht Club. They have visitors moorings and we are able to use one of the other moorings if the owner is gone. We stayed for a couple of days relaxing and sightseeing in the small town. Unfortunately the Katherine Hepburn Cultural Center was not open but we did find a bar for beers and burgers. From Old Saybrook we moved to to Mason Island and anchored for several days. Mason Island is the closest we were able to anchor Mystic CT home of the Mystic Seaport Museum. Marinas in this area are out of our price range so we anchored and dinghied into town. We skipped the museum since we had been there previously but checked out some shops including the marine consignment shop looking for good deals on things we don't need. I did buy a new pair of sailing gloves. We did pick up some pastries from a shop that is now famous for winning some cooking show, and yes they were delicious. We also skipped eating at Mystic Pizza, the inspiration of the movie with the same name staring Julia Roberts. The forecast was for rain the next couple of days so we hunkered down on the boat with one short excursion to shore to check out an old church and it's gardens. A lot of work was put into building the stone church and buildings and maintaining the many flower gardens. While waiting out the rain I took the opportunity to work on the watermaker. It had stopped making water and several years ago I had damaged one of the poppets while I had it apart. I had ordered replacements but never got around to replacing it. Once I had it apart I found the small spring I had damaged and replaced in Granada had rusted away. The original and the new replacements are stainless steel. Once back together everything seems to be working.
On Friday, the 6th we were ready to pull anchor and head to Newport when Cori got a phone call. Her Dad passed away suddenly and unexpectedly that morning. We needed to get back to South Dakota. We started back down the Sound looking for solutions of how to get back and where to leave Hi Flite. We checked many options and decided to check with the Yacht Club in Old Saybrook to use a mooring. They didn't have an opening but suggested we call Old Lyme Marina a little further up the river. We called and they had a mooring we could rent for a couple of weeks. While motoring to the marina we made arrangements for a rental car to pick us up and sorted out what to bring with us and what to leave. We packed everything up and when the rental car arrived we loaded up and started our drive. Cori made arrangements with her brother who lives near Richmond that we would pick him up and the three of us drive nonstop to South Dakota.
I won't go into detail but we spent two weeks with her family dealing with everything. This also gave us a chance to look at the property we had bought. A couple of weeks prior we had bought, sight unseen, ten acres of undeveloped property in the Black Hills. We had seen pictures and videos her sister had sent us but this was the first time seeing it in person. It is everything we had hoped for.
At the end of the two weeks we had to get back to the boat. There was a hurricane coming. It had been decades since New England had taken a direct hit from a hurricane and Henri was on a course to give us a direct hit. We moved to a different mooring to get better protection from the winds, took down the cockpit enclosure, took down the headsail and tied down the other sails. Everything we had learned from previous hurricanes in North Carolina. Now it was time to wait and see how bad it would get. The storm was forecast to hit Sunday during the day which is better than hitting at night. During the night Saturday the storm took a slight jog to the east and came in at Block Island and Newport instead. We just had some winds in the 20's with gusts in the 30's and a lot of rain. We had gotten very lucky. The marina had been kind to us by checking on Hi Flite while we were gone, moving us to a stronger more protected mooring and not charging us for the extra days. We cannot say enough about how great we were treated by Old Lyme Marina and staff. We will defiantly be back.
Once the storm was over we had decided to work our way back and find a place to put Hi Flite up for a couple of weeks over Labor Day while we go back to South Dakota. We were looking for a good weather window to get back to the Chesapeake. We had a couple of days to wait so we sailed across the Sound to Sag Harbor on Long Island. We spent a day sight seeing in Sag Harbor including the whaling museum. At this point we decided that instead of waiting several days for a weather window we would move back down the Sound and go through New York City and jump off from there. We moved out of Sag Harbor and spent the night at a small anchorage and the next day we made the long jump to Port Washington, a seventy mile day. The next day we toped off the fuel and water and made our way down the East River through NYC to an anchorage near the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. We spent the night and as the sun came up we started the trip to the Chesapeake. There had been some storms come through and the seas were a little rough but we had a good wind to sail with until it died in the afternoon. From then on we motored through the night. The next day, Monday, we continued motoring with the wind on the nose until in the afternoon the wind shifted and we were able to sail again. All was going well but we were getting warnings on the radio for severe storms. After dark we could see the clouds building and the lightning flashing. We decided to drop the mainsail and roll up the headsail and continue motoring. Soon we had lightning flashing all around us and the winds kicked up with gust in the 40's and sustained in the 30's with heavy rain. Once the front had passed it calmed down but the seas were getting rougher. As we were approaching the mouth of the Chesapeake the second wave hit us with sustained winds in the 30's on the nose and we were pounding into the waves with many of them breaking on deck. We managed to work our way into the harbor and when we started our turn north it stated to calm down. We were making a turn north instead of going to Norfolk because we had made arrangements to leave Hi Flite with friends off of the Bay up the Great Wicomico River. We continued the rest of the night and started up the river after sunrise. We arrived after fifty-one hours of motoring and sailing 303 nautical miles. We planned to anchor her out while we were gone but when we arrived our friends Tom and Sandy had us tie up to their dock while their boat is in the boatyard.
Cori's brother will be coming to pick us up and we will make the trip back to South Dakota and spend some more time with her family. When we return we will continue back to North Carolina where we will pick up the new mainsail we had ordered earlier.
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