Travelogue

It’s open season for sail now, and we are initiating the summer with a sail to Eastern Long Island Sound.  Our next stage of summer sailing will be Narragansett Bay and the Cape, and our final sailing grounds will be Penobscot Bay area of Maine.  I always provision the boat with lots of projects, so I will continue to post about weaving, knitting, and spinning.

Middle Ground: literally halfway in the sound,both East/West and North/South.  We are headed for Mattituck Inlet, near the Hamptons on LI

We were virtually alone on the water Friday!  We saw one tug pulling a barge, but we did see lots and lots of helicopters heading out to the Island.  Some people still have enough money to travel in style!

Entering Mattituck Inlet, a long narrow inlet with lots of interesting bird life.

 

After anchoring and preparing dinner during sunset, we spent the next day ashore, taking a 2-mile walk to a local winery which took us through a neighborhood of modest, lovingly maintained houses and gardens (rhodies and lilacs in bloom).  We bought cheese at a local shop and had it for lunch with wine on the deck of the tasting room, amidst a Mediterranean style garden (pinks and nepeta in bloom and buds on the lavendar) overlooking the vineyard.

Goats at a small residence on our way to Shinn Vineyard.

 

 

 

Sod farm barn across the street from the entrance to Shinn Vineyard

 

 

 

 

Shinn Vineyard, the only bio-dynamic vineyard on the Island at present

 

 

Water front activities
We’ve seen lots of ospreys and babies in the nest (is there a name for a juvenile osprey?).  One interesting sight was a particularly aggressive osprey who chased an egret in flight all around the harbor.  The next day that same osprey chased a little plover all over the sky.  I’ve never seen an osprey do that.  Motoring back out of the inlet we saw a bald eagle sitting in a tree, and an osprey sitting on her nest with two swans in the water right below her.  Such bucolic sights!