ArgoKnot

ArgoKnot
A journal of my weaving, spinning, and knitting life
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Author name: ozweaver

Migration

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 The lovely sights in Chesapeake City….

Do you think they bought that red car to match their front door?

 We are starting to see lots of migrating birds, and it seems to me that this year we are migrating with them.  Each day that we haul anchor in the morning we are accompanied by the honking song of Canada geese in their V-formations, and as we travel south we find monarch butterflies alighting on Pandora for short breaks before fluttering away.

The bird life here is extensive!  In the Sassafras River we were exploring the coast line, and we startled two blue herons off their nest!  What a beautiful sight to see them take flight right in front of us!  We had not noticed the nest because it was well hidden in a ‘bog’ of lotus!  We have never seen lotus growing in such a temperate climate before.  It looks like it has become rather invasive in the Sassafras River, and we wondered if the lotus will soon take over… I guess only time will tell.

 We have been sailing along with three other boats since Cape May….not on purpose….but each day that we travel we see them sailing too.  For several nights we’ve ended up in the same harbor, so naturally we’ve gotten together to re-hash the day and talk about where we’re heading.  I know this is quite a common occurrence for boats heading south. Perhaps we are becoming a different kind of migrating flock!  We saw Banyan, a 40 ft Juneau, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Cape May with David and Alex (short for Alexandra) onboard.  In Chesapeake City we first saw Peregrine, a 42 ft. Catalina, with Dave and Libby on board with their dog Brody.  And also in Chesapeake City we stumbled on Rick and Julie Palm, who live aboard Altair, a larger version of  Pandora, and whom we met briefly a few summer ago in Maine.  We have formed our own very loose flock and have decided to explore the Chester River together over the next few days.  We will see both Banyan and Peregrine at the SSCA seminars that will take place in Camp Letts at the end of next week.

So I am settling into life aboard…. coffee and knitting in the mornings.  I have finished the shawl and should have posted photos days ago.  I have now started a little baby sweater for the brand new granddaughter who arrived last week to join the family of my oldest childhood friend.  And earlier this week I made ‘poolish’ which will become my ongoing sourdough starter for bread while the weather remains cool enough to bake.  I made the first loaf yesterday, and it was a success!  I will make another loaf today since there is more poolish ready to use now.

Swatch for "Shadow Baby" sweater

I am feeling the pangs of homesickness, but it is balanced by the joys of living is this soft southern landscape.  We’ve seen a number of bald eagles since arriving in the Chesapeake, and yesterday we saw one shag a fish right out of the water and rise into the blue sky with  his/her catch!  It was dramatic!

Day 8, September 18: Lay Day in Chesapeake City (#29)

Day 9, Sept. 19:  Chesapeake City to the Sassafras River (#29 – 31)

Day 10, Sept. 20: Sassafras River to Rock Hall (#31 -34)

Day 11, Sept. 21…..we’re not entirely sure yet!  We will walk into Rock Hall today for some provisions, and then we’ll think about sailing up the Chester River to Chestertown….

Destination: Vulcan’s Rest

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Have I mentioned that the main reason I agreed to doing the New Jersey coast was so that I could stop at the weaving store called Vulcan’s Rest in Chesapeake City? I kid you not that I was willing to endure almost any sailing conditions to get there, and luckily I made it there with almost no trauma!

Day 6, Sept. 16: Atlantic City to Cape May (#25)

Finally, a zephyr!  We motored most of the day down the coast of NJ, and I actually got to knit a fair part of the day!  This is a very good thing because no one, including me, likes to be around me after I’ve been emptied handed for a couple of days.  I have to admit that my knitting was something on the order of knit one row, look at the horizon and breathe deeply for a few minutes…..knit another row.  Still, it was better than not knitting.  I do realize that this paints me as somewhat of a fanatic, or an obsessive person.  Well, I’m officially calling the pot black.

We got into Cape May in the mid afternoon.  I’d been told that the anchorage is no where near the town, and boy was that right!  It was a long dinghy ride to shore, but both Bob and I were bent on having a walk to stretch our legs.  My dear friend June is always visiting her sister in Cape May, so I rather wondered where she lives!  I had also heard she has a boathouse right on the water for a summer cottage.  When we got ashore I found myself looking across at a lovely row of about eight vintage boathouses.  I had a feeling one of them had to be Stina’s.  I did try calling Stina since June had given me her number.  No luck….

Then Bob and I took a walk through a residential area that put us on the road right behind these boathouses.  The one I’d imagined Stina living in had a bright red Volkswagen bug parked behind it, and I imagined Stina driving this very car.  It seemed to fit with my image of her, even though I don’t know her at all.

We stopped and had a drink on a fake schooner-turned-cocktail bar in the harbor and then got back in our dinghy to head out to Pandora.  But as we left we just took one little turn by the boathouses.  There were two couples sitting on the deck of the one I had dubbed as Stina’s, and wouldn’t you know one of the women looked about the right age (80s).  So I decided to give a yell, “Are you Stina?”  And she was!  We were invited into this lovely boathouse that has been beautifully renovated to look very Swedish.  It was really wonderful!  My huge regret is that I never thought to get a photo of all of us together!  Stina is June’s fireball older sister and is almost 89 years old.  She has far more energy than even my 28 year old son, and she makes my energetic husband seem positively unconscious…. yes, I know what that means I look like in comparison to her!

Oh!  Wouldn’t you know that Stina’s boathouse is the very next house to the right that didn’t get included in this shot!  Could I have had worse luck??  And hers is even quainter than these….sigh…

To totally top things off, Stina asked us what we did when we came ashore, and when we mentioned getting a drink at ‘The Schooner’ she asked us if her granddaughter might possibly have been our waitress.  Of course we had no way of knowing, but Bob thought to check the receipt which showed our waitress was the granddaughter.  Pretty serendipitous!  We were meant to meet!

Day 7, Sept 17:  Cape May to Chesapeake City (#26 – 33)

In order to get the tides just right we got up at 4.45 this morning.  Ugh!  We left Cape May and went rather far out due to the shoaling around the tip of New Jersey, and then found our way into the shipping channel for the Delaware River. That was when we got the big payoff of a stunning sunrise which made me thankful for getting up today! It was 50 miles up the river to the C&D Canal (Chesapeake and Delware).  Today was truly zephyr breezes, and I finished the Flower Basket shawl!

I really don’t like how lace looks when it comes off the needles, before being blocked.  It’s so spongey and amorphous.  I will tackle blocking it on 0ur bed tomorrow!

The C&D Canal was a lovely ride, with lush greenery all the way to the water’s edge.  It had the feel of another century, when farms were all along both banks.  Some of the old farmhouses are still sitting along the banks, and some new suburban looking developments have also cropped up.  Everything was very verdant and peaceful.  Beautiful!  Very southern feeling.  I can only imagine how much more ‘southern’ its going to get in a few more weeks!

I got my stop at Vulcan’s Rest!  This was my much anticipated destination on this first part of our journey. I bought yarn….no kidding!

Lovely Chesapeake City….

A ship going down the canal right in the backyard!  Pretty amazing!

The Fickle North Wind

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Day 5, Sept. 15: Atlantic Highlands to Atlantic City

Zephyr is my favorite word related to sailing, and I’ve been saying this years.  Zephyr….bring it on.  A particular word related to sailing that I detest is gale.

The Greeks had many words for wind, and if I had better internet coverage here I’d try to find out just how many words there are for wind. Anyway, that is a sure sign that they have a lot of wind.

I imagined myself making peace with sailing down the New Jersey coast on a zephyr, relying on our motor to get us down the coast.  No such luck…. Bob is using a well respected weather router named Chris Parker, and if you are a sailor you will know that Bob has chosen well.  Chris Parker said it was a favorable time for us to tackle the New Jersey coast because even though there was a north wind which is highly fickle with lots of gusts (reaching gale velocity….my least favorite sailing word!), the wind would be behind us.  You know that famous blessing: “may the wind be always at your back…”

Well, this landlubber thought today sucked!  I dealt with it as best I could by taking half a stugeron at 7am and again at 2pm which insured that I slept about 6 hours during our 12 hour slog southward.  I still hated it.

But at last we came into Atlantic City as the sun was setting, no easy feat with the sun right in our faces and the buoy lights not on yet.  It was nerve wracking to me, the land lubber.  But at least I can say it’s a fairly quiet anchorage, in spite of the insane night lights of this gambling city.

I remember when Stitches East was held in Atlantic City for a couple of years…..now it’s held right in my new backyard (Hartford), but I won’t be there to attend this fall.  If only I could have done some knitting today….. not sure tomorrow will be any better.  We have to get to the C and D Canal (Chesapeake and Delaware) by Monday evening because Tuesday’s wind is going to be off the charts.  I need to find the appropriate word for that.  We plan to be in Chesapeake City, and I hope to be snug inside Vulcan’s Rest, a weaving/knitting shop, rewarding myself for enduring this fickle north wind, even if it is at our backs.

 

Jewels in the Night Sky

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Day 4, Sept. 14:  Lay Day in Altantic Highlands

We did not move today since we are waiting for fair winds to travel down the coast of New Jersey with the wind at our back, which should happen tomorrow.

Today we met up with some old friends and some new friends.  We know a couple with a house on the highlands of Atlantic Highlands, and the husband took us out for a little shopping today and then a visit to their house.  What a view of lower Manhattan they have from the back of their house and their luxurious deck!  It was just about the most amazing view one can have!  At the end of the day we visited with some newer friends that we met in Maine two summers ago, who are also anchored in the harbor.  We watched the sunset together, then the lights of lower Manhattan take center stage.

Here are a few shots that our son Christopher took of us as we motored down the East River and Upper New York Harbor on our way to Raritan Bay.  He rides fast and takes great photos!

The night sky is not nearly as spectacular as what we see from our new home near the Connecticut River or on many summer nights in Maine, but the Manhattan skyline totally makes up for it!  From this spot we have a glorious view of lower Manhattan with the new Freedom Tower as the show stopper of the skyline.  There is a waning moon with  a bright Venus right near it…. we’ll have much better star visibility when we get out of the NY area.

Today we got some wonderful treats from the local farmers’ market in Atlantic Highlands, and I indulged in both a pedicure and manicure.  How decadent!  No knitting today!  Perhaps tomorrow during our long sail down the New Jersey coast.  If I can knit during that I will have made some great strides in confidence about being out on the open ocean!

 

Ready, Set, Go!

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Day 3, Sept. 13:  City Island to Sandy Hook

This morning we played our own version of a “Top Gear” race.  We left City Island by boat, under power, and our younger son left his apartment on West 112th St. (the block that has Seinfeld’s “Tom’s Restaurant” at one end and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at the other) for a race to the bend in the East River (#7), near  Roosevelt Island across from Gracie Mansion.  I think we (on the boat) even got a bit of a head start, but our son the biker beat us on this leg of the race!

After photos and a lot of exuberant waving (and happy tears on my part) we began the second leg of the race: the Upper East Side to the Battery (#8).

In Chris’s case this meant dodging a lot of traffic on 1st and 2nd Avenues.  We, on the other hand, were just sluicing down the East River at half throttle, with a favorable current pushing us and luckily no other traffic!  We won this leg by several minutes.  Chris had some bad information on the quickest route downtown, so he was terribly disappointed to miss getting a shot of us going under the Brooklyn Bridge.

 

Given Chris’s struggle with morning traffic coming down the East Side, it was impressive that we only beat him to Battery Park by about 10 minutes.  That boy can ride!

 I had quite a moment of panic when Chris jumped over the railing in Battery Park to get a photo of us.  The folks nearby asked if he was planning to swim out to us….

I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition, the Verrazano Bridge and the colonial fort near the base.  And that brings me to the similar clash of cultures I felt as we went through New York today.  We were on our very small vessel, not a lot different than a floating gypsy caravan, with all our power in our little world generated by four solar panels that sit atop our bimini at the back of our cockpit.  Meanwhile, we were motoring through one of the largest cities in the world, the city I have lived nearest for over 40 years now.  It’s vastness was almost as great as the ocean to me….and I felt pretty tiny on board Pandora.

We anchored inside Sandy Hook (#10), New Jersey, in time for lunch.  The excitement of the morning had thoroughly worn me out!  So it seemed appropriate for some quiet time with my current book and then a nap.  At this point, it’s almost opening time!

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