Back on Block

Friday, 15 August

Those who come to Salt Pond in summer often bring loads of toys.

Weekends begin on Friday. Well, maybe not where you are but at Block Island in mid-August, it may as well be Fourth of July in Annapolis. Great Salt Pond is packed. Town moorings, private moorings, even the anchorage is nearly wall-to-wall. There does not even appear to be room to land one more dinghy on the beach.

This is, as you may recall from an earlier dispatch, in marked contrast to Salt Pond in late June when half the 45 town moorings were vacant. But then, it is a short season up here and there are only a couple of weeks of it left. So it makes sense that Block would be busy before noon Friday.

The 1807 brick light tower at Point Judith stands at the southwestern tip of Narragansett Bay.

Block Island’s North Light, built in 1867, looks from a distance a lot like a church or schoolhouse.

That’s when Steadfast arrived to claim a spot among the dozens already anchored at that hour in the northeast corner of the harbor. She’d left Wickford Cove about 0630, headed under the Jamestown Bridge and, passing Point Judith to the west, bid farewell to Narragansett Bay. It had been a memorable week, sailing the Bay, letting the wind dictate the day’s destination, but it was time to move a bit farther west.

So once past the Point, she turned to a heading of 230 magnetic, North Light came into view before 1100 and she finished the nearly 29 nautical at an average speed of 5.6 knots. The southerly swell was two feet, the eight-to-10-knot westerly enough to just ripple the surface, and with plenty of sun it was a lovely crossing.

UV skin damage has not been an issue this summer.

Now, about that sun: do not be concerned about overexposure aboard Steadfast. Great care was taken today, as it has been throughout this trip, to employ sunblock of the highest possible SPF rating. Several layers of it, in fact. This is due far less to some subliminal warning from Mother or the Center for Disease Control than it is to the fact that it is VIKING COLD up here! Sheeeeesh! It was 61-degrees when we weighed anchor this morning. Accu-Guess alleges that it’s now 75 but that’s a tough sell aboard this boat. We ain’t buyin’ it.

The good news is that sunburn has not been an issue. And regardless of how many layers one wears, it remains beautiful here, a photo-op whatever way one turns. That’s especially true on Block where the weekends begin on Friday.

Steadast out.