shooting celebratory sprays of water into the air
Last weekend we went to the Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival. The weather was terribly hot and unbearably humid, but we pressed on… You can see how hazy it was in the pictures. I love tall ship parades. After the parade we went home to recuperate in our air conditioning. When you can’t cool off standing by the sea it is just too hot.
home port Panama City, Florida
home port Mystic, Connecticut
home port New London, Connecticut
home port New London, Connecticut
Later on we went over to New London to take a dinner cruise on the Mystic Whaler. I have a bit of history with this schooner. Back in the early 1980s two of my aunts signed up for a two-night cruise to Block Island. But just before they were to leave, one aunt got sick and couldn’t make it. The other aunt insisted I go with her, which I did, very reluctantly. I had three small children and didn’t want to leave them for two nights!
The cruise was a mixture of very high and very low experiences. I loved the sailing and the meals grilled outside on the deck and the captain singing and playing his guitar when we were anchored for the night. I just wished I was there with my husband! Sadly, though, my period came early and heavy and it was a struggle to use the “head” (bathroom) correctly. And in the next cabin was a teenage boy and his mother. They were up most of the night, or so it seemed, as the mother pounded his back trying to loosen the stuff in his lungs. He had cystic fibrosis and his suffering tugged at my heart.
So one day Tim surprised me with tickets for the dinner cruise. The following pictures were taken from the ship…
it looks so different from the mouth of the Thames River
the benches behind the fence with the white posts are where
Tim & I usually sit to have our supper in the summer
As it turned out this cruise had its share of negative aspects, too. It was still so hot outside that I never needed the jacket I brought, figuring it would be cool out on the water. And I wish we had been informed that most of the tickets were held by a raucous group of people celebrating a birthday. They brought their own drinks and things got lively very quickly. Someone even started choking on his food and luckily someone else was there to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
So much for romance at sea!
It all looked very beautiful! And the pictures from the cruise were great. I am sorry for the ruined romance on that beautiful old ship. We had a very similar experience once on a day cruise in the Mediterranean – I became soaked in someone else’s brandy 😎
Thank you, Tiny! Getting soaked in someone else’s brandy – yikes! The wonderful thing about sailing, to me anyway, is being out on the water without the sound of an engine, just the breeze moving the sails, waves lapping the sides of the boat… That party could have/should have been held in a bar. Sigh.
“Patricia Ann” – my mum’s name ! loved the new photos, life is such a mixture Barbara
Ah, Patricia Ann is a lovely name! Life is indeed a mixed blessing – disappointments and pleasant surprises all parts of the mix… 🙂
That New London Ledge Light is something else.
It’s neat to get up close to that lighthouse because from our beach it’s a small dot on the horizon. There are some tours that allow you off the boat to see it inside but after all the years we’ve lived here I have yet to do it!