The Sailing Adventures of Island Eclipse

                                                           The good, the bad and the ugly Well my friends it's a foggy morning here on the Hudson River.  Yep you read that correctly, Henry and I arrived in Waterford NY at 2pm Tuesday afternoon after transiting  a total of 31 Locks, 183 miles and  descending 435 feet in five days.  Today is Henrys CBA mandated day of rest, not so for me.  I'll be doing the household chores, Laundry, fill the water tank and some boat maintenance.  What's happened since the last time we posted?  Lot's and nothing all at the same time.  We arrived in Little Falls late Saturday to a friendly reception of Laundry, showers and a dollar a foot moorings.   We helped a familiar boat dock, it was World War II tug from Korea similar to the one we winter with at Pier 4 ...

                                                              Making some miles and some memories. It's Friday afternoon around 2 o'clock and we've been on the water since 8 am.  We've completed two locks and we're now crossing Lake Oneida the scourge of every sailboat that comes South through the Erie canal.  Fortunately it's overcast and a little lumpy so the smaller boats are staying off the water, we've got the whole thing to ourselves.   We didn't do too much on Thursday, we got off the late after doing the overnight from Youngstown to Oswego.  We slept in till around nine, had breakfast and then kind a took a look around the town. We got off the dock around noon and completed six locks before calling it a day, tying up on the wall between lock 6 and 7 on the Oswego Canal. When we set out this morning our...

                                                                                          Kicking it old school   It's 11:20 Wednesday morning and the deck is awash after a night of motoring into the swell.   We left Youngstown at 1:00am to catch the lull in the weather, it had been blowing 35km/h or more throughout the day and although the light winds rolled in around ten we decided to wait until late to let the swells subside. We spent Tuesday exploring Youngstown. Most of the stores don't open until Wednesday so we just biked around looking for some trouble to get into.   We explored a number of parks until we found the one with the best climbing trees for Henry to hone his skills on.  Although...

                                                                                             In the Blind Sailing is not for the faint of hearts, and it's definitely not for those in a rush.  It has it's ups and it's downs, it can be a hard slog on tough seas through rain and sleet or it can be a calm anchorage on a beach.  To be a sailor at heart you have to find the best in both to make it worth while because living only for the good days isn't enough. Almost every cruising story anyone's ever told me starts with their worst moment, their moment of perseverance, the moment they overcame the odds and succeeded.  Those sailors who have no stories of such epic moments to tell probably never left the doc...