Sunday, September 2, 2012

Labor Day Weekend is here...

Though Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer, we KKY owners are just getting started.  Thanks to incredible creature comforts, the cooler days of fall are all the more reason to snuggle into our floating nests.

This weekend has been remarkable weather-wise.  Warm sunny days and cool, breezy nights mark this end of summer holiday.  Tom and I have been aboard all weekend, just enjoying the serenity of Serenity.  We showed off our girl yesterday when we had a couple of friends over.  The plan was to take a cruise around LI Sound, then feast of all sort of excellent foods and wine, followed by dinner at our favorite local restaurant.  We cruised, feasted and still wanted more, so after dinner, we came back to Serenity and had brandy on the flybridge.  Only after we all confessed to exhaustion did we reluctantly break up the party.

The Huntington Lighthouse Preservation Society hosts a free music festival at this time each year.  The festival draws boats from all over Long Island and Connecticut, making an already congested harbor a real booby trap to navigate.  This year's crowd was predicted to be in the neighborhood of 700+ boats.  Since yesterday was also the day of our planned cruise, we set out innocently unaware of the gathering crowd at around 11 am, the start of the festival.  By the time we returned several hours later, boats were rafted up and anchored all around the lighthouse, creating a very narrow passageway.  From our vantage point on the flybridge, it appeared that many of the boats' operators were truly weekend boat warriors with not too much common sense going on.

As we proceeded down the channel to our marina, we were shocked to suddenly find a small Regulator  backing directly into our path while the idiot operator was looking the other way, trying to fish a flip flop out of the water.  To make matters worse, a bigger boat than Serenity was less than 10 feet behind us.   A blast from our horn elicited profanity from the Regulator's operator.  Can you believe he was screaming at us that we could have moved over 5 feet or so for him!  Our boat takes more time to move over than he would have liked to wait for under the circumstances.

We no sooner recovered our normal breathing pattern when another jerk zooms around us shouting that we were going too fast.  Now all KKY owners know that it is rare for us to ever go "too fast".  In fact, we were doing 6 knots and the moron was probably going at least 12 knots.  Apparently, someone had created a little known rule that on festival day, the speed limit is 5 knots for a mile around the lighthouse.  All this was too much for our serenity.  We got back to our slip, got out the food, poured the wine and reveled in Serenity's serenity.


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