Athens to Saugerties – 14 nautical miles and 5 kilometers walking
After a couple of hours motor sailing we reached the channel entrance to Saugerties and slid slowly and carefully past the dredger. It was taking up most of the space as the giant claws of the backhoe plunged into the water, retrieved massive loads of sticky mud, then dumped it into the hopperscow.
We motored slowly down the channel, which became progressively skinnier until we reached the end where the anchorage was marked on the chart. Although beautiful, there simply wasn’t much space and we had to double check the charts just to make sure it was an anchorage. We inched into the space and found over 30 feet of water in the middle, but it rapidly shallowed around the edges, making anchoring a challenge. When anchoring, you should normally put out 5 – 7 feet of anchor line for every 1 foot in depth to ensure adequate holding power. So in the case where you have deep water with steep banks going up to the shallows, you need to get close enough to the shallows to drop the anchor, but the problem is the boat can swing right into the shallows if the wind or current changes. The solution? A stern anchor, set from the back of the boat which keeps the boat parallel to the shore, allows you to anchor in the shallows, but prevents swinging. This we did, but it was a minor shit show, as we’d never used a second anchor on this boat, and it happened to be buried beneath a couple hundred pounds of chain in the anchor hold. Between the two of us we managed to use the boat engine to first drop the primary anchor in the shallows, then reversed the boat to set the anchor hard, then used the engine to keep us off the shallows while we wrestled the second anchor out, launched the dinghy, got the rusted and filthy anchor into the dinghy, then carried the anchor out to the appropriate spot, dropped it, then set it. We had to reposition the second anchor a couple of times to get it right, but eventually we were happy with the position of the boat and the anchors were tight and holding well. Waddington had tried to anchor a bit further down the channel but found nothing but shale rock on the bottom so instead tied up alongside SeaLight (known in the boating world as “rafting”).
After all that stressful manoeuvring, we sat back to appreciate the anchorage. It was quiet and incredibly beautiful with a small park on one side, towering shale cliffs on the other, packed in with rapidly colouring autumn leaves, then the creek disappearing around a corner in the distance.
We paddled the dinghies over to the park then took a walk to explore Saugerties. After humping it up a long and seemingly never-ending series of inclines, we finally reached the downtown area and found an incredibly cute main street with a surprising variety of shops, not nearly as upscale as Hudson, but with just the right touch of it, alongside diners, hardware stores, and regular old bars. Kate and Ben hit the Ace Hardware to pick up a propane heater to warm up their boat on these increasingly chilly evenings, then went to Price Chopper for groceries. Ana and I just wandered around exploring the shops and people-watching.
Back at the boat we decided to take the ladies for a romantic dinghy paddle so Ana and I jumped in our dinghy, and I started rowing as I sang her a series of magnificently delivered Frank Sinatra classics and she drank her coconut-flavoured Buble, very fitting. Fortunately, before the romance became too overwhelming and a heavy petting session ensued, we were hit with a wall of sewer stink.
“Was that you?” she said, eyeing me suspiciously as I heaved on the paddles, sniffing the air.
I pointed towards the sewage treatment plant just beyond the trees and asked her to plug her nose.
We soon passed the sewage zone and came to a picturesque waterfall and the end of the navigable part of the creek. By this time Ben and Kate had caught up to us so we all eased back, enjoyed the rest of our drinks, and chatted about online dating, which seemed to be the only reliable way for singles to meet these days, making mine and Ana’s first contact at a slot machine in a Bahamian casino seem rather retro and dated.
We rounded up our leftovers and made a delicious chicken stir fry for dinner then sat with Ben and Kate for hours in our cockpit eating cheese Sun Chips, drinking Filipino rum, and scanning the sky for northern lights which everybody else in North America seemed to be seeing, but were mysteriously absent for us.
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