Saturday Forecast - Accuracy Review PLUS Part One of The Last 10 Miles Trip Report

Sunny?

Check!

Lobster Roll?


Check!


And oh, yum...pufferfish, too!

That particular indulgence, btw, was completely Baydog's fault, via his OTHER blog. This was my appetizer and I almost fell out of the booth when they brought out this heaping plate of little fishies. I peeled off a lot of the breading to save a little room for the lobster roll, left on just a little for the crunch. Onolicious (and not a bit poisonous, this is a totally non-toxic local variety, the Northern Puffer.)

Baydog, think you might stop by Lobster Roll Lunch next time you're out Montauk way? :D

Oh, and as far as what we did? Well, here's a quick & clumsy map - it's not a GPS track or anything, but it shows what's done & what's left.


John and I have both done the Red Hook to Sebago paddle, so we're officially done. I'll still join in on the October 22nd Red Hook to Sebago leg, just for fun and to "put a bow on it"; John won't be able to make it because last weekend was his last possible free weekend before the "Gravesend Inn" haunted house that is the big annual project for John's show control students at Citytech.

It was really a bit of a crazy trip - John tracked the mileage all the way from Sebago and as he put it in his trip review, we drove 220 miles to paddle 10. In one day! We'd started out hoping to make a weekend of it - John used to live out in the area and has a friend in Sag Harbor with whom we were hoping to stay, and TQ was originally thinking of coming along.

The place to stay and the 3rd paddler both fell through - but we decided to go for it anyways. Saturday's conditions were just too good to pass up. Sunny, warm, not much wind, negligible surf...we decided we were gonna go ahead and go for it.

You need good conditions to paddle the Atlantic shore of Long Island - you can mess around with rougher stuff inside the barrier islands, but not here on the open ocean. We'd actually lost this particular 10 miles 2 years ago because we weren't making the time we needed (partly due to a headwind, partly because this was the area where we stopped to gawk at a pod of dolphins - no regrets there), the western boundary of Napeague (we were paddling from Montauk Harbor to Georgica to try to get the most help from the wind) was the last viable takeout where our wonderful land support team was going to be able to come pick us up until Georgica, the surf was pretty big & getting bigger, and we didn't think a surf landing in the dark was a really good idea (especially at Georgica Beach, where the surf kinda dumps), so we pulled out at the western boundary of Napeague and called it a year. Remember my Really Silly Map?



That 10-mile stretch was left blank because we just never had a plan for it. Not having a car, I was just going to have to jump in with somebody else, and it was really kind of bothering me having it just hanging out there!

So I was glad when John agreed to make a day trip of it. He was also glad I was up for it - he's actually done a really impressive job of catching up, he joined us in the 2nd year and then had some shoulder problems last year, so he'd been making up the 1st year mileage plus that which he lost to the injury this year. He'd done it and we were both in the same boat (ha ha) where we just needed to pick up what I'd come to think of as That Darned Ten Miles.

It was crazy, as I said -- but it all worked out great!

More tomorrow (and I do want to get back to our 3 days in September, too)!