More Fast Boats (plus schooner Arabella, and a duck)

I was feeling a bit wiped out at the end of the work day last night, so I decided to head home instead of going to Blue Drinks (hopefully there'll be another later in the summer). On my way home, though, I did loop by North Cove again, this time to see, and of course take some pictures of, the Atlantic Cup fleet (thank you Harry M. for cluing me in). A few of my favorite photos are down at the end of the writing. The big 3-masted vessel, btw, is NOT a Cup contender, that's the schooner Arabella. Not sure what she's doing in NYC but she's been here for a while (Update 5/20 - I finally found out, answer's in the comments). And the duck is a duck.

BTW, Icarus, #116, has a local connection - she belongs to the USMMA at King's Point! Go NY! 

The Atlantic Cup is an interesting 3-legged race. Two sailors on each boat and see, they stand next to each other on the dock with their arms around each other's shoulders and then they have their 2 adjacent legs tied together and...no, no, no, not really. Although that would be an interesting race too. This one's three distinctly different legs. 

From the Cup's website: "The first stage is a long offshore, double-handed leg from Charleston, South Carolina to New York City. The second stage is a sprint leg, also double-handed from New York to Newport, Rhode Island. The third and final stage will be a fully crewed inshore series raced over a weekend in Newport."  For more info, visit AtlanticCup.org. 

IDEC wasn't there but according to the website he's still here on standby - maybe Joyon decided to take some friends sailing or something, it was a very pretty evening and maybe it's fun for a singlehander to occasionally have other people on board.

Here are my favorites from last night's pictures - it was an excellent night for picture-taking, too, the late afternoon light is always pretty and when you get lucky enough to have a large black cloud that's passed by and is to the east, stuff just glows. Didn't actually storm this time as far as I know, but it sure looked dramatic!

BTW, I have again put all the text at the top, here, nothing more to read, so you can just click on the first picture to get the much nicer slideshow view. Enjoy!