“Wake up,” Todd nudged me at 9 AM on Sunday. I’d taken a shot of Tussionex the night before in an effort to fend off my infamous semi-annual-chronic-cough and I was groggy. “I got the reservations. We need to leave in an hour.”

The afternoon before we looked into the possibility of taking a car on the ferry to Block Island to go geocaching. Reservations are required for transporting a car, and it’s still a bit cold to be biking around on a small island 15 miles offshore.

“I’m going to clean out the Jeep and pack a daypack. You wash up and get something to eat. The ferry’s at 11, we need to leave at 10,” he instructed while I rubbed my eyes.

At 10:50 we arrived at the ferry landing in Point Judith, RI. I backed the Jeep onto the ferry and rubbed my palms together in excitement, the adventure was about to begin.

The last time we’d been to Block we’d sailed there. I can’t remember if it was 2004. Maybe. At any rate, we were due for a visit.

Here I am in the ferry bay, just after backing in and getting ready to go upstairs to the main level of the boat. When we got into the seating level we saw that other people brought their dogs to sit with them. We left the boys in the car, and instead made a list of all the geocaches we wanted to find. There are dozens of them on the island. Many are about a half mile apart, if that.

The ferry is about to land in New Harbor.  This section of the island, for obvious reasons, is the downtown area.  Not many people have cars on the island.  There is bike rental and scooter rental and there are flat rate taxis on the island driven by full year residents.

After lunch we headed to our first cache, just south of the ferry landing. We were greeted by a dozen or so seals lounging in the sun. We watched them drape themselves over the jagged edges of the rocks.


“How can that possibly be comfortable?” Todd asked.

“They probably can’t even feel it through all that blubber,” I pointed out.

We got back into the car and headed to the next cache at Mohegan Bluffs.  The Bluffs is quite possibly my favorite beach in all of Rhode Island.  You have to go down 144 stairs to get to the beach.  The dogs bounded down them the moment they got out of the car, Griffen dying for a swim.  We called them from the top of the stairs, but the crashing surf is too loud we had to go down all those stairs to get them back. 

Looks like Nemo got a bit wet too.

After the Bluffs we headed to the west side of the island, and got there about a minute later, Block Island is that small. The next cache was near the life guard station, but we didn’t find that cache. Most of the caches on Block Island are micro caches. That means that the container that holds them is very small. Usually it only holds the tiniest of notepads for a log book, and you have to bring your own pen to sign it. I am not a fan of micro caches, because the fun part is to see what’s in the box. Usually it’s just junk, we end up taking one silly little toy and put it into another cache. But the micro caches are pretty uneventful.


But on Block it looks like hiding caches is quite hard. In the summer the bushes off the paths becomes quite overgrown to the point where you couldn’t possibly get through it to get at a cache. And many caches get thrown out because non-geocachers don’t know what they are and assume it’s litter. Hence, micro caches are the way to go because they can be hidden inside things easily.

On the west side of the island we kept Griff on the leash so he would have the chance to dry off and not get the inside of the car sopping wet.


 
As we drove to the next cache, in the cemetery at the center of the island, I spotted a deer on the side of the road. It hadn’t occurred to me that deer would be on an island 15 miles off shore. I wondered how they managed to get out there. Sure, I’ve seen deer on Jamestown (island in the center of Narragansett Bay) and on Aquidneck Island (island that Newport is on). But those islands have bridges to them, and the distances to those islands is much shorter. For example, the bridge connecting Jamestown to Aquidneck is 2 miles long. A deer could cross that bridge easily, or swim across. How the heck did deer manage to arrive on Block Island.


I googled around and learned that deer were brought over on the ferry in 1968 at the request of hunters. Since then, the deer population on the island boomed and is now labeled a nuisance. Apparently, there is a running debate about whether to eradicate the entire population because deer transmit Lyme disease through ticks and pose a threat to public health. Most island residents have either contracted Lyme disease or knows someone who has.

 

We found a few more uneventful caches after that. Overall, it was a beautiful day on Block Island, and I leave you with my new favorite picture from the day.

Husband in the sun.

 



Just What We Needed

On Sunday I looked out at the fresh inches of snow that fell overnight. I looked back at the still warm rumpled covers on my side of the bed and thought to myself, “Now, what if we just blew them off, stayed in, and tested the durability of our couch all day today.” Unfortunately that’s been my motivation this winter.

It used to be that we’d spend entire weekends, in the freezing cold, restoring the boat. We’d fire up propane heaters, strip down to t-shirts in the heat, and work on whatever the project du jour was. I have memories of sanding every single inch of teak on the interior of the last Sabine. I have another memory of scraping off the teak decks in the new Sabine. I remember replacing entire water systems, re-wiring lights—which I discovered I am extraordinarily bad at, seeing as how the light over the galley sink no longer works and is likely shorted out. Then at the end of the day, we’d pile on our layers, put out the propane heaters (when we weren’t leaving them on until the fiberglass cured if we happened to glass that day) and head home for a shower and dinner. We’d return to work on Monday exhausted, muscles sore, but one step closer to being able to sail in the spring.

Lately we haven’t been spending weekends that way. Some of it is sheer laziness, but most of it is that we don’t have those kinds of boat projects anymore. The projects we have to do now require the work of professionals. In February, Sabine is going into the shed for a professional re-fit. She’s getting painted, woodwork getting varnished. She’s getting an anchor windlass installed so that Todd won’t have to pull up the anchor by hand anymore. Hopefully, after February our radar system will no longer be classified as “decorative” and will actually become functional as well.

On Sunday I pondered falling back into bed, and trying out a day in the life of a Labrador. (Eat, sleep, move to another spot, sleep, get a drink of water, sleep, roll over, sleep, eat, sleep.) But then I remembered we made plans to introduce on of my co-workers and his girlfriend to geocaching.

There’s nothing like introducing others to a sport to get you out of the house and invigorated again. We love taking new people sailing because it’s fun to watch them hold the wheel at the helm and wonder at the concept of being propelled by the wind. It’s fun to field their questions. “What’s that rope do?” That lifts the main sail. “What’s with the propane tank?” That’s what we use to barbeque our dinner.

On Sunday co-worker Dennis and his girlfriend Nikki tromped through the snowy forests of Podunk, RI and found three geocaches with us. We watched the dogs bound over the snow, and slip on the ice patches. We walked single file across a frozen pond, holding our breath as we wondered if any of us would fall through. We marveled at the stone foundations of old houses we spotted in the middle of the woods and speculated at their age, what the house may have looked like, and where the occupants may have gone. We found the caches, wrote in the log books, joked, laughed, and took in the fresh winter air.

Thank you Dennis and Nikki for forcing us to go outside for an entire winter day. It was just what we needed.

Geocaching

Some of you may know that Todd and I are really into Geocaching. It's a sport that people participate in world wide. It's basically a big, giant scavenger hunt. People will hide a cache (container with goodies in it) somewhere in the world, and post the latitude and longitude coordinates to it on the Internet at www.geocaching.com. If you want to find a cache, go to this site, get the coordinates of caches in your area, plug 'em into your handheld GPS, and go find a cache.

The idea is, when you find the cache, is to take a goody and leave another goody. Usually there is a log in there too, so we write in the log, and some people even include a funsaver camera so you can take a picture of yourself to leave for the cache owner.

We learned about geocaching one night while goofing around on Google. Todd likes to search on random words he hears on TV, or words that I'll say when talking. On this occasion he searched on his pet name for me (no, I will not tell you what that is, it's kinda private, OK?) and we stumbled upon the Geocaching site. It was around 10 PM, and we called up a few friends, explained what we were doing, they were game for an adventure, so we all set out for Goddard Park around midnight with a backpack filled with beer, along with goodies for the cache, and our trusty GPS.

It's great fun, and we always get to see a new area in the Ocean State. It's an excellent way to explore a new area too. Here are some pictures from a cache we tried to find a few weeks ago. This was a multi-cache (cache contains a clue to another cache, which contains a clue to another cache until you find the one that contains the goodies) but we only found the first cache in the series of caches. This area was so beautiful, we may have to go back soon, and find the rest of the caches in the series.

We were at a park called George B. Salter Grove for this cache. This park overlooks Narragansett Bay in RI has a rock wall breakwater that you can walk out to and walk on. The first cache was out by the breakwater, so we had to walk on the rock wall to find it. There were people fishing off the wall, as well as swans galore. Dozens and dozens of swans! It was a cloudless day, warm, and just all around fabulous.


This is me, on the rock wall, on the way out to finding the cache. I think our GPS was telling me that we were about 500 feet away at this point.



Swans galore. Look at them all! You should have seen Griffen jump into the water to scare them. Swans don't scare that easily, I think they would have eaten Griffen if he got any closer to them.

They are pretty though, aren't they?

This is me, just after we found the cache. The cache itself wasn't all that exciting. It was just a small container that had the hint for the next cache in the series. Normally when we find just a normal cache, it's more interesting than that.

Cormorants on a rock, sunning themselves.

This is Nemo in the high grass. He's in his natural element in the high grass, as beagles are bred to flush rabbits out of the high grass so the rabbits can then be hunted. Interesting, the white tails on beagles were also bred in, so the hunters can see the dog when they are hunting.

So, that was my Cliff Claven moment of the day.

Wait up!! Waaaaaiiiiit! Griffen and Nemo are trying not to get left behind.