Montauk

We had a lovely sail down to Montauk with good wind and flat-ish seas. We were a bit nervous getting to the anchorage as it is quite a convoluted route which bends sharply from left to right. Andrew had to watch the markers carefully after we had passed all the restaurants and marinas with big fancy boats.

After negotiating the various markers, we found ourselves in a big, beautiful bay. The centre of which is very shallow, hence the need to follow the marker buoys!

Once again it was not at all what we were expecting to find. I thought it would be a small, narrow anchorage.

We found a good spot to anchor behind the mooring balls.

It was quite misty for most of the day with the sun trying to peek out from time to time. The restaurant over the way was having a function and to begin with the music was terrible but then they quieted down and didn’t disturb us for the rest of the evening. By 6pm the mist had fully settled on the bay and we couldn’t see what was next to us.

Sunday morning broke clear and sunny with a slight breeze. I decided to do some washing on the back of the boat. Once I had all the washing in the bucket, Andrew told me it was going to be misty again by 10 and cloudy by 2! I hastily did the washing while the sun was still shining. But lo and behold, the weather was wrong once again. Not only did we have no mist, we also had very little cloud cover.

We stayed on the boat watching as people came and went. It is a beautiful place for small yachts and quite a few people were out in speed boats.

Quite a few boats had left the anchorage early that morning, and we were thinking we would be the only ones here for the night. Nope, we had a couple of power boats come in, one anchoring quite close to us. They then got their fenders out and another one rafted up next to them. We thought it would be okay, until a third smaller one rafter up as well. They turned out to be day trippers and all left by sunset.

On Monday morning we decided we would walk to the town. It was about a 4km walk there on what looked like a highway. There was a space on the side of the road to walk so we were ok. There were also a lot of runners and people on bicycles going in both directions so we presumed this was the only road into town. 

The town was lovely with a very Plettenberg Bay type vibe. We stopped at a restaurant to look at the prices and a chap who was sitting on a nearby bench told us it is a very good one. Then he got chatting to Andrew (Laura and I went ahead and looked at the shops). He said that Andy Warrhol had a house there and Elizabeth Taylor used to stay with him. She would walk down the street and go to the pub. He told Andrew we need to write a book and he would publish it for us.

We had to stop off at the beach to look at the sea. It was a lovely, long beach. The water looked very inviting after our long walk, but sadly we hadn't thought to bring our cozzies!

I don't think we have walked quite that far in ages and walking on the tar road was exhausting. It was a relief to get back to the dinghy and Calypso.

Our next stop on our journey was Block Island. We left Montauk on 1 July, with beautiful clear skies and good wind.