AroundMe

First, a word about our Live Tracking. Thank you to those who have written to us asking why we haven't moved from our initial anchorage in Northport last Friday. We are OK. We've gotten a good 25 emails asking about our condition. Everything is fine - it's just that the weather off the New Jersey coast has been terrible and we didn't see the need to move away from a nice harbor with many services and a great dog swimming beach. I now issue an "OK" message on the tracking device every afternoon that we don't move to show that we're fine. If we needed something, you can bet that we'd be making a blog entry about it. It's nice to know that there are so many people watching our movements. Really though, it's been very, very nice here.

That brings me to our need for fruits and vegetables. Fresh fruits and vegetables don't last longer than a week. Sure, we've got some frozen and canned items, but those are last resort types of things. We've been on the boat longer than a week already so needless to say, our fresh supplies are running quite low.

Finding a real grocery store within walking distance from a harbor is rare. As you can imagine, property close to the waterfront is expensive - usually not the place where a large store would be built. We asked some locals and everyone told us that a grocery store was miles away from the harbor. But then I checked AroundMe...

AroundMe is a free iPhone app. It looks at your current location (from the built-in GPS) and gives you a list of items to select from like Hospitals, Hotels, Movie Theaters, Restaurants, and, you guessed it, Supermarkets. Here's what it looks like when you start it:

It thinks I'm in Asharoken which is the closest beach to where we're anchored. Touching the Supermarkets item displays the following:

That's a list of supermarkets in order of approximate distance from where I am (I'm not sure why Thebarn is in the middle). We looked at this list and decided that 2 miles was too far to walk so it looked like nothing fresh was in our immediate future.

But wait a minute. That's 2 miles from our current location - out on the boat in the anchorage. It's a 1.5 mile dinghy ride to get into town. So here's the cool thing - touch on a supermarket in the list and it'll show you where it is on a map. It turns out that King Kullen is only a half mile away. The blue dot is our boat. The town landing and dinghy dock is all the way in the inner harbor on the east (right) side. The red pin is King Kullen:

So off to town we went. We had some ActiveCaptain hats to mail at the Post Office and some items to buy at the hardware store. A few side streets and some traffic lights to cross and voila, a huge King Kullen grocery store:

AroundMe hit a home run on aCappella today. I'm thinking of it as technology you can taste!

I Miss Val....

Soon after Jeff and I were married I went back to night school to get an MBA while I continued to work full-time. Something had to give so I hired a cleaning women to come once a week - a luxury my mother never had. This “habit” stayed even after I finished school and we've had some great people over the years. For the past 5 or 6, we've had Val.

Val's job is to come once a week to keep the dog hair to a gentle roar, make sure my bathrooms are not conducting any science experiments, and administer the required amount of belly rubs to Dylan (who complains that she loafs on the job). I love Val because she helps keep my life in order and she's a wonderful person.

Almost two weeks ago we said goodbye to Val. She's filled our spot with other clients with a promise to fit us in if she can when we return - I'm trying hard not to wish any of them harm.

So as we spend day two comfortably anchored in Northport, I decide it's time to thoroughly clean the cabin. How can two dogs generate so much hair?! Fortunately I have discovered a magical dog hair tool. Actually, it's been on the boat for years but I was never sure why I had it...

I moved this funny looking rubber brush-like thing around the “dog bin” for the past couple of cruises. Finally, the other day I tried brushing it across a cushion and was stunned at how the dog hair came up. It's called a Sweepa and even has a sharp edger for pulling the hair out of cracks. I'm adding it to "Products and Tips We Love." I honestly don't know where I got it but they do have a web site (http://www.sweepa.com/).

Don't worry Val, you're still irreplaceable. The Sweepa can't do belly rubs.

Dog Day Morning

ActiveCaptain warned us that the beach at Northport (Asharoken Beach) didn't allow dogs. The town of Northport just didn't understand though - these dogs have been on the boat for a solid 4 days. There wasn't an option of "No Dogs" at this point. By 7:00 am we were all in the dinghy headed out for a stealth beach landing. By 7:15, everyone within a 2 mile radius knew that Dylan was retrieving items from the water. He needs some stealth training.


The sky is nasty looking and there is rain spitting from the skies. The water temperature is a nice 70 degrees, very different from Maine ocean temperatures. To be honest, the dogs showed no preference. They loved the swimming.

The storm is projected to have 20 kt winds here - almost nothing. There isn't even a small craft warning for the area - it was called off last night. There's just a lot of rain coming.


Karen walked Dylan down the beach which gave me a rare moment to allow Dyna to retrieve her bumper from the water by herself. Dyna is an excellent swimmer but at 11 years old, she can't compete with 2 year old Dylan. I know she loves swimming with Dylan but I think she felt a little more joy by being able to get the bumper first and bring it all the way back. She deserved that moment.

By lunchtime back on the boat, the canine crew was exhausted and sleeping. We'll try another swim tomorrow and go into town to explore and search for bread and vegetables.

Walking from Danny

We awoke again at 5:00 am with plans of heading out to Sandy Hook. The latest forecast showed that Danny was going to be much less of a threat to western Long Island - there was almost no chance of 50 MPH winds. We now had a lot more options.

Going to Sandy Hook would mean we'd be stuck on the boat with almost nothing around for a few days. It had already been more than 3 days since we'd been off the boat and the team was in need of exercise, especially Dylan. Northport, NY has a wonderfully protected bay area. ActiveCaptain had a couple of anchorage areas for it. We've anchored ourselves in one of them before. Northport also has a town dock, a beach, restaurants - it would give us much more to do. We figured we'd be stuck because of the storm and rain for a few days. Everyone voted to change plans and go there instead.

The route to Northport is only 35 nm away. Leaving by 7:00 got us anchored in the harbor by noon. We have almost a quarter mile between us and the closest other boat anchored here. With 250 feet of chain out in 11 feet of water, this would be an excellent place to hunker down and ride out any storm. It's times like this that I'm happy we installed that new monster Rocna anchor.

It was a cloudy day with no waves and no wind. The perfect type of day to move the boat from one place to another. Once again our crew was ready at a moment's notice for anything. Well, as long as you had enough time to wake them up or allowed them to finish playing their cell phone game.