Whoops

Burlington, Vermont
NoLL

Last night we made a camp fire on the beach at Valcour. We had the whole place to ourselves. We love camp fires, and we love the intimacy of not sharing them with onlookers. It was a special treat. Meanwhile, Tarwathie sat securely tied to a cliff Mediterranean style, facing North while a stiff breeze raged from the South. See below.

Tarwathie's Last Night on Valcour

The picture below shows the remains of a dinghy which must have got loose from some cruiser's boat. It is broken in half as you see.

First, this picture is a good reminder of how disastrous it can be to let your dinghy get loose. Have we ever done it? Yes, once on Tarwathie. We were in Solomons, Maryland and one evening I returned to Tarwathie and must have forgotten to secure the dinghy painter. The next morning, it was no where in sight. Uh Oh. Fortunately, our friends Chris and June on Albion were close by. Chris took me for a tour of the area in his dinghy and in a half our we found it. Whew.

The other salient point is that the skipper who lost that dinghy on Valcour, committed a very gross act of littering. By next spring, bits of broken fiberglass will be spread over half the island. True, it would be a tough job to gather up the pieces from the dinghy and to take them to proper disposal on shore. But it was the captain's responsibility to do so. Shame on him.

Shame on me too. It just occurred to me as I write this that instead of just whine, I could have been a good Samaritan and done the job myself. Considering how much I love Valcour, it would have been the right thing to do. Oh well, too late now. My excuse is that I didn't think of it, and that I would have needed help and some ropes to climb down to the place where it was. Pretty flimsy.