June 4, 2008: Northport to New Haven, CT

It rained all night and all this morning, but the birds of the Britannia marina in Northport loved it. There were Canadian geese with brown fuzzy goslings, long necked graceful white swans, wood ducks, and a snowy white egret all feathering around the waterfront which varied greatly depending on the tide. We filled up with fuel at $4.79 this time, and set out around lunch time. We had a calm and restful crossing of the Long Island sound towards Connecticut. It was amazingly calm since this sound is quite as large as the Pamlico Sound only much deeper. On the trip, we encountered a very interesting sight. In the middle of the sound we came upon two huge ships tightly aligned side to side. As we approached, we could not figure out why they were so close together since that is fairly unusually. As we got closer, we realized that one of the freighters had several cranes and it was retrieving cargo from the other ship; even closer, we saw that the cranes were actually huge digger jaws and they were moving coal. We played a little game suggesting all the reasons this could be happening starting from out right piracy (we have been watching Captain Jack Sparrow), to perhaps the coal was sold to someone who owned their own ship and wanted to handle the transport. Anyway, it was fun to discover and something we had never seen before. We also passed Eton’s Neck lighthouse which is the 2nd oldest light house in New York, 1799 and was one of the first life saving stations.

Tonight we are docked in New Haven, Connecticut at a marina that does not usually take boats our size. When there were no slips at the larger marina, he agreed to take us in, saying that he had been to Beaufort, NC, experienced Southern hospitality and wanted to reciprocate.

We connected with a rental car have seen some of the city. Here we found the story of the very first pizza. It was made by Frank Pepe who came over from Italy in the early 1900’s. After working making bread for someone else, he and his wife opened their own bakery often working 18 hour days and delivering bread in a horse drawn cart. Then he began taking bread dough and flattening it into a circle and adding fresh tomato sauce, grated cheese and anchovies. His granddaughter said that the circle of dough traditionally received the leftovers of a previous meal to make another meal. He called it “the poor man’s answer to hunger” and in 1925 began making these pies to sell in his store. The store front on Wooster street had a line when we arrived. They sold pizzas and soft drinks, no salads or other menu extensions, and we got to see them sliding the pizzas into the original coal burning brick oven that reminded me of the one in Tryon’s Palace in New Bern, NC. By the way, our pepperoni and mushroom pizza was delicious...