June 6: Long Island Sound headed west

We said goodbye to the swans of New Haven that guarded the opening to the Quinnipiac River this morning. It was rainy and gray as we pulled out, but a transition day with great anticipation of Laurie and Brian coming tonight. The trip across the bay was uneventful, with blue gray water and sky and slightly darker blue gray land on the horizon. We passed several little doll houses set up as channel markers where there were reefs in the sound. I actually thought they looked like submarines that had surfaced with their control tower riding on top of a little bit of their fuselage. They were actually large enough that someone could have lived there but we saw no signs of habitation. One of them that was actually on one of the Norwalk Islands was the Sheffield Island Lighthouse which had been made into a museum.

We did discover the music box that I heard last Tuesday though. We heard the music again and this time investigated more closely. We found a large red buoy that had three bells mounted vertically in its center. Then there were pendulums hung above the bells which swing as the buoy rocked but the pendulums each only moved when the buoy rocked in a specific plane. So as the buoy danced around, the pendulums each struck a different bell independently and played a little random song of three notes. Pretty cool, huh.

Entering the East River, we went under the Whitestone Bridge on our way to La Guardia airport. It is a bridge which I frequently cross getting into New York. It was fun to see it from the river, and the Kathleen tugboat came by just in time to make the picture. Laurie and Brian are due in tonight and we are meeting them at the Worlds Fair Marina – built in 1964 and one of the places my family came on our trip to New York when I was a sophomore in high school.