August 16, 2021 Monday

The plan for the day was to head north, pass through the Race at slack and continue on to Ram Island and anchor for the evening. The Race is the point where the tide coming in and out of Long Island Sound gets bottle-necked and accelerates up to four knots. Depending on what the wind is doing the Race can get very dangerous.

Slack was estimated for noon so we took our time getting ready in the morning to avoid an unfavorable current. The weather was perfect on the water with temperatures in the mid-eighties and a light north wind expected to turn south.
There were lots of fishing boats of all types and sizes in the Race as we crossed past Little Gull Island Light House. A tug was towing a barge toward the Race east bound and I adjusted course to go behind him. Shortly after I passed, I heard the tug talking to a ship to coordinate a port-to-port pass which indicated a ship was coming into the Race from the ocean side but I couldn’t see anything coming. I looked and checked the AIS and turned on the radar but no luck. Finally, I saw a thin black object coming but it was pushing up a huge amount of water ahead of it. I thought maybe it was some kind of odd tug pushing a very low loaded barge and I wondered why it was not on AIS. Then I realized it was a submarine coming in fast.

In the past when we have seen submarines, they are exposed on the top of the water a little but this monster had only a very small conning tower and a fin on the back rising above the water making it very hard to see if not for the huge bulge of water coming before it. I tried to find the submarine on radar so I could see how fast it was moving but I couldn’t find it among all of the fishing boat signals. However, I would estimate the sub was doing thirty knots. The strange thing was how little wake it created even as it lifted a tremendous amount of water above its bow.

Soon the sub was past us and it picked up a naval escort that led it up the Thames River to the Electric Boat facility while the patrol boat yelled at boats on the river to get out of the 500-yard exclusion zone that surrounds naval ships.
We continued on, passing Fisher Island and since it was still early, I decided to explore the anchorages on the north side of the Island. Fisher Island is mostly private and we saw some modest homes but mostly we saw these spectacular estates overlooking Fisher Sound.

After checking out the anchorages that would be adequate for a future layover, we crossed Fisher Sound and tucked into a small cove at Ram Island where one modest house sits on the private island. The shore of Ram Island and the small surrounding islands are all white/grey solid rock with beaches of cobbles making it a very lovely anchorage, looking very much like Maine. The bottom is weedy and it took a minute for the anchor to bite in but we didn’t expect any wind this evening so we didn’t need to dig the anchor in very much.

The anchorage was a little unsettled due to wakes coming in from the sound but it calmed down in the evening. We enjoy a quiet afternoon as numerous local boats came out, anchored for a while, some with kids who took a few jumps into the water, and then moved on.