Watch Hill….. Again!

I wasn’t planning to do a post for our latest visit to Watch Hill – how much can you say about a little place like Watch Hill?  We had such a delightful 5 days there, that I decided to share a few photos. Watch Hill is close to home, but has so much to offer – good anchorage, lovely beach, nice town. Not much more that a boater could want.

We left in so-so weather (note the Captain’s foul weather jacket) with anticipation of beautiful weather to follow….soon!  Our wish was granted — We had four days in a row of perfect weather!!
We joined our friends, Mary Jo and Dean, who were already at Napatree.

Retirement means that you can stay and play after Sunday. What a difference it makes. See the anchorage on Sunday compared to Tuesday!

How nice it was to have 4 days of beautiful weather!! We enjoyed beach time – swimming, reading, and walking.

We celebrated our 19^th wedding anniversary… for 2 days. We had breakfast at St Clair Annex. We even treated ourselves to an afternoon drink and “snack” at the Ocean House.

On our actual anniversary, Dean cooked his famous seafood pasta for our dinner onboard Jallao.The four of us dinghied to land to attend the “Watch Hill Sunset Concert on the Green” — Al Copley. Lots of fun! Al and I had had never heard of him before. Awesome pianist and a very upbeat, fun guy.

Once again, the sky became our entertainment, showering us with a various displays of Mother Nature’s  beauty. We just don’t get tired of it.

The horizontal “rainbow cloud” (below) formed a stripe across the sky over the beach — just like the one we saw last week sailing home from Block Island through Fishers Island.  We had never seen anything like this before, and  now we saw it twice in a few days! Google to the rescue. That ‘stripe’ isn’t a rainbow (it doesn’t form with raindrops or even cloud drops), but is actually an arc…a special type of arc called a circumhorizon arc.  It occurs when the sun is high in the sky (at least 58° above the horizon) and ice crystals are present in high, thin cirrus clouds. The sunlight splits or ‘refracts’ into it’s component colors, reflecting off the interior ‘faces’ of the ice crystals. When the angle between the sun and the falling ice crystals is just right, the ‘arc’ will develop.  The phenomenon is quite rare because the ice crystals must be aligned horizontally to refract the high sun.