The name, all by itself, would entice me to visit. Getting to Robinhood Cove requires making the transit of Goose Rock Passage where the current can flow swiftly and we timed it each time to assure we were making the transit at close to slack.
- Once through the passage, Robinhood Marina is directly across the cove. We never went north, but instead went south in the long cove that is the Sasanoa River. It’s really an excellent anchorage, and I was surprised to not see more boats there. The cove is at least a couple miles long, and we anchored maybe a mile or so down the cove in water that was about 8’ at low. When we were there, a plague of flies seemed to have descended on the cove, causing a bit of frustration in such a nice and quiet spot.
- We took a dinghy day trip south in the cove to where highway 127 crosses the river. While the charted depths are quite shallow, we did see several local sailboats back there on mooring balls. In a storm, this might be an excellent storm hole. We beached the boat at the landing there at the highway and walked over to the Josephine Newman Audubon Sanctuary. The hiking there at the sanctuary appears to be excellent, but we cut our day short before we hiked much of it due to the frequent notices of Lyme’s carrying ticks in the area. The mosquitos, it should be noted, were abundant and healthy.
- We learned here about the growth locally of oyster farming, and our dinghy ride took us past a couple oyster farming operations. Personally, when I watch all the resource it takes to put a single lobster in the market or on the table, I really love the idea of devoting resources to oyster farming. Not that there’s no resource us in putting an oyster on the table, but it intuitively feels to me like a more sustainable fishery. I’ll do a post sometime on my impressions of lobstering, but I’ll summarize it here by saying that yes, I like the taste of lobster, but it’s really mostly the butter that drips from the lobster that makes it so wonderful. To get a lobster on my plate, there’s a whole lot of resource that goes in to powering all the boats involved, netting the tons (literally) of mackerel to bait the traps, etc. Every time I see a 55 gallon barrel of rotting mackerel sitting on the dock waiting to be used as lobster bait it’s hard not to consider how many pounds of good, edible mackerel is used to harvest on pound of lobster. And none of this even considers the thousands of lobster pot buoys cruisers need to dodge, the abandoned pots and associated lines polluting the water, or that segment of the lobstering population that seems intent on exerting their presumed predominant first right of the water over cruisers. Of course, there’s that wonderful segment of the lobstering population that’s kind and courteous, happily coexisting with the cruising population. Personally I go out of my way to yield right of way and predominance to the lobstermen, as they’re out making a living and I’m out having fun, but it’s hard for me not to wonder how much more good table fare the fishing community might be able to provide to our society if we modified our buying habits and bought more good mackerel and a little less lobster. Of course, I might be all wet with these observations as well, and would love to have an actual informed conversation someday with a fisheries biologist who could explain it all to me in objective and unbiased science. Either way, we always buy a few lobster each summer—directly from the lobstermen on the boat btw—and enjoy both it AND the butter dripping from it.
- Robinhood Marina (technically called Derecktor Maine now after a recent ownership change, but I’ll stick with Robinhood because I like it so much) is one of our favorite marinas ever. Neil Collins runs the place and was able to help me out with some unique repairs. Interestingly Jordan and Desiree (the kids from Project Atticus) were there at the same time getting some battery work done. During the summer of 2021, the marina hosted local musicians on Friday night to play—kind of a back-porch affair—and we were lucky enough to enjoy some local music. While the only walking to be done us up and down the road, the traffic wasn’t that bad, and if we turned north just outside the marina we were on a local road that had very few cars but a healthy population of bugs.
- Maybe a mile up the road from Robinhood Marina is the Robinhood Free Meetinghouse. It’s a community landmark that hosts concerts and other events. The highlight of our summer may have been a Saturday night concert we attended there to see the Porch Party Mamas, a relatively local band with at least a couple albums out. We thoroughly enjoyed the walk up to the Meetinghouse, the concert and accompanying food and beverage, and of course the wonderful music. The walk home in the dark with a pleasant buzz left a smile on my face for days.