June 6th-7th  

We awoke in Marlborough to twenty knot winds bouncing us around at the dock and we figured it was easier to face the choppy River so we cast off.  We only cruised about twenty miles North, to Kingston.  Kingston was once the capitol of New York, and the center of River commerce, with the establishment of the Cornell Tugboat works in the early 1800s.  Cornell’s tugs and barges moved blue stone to New York City primarily for sidewalk use, and then brought coal from Pennsylvania on the canal (now mostly filled in) that used to extend the Rondout Creek to Delaware.  We learned this fascinating river history at the Hudson River Heritage Museum in Kingston.  There is still a small shipyard building barges in the Rondout Creek and there are old tugs and barges all along the Creek shoreline leading up to Kingston.

We took in the art walk on Saturday night, poking in the small galleries, and on Sunday morning we went back to town to walk through the neighborhoods to see the old stone houses from the 1700s and the Victorian architecture from the 1800s.  Sunday has been the best day yet - sunny, warm, with just a little breeze.  We set off upriver about ten.  

We passed through a group of swimmers making one leg of their annual River Swim - about a hundred miles spread over five days.  This leg was eighteen miles, from the Rip Van Winkle bridge near Catskill to Kingston.  Each swimmer was accompanied by a kayaker, and there were several other motor boats around to protect them and warn other river traffic like us.  

We made a day of it, dropping anchor across from Castleton-on-Hudson, where many boats stop to take their masts down before entering the canal.  We will take ours down in the morning and continue on up to Waterford tomorrow, hopefully to enter the Erie canal on Tuesday.