Yachting & Lake Life | VFYW by Chris Bodenner

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

Some highlights from this week’s write-up:

• A sleuth who got engaged in this view, and another who honeymooned there.

• A band named Bumpin’ Uglies.

• A super-sleuth with a moving tribute to his dad, who died in hospice not terribly far from this window last week.

• A crabby profile.

• A reverse red herring?

From the winner of last week’s contest:

Cool! I’ll take the book. Thanks, Chris!

I’m chuffed to receive the following note from a “long-time reader and off-and-on subscriber here”:

The last time I paused my subscription, I wondered what would make me reactivate it. Yesterday morning, when I opened the VFYW write-up and saw photo #487, I found out! I glanced at it and thought, “Huh, that looks an awful lot like downtown!” Zooming in confirmed that the photo really was taken three blocks away from my house, here in my adopted hometown of Hamilton! Of all the college towns I’ve lived in, it’s the smallest — and the one I’d have guessed to be the least likely to show up in VFYW!

So congratulations, Chris, you got me to resubscribe!

I always enjoy the follow-up notes, so I’m sharing a few of my own here. A few things my fellow sleuths didn’t cover include:

• Two doors down from the Zen Den is Flour and Salt Bakerywhere they make the best chocolate bread that I’ve had outside of Paris.

• Hamilton is delightfully walkable, so I’m including a few views from my walks, including the exterior of Oliveri’s from the corner of Lebanon and Maple (the well-lit place on the left side of the street):

  

  … the tree in the Village Green lit for the holidays (which will be joined by a menorah next week):

  

  … and a bridge over Payne Creek, which leads into Taylor Lake:

  

  As you can see from the photos, winter is well underway here.

• On the movie front, I was surprised no one mentioned The Addams Family. While several towns have houses they claim inspired Charles Addamshe attended Colgate for a year and we have our own Addams Family House.

• And for the entrepreneurial among us, if someone has a cool million dollars and the desire to run a bed and breakfast, this historic building is seeking a new owner.

Life isn’t perfect here, but of all the places I’ve lived, it has the strongest sense of community. Jennifer Brice, a faculty member in the Colgate English department, recently published a collection of essays, Another Northand a few of them give glimpses of life in Hamilton. I often think, completely unironically, that I fell asleep one night a few years ago in Virginia and woke up the next morning living in a fairy tale in NY.

Thanks for the chance to think about what makes this tiny Village home!
With prayers for peace this holiday season.

I can’t wait for this chaotic year to be done. The Burner super-sleuth shows his persistence:

I missed last week’s contest due to a dead phone; I had a small dead spot on the touchscreen. That by itself was fine — I could work around the dead area — but unfortunately it was time for the periodic “enter your PIN” additional security, and two of the digits were in the dead zone. The workaround was to buy a converter and a wired mouse! Instead of getting frustrated looking for the right Phoenix Block building, I got frustrated having to run to Target and hope they had what i needed (they did). I already ordered a new phone, but unfortunately it arrived six hours too late.

But he was able to send a few views:

The pics are from Cuatunalco, a tiny village on the Oaxacan coast about an hour from Zipolite and 45 minutes from Bahias de Huatulco. My cousin had the foresight to buy land there and is nearly done with construction (pool and landscaping still underway). The pictures don’t capture how stunning this part of the Mexican coast is. Unfortunately we were there too early, but during peak whaling season you can see whales all day long from the deck.

One more followup:

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving and your holiday season is off to a great start! I wanted to follow up with a fun fact about one of the notable people flagged in the VFYW last week who graduated from Colgate. One sleuth wrote:

And the writer of the Christmas classics we’re all singing this time of year — “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Silver and Gold,” and “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” — Johnny Marks, graduated from there too.

I thought it might be cool for your readers to know that Johnny Marks — writer of some of America’s most prolific holiday songs — was Jewish. In fact, Jewish composers wrote many of the most famous Christmas songs. Irving Berlin is one of the most notable; he wrote “White Christmas” (as well as “God Bless America”):

It’s emblematic of the amazing, multicultural country we live in to know that Jewish Americans contributed so much to the festive season. Happy holidays!

And Merry Hanukkah!

On to this week’s viewa previous winner writes:

Many thanks for serving up another easier view to keep a sporadic sleuth in the game! Many winners this week, I’m guessing.

Here’s a place that I’ve actually been — a few times, but most significantly when searching for a jeweler to set the diamond from my old tie pin (that dates me and my country of origin!) into my then-fiancée’s engagement ring. I forget why we went there or whether we actually bought the ring there or at home in DC, and I dare not ask my wife …

From a sleuth in Chicago sending his second entry ever:

This immediately screamed East Coast to me. Wealthy, green, water, marinas on both sides. We can see that there are large boats on both upstream and downstream sides of the bridge, so likely a drawbridge. Googling drawbridges in the various East Coast states (first guess was Connecticut), it did not take long to find the bridge.

A first-time sleuth knows it well:

That bridge is where I proposed to my now ex-wife back in 1985, when we lived in Eastport. I’m not yet a subscriber, although I look forward to and read the Dish every week.

Another guesses simply, “Vinylhaven ferry terminal, Rockland, Maine.” From our previous winner in Sherman Oaks:

Another view that looked impossible to solve, at first. So many marinas in the US. I could only surmise that it was on the East Coast, and looking south around sunrise. In my head, all I could hear were Yacht Rock anthems.

One of my favorite characters on Instagram generates yacht-rock covers. Here’s “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails — with a smoother finish:

From the ever-inventive San Mateo:

So far I have four Reimagineds in mind this week: role reversal, board game, Regatta Day, and the little house unlittled.

For role reversal, reverse the roles of cars and boats in the marina. Line the asphalt lot with boats out of the water, resting on trailers and parked perfectly in the painted parking spaces where cars used to park. Move the cars into the marina slips and moor them between the pilings. Keep the little white building in the upper right. Turn the big concrete pad in the middle of the lot into a “dry dock,” and repaint the pavement so “NO PARKING” becomes a “NO WAKE” warning:

Next, turn the marina into a board game while keeping the same overall layout: marina at the top, parking lot below, little white building to the right, and concrete pad in the center. Flatten everything into printed artwork on a cardboard board. Use the painted parking spaces to form a grid, and morph the small numbers on the asphalt into game points. Turn the concrete pad in the middle into a special “Harbor HQ” tile. (Maybe it’s like “Go” in Monopoly?) Replace the photos of cars and boats with stylized game pieces, and add score tracks around the perimeter of the board:

The parking lot looks too empty, so imagine the VFYW on Regatta Day: the marina is packed tight with sails and tiny specks of color are everywhere. Colorful cars fill every parking spot. People set up pop-up tents, coolers, and folding chairs along the seawall. Pennants and flags hang from the light pole and stretch across the lot:

One of the key clues was the little white house with Dusty covering up something important. So let’s make the house more prominent and show us what company name was obscured by Dusty. Of course, it’s “DUSTY CAPITAL:

West Orange sees what I did there:

I appreciate the clue construction this view, in that you leave the “Capital” visible on the sign for “Sera Capital” — an investment firm outpost, while perhaps subconsciously clueing that we should be looking for a waterfront *state* capital … an entirely different type of capital than the sign suggests!

What do you call that? A reverse red herring? A clue that on its face offers one line of inquiry, but in fact implies a very, very direct path to the solution?

Back to caring for a sick baby. Wish us well!

Wishing all the well! Here’s Giuseppe, our super-sleuth in Rome:

A contest with a marina and a water tower in the background … I felt a vague sense of déjà vu. After a brief search of the archivesI found it: contest #258 in Muskegon, MI. And what was that contest title? Why, “Déjà View”!

Berkeley names the body of water in view: “There was no way this scene or that marina could be anywhere on the West Coast, so because palm trees are nowhere in sight, I focused on the Chesapeake Bay.” Here’s the view from Chini:

Our super-sleuth on Park Avenue names the city:

This one felt like it could be any one of a hundred marinas down the East Coast. Initially I felt it was one of those towns off I-95 through Connecticut, like Mystic or Groton, but I eventually got to Annapolis. Another sleuth on a college tour/visit?

Not this time. The Brookline super-sleuth singles out a boat:

My first impression of this week’s view was the eastern US, maybe one of the small marinas in Connecticut dotting the coast of Long Island Sound. But a little squinting at the boat with the partially blurred name put me in the right place:

This looked like a pretty nice yacht, so I figured that its name might be floating online somewhere. Taking into account the slant of the font, the blurred bit looked like it could be Roman numerals, a little wider than II, so maybe III?

A similar sounding sleuth, Brookland, continues the thread:

The key was the boat “Lady Jane III”. “Lady Jane” seems to be a common enough name for a boat and was easy enough to read when enlarged, but what was blurred out? After looking around at several “Lady Jane II” images, it didn’t take that much scrolling to find that this boat is actually for sale — for only $1.2M:

And it’s pretty clear why you blurred “Annapolis,” since it didn’t take long to find the Yacht Basin. Here’s a YouTube video giving us a tour of the boat:

… which lets me present my window guess as a view from the boat:

How the A2 Team in Ann Arbor got to the right marina:

Marinas.com to the rescue again (as in Kennebunk contest): Maryland seemed like a good guess to start with. Our daughter’s in-laws have a boat on the Magothy River, and the area looks similar enough. Turns out that it is basically around the corner from the window, as we found a match here — at the Annapolis Yacht Basin Company.

Our globetrotting super-sleuth in Alaska shares one of the most moving VFYW moments in a while:

I’m not the first to recognize coincidental patterns in VFYW locations that match up with something in their personal life, but the Views from the past two weeks are a little bittersweet. We’ve gone from New York’s finger lakes — where my dad grew up — to the Chesapeake — where he passed last week at age 92.

I barely got to talk to him about the NY contest, and he didn’t get a chance to find Annapolis. For a guy who was lucky to identify one in 50 Views, the irony is that he might have gotten lucky guessing this week. He was an occasional visitor to the city, and often recounted a week-long voyage from Kittery, Maine to Annapolis when delivering his beloved J-40 sailboat, Windsong, to a new owner on Spa Creek, not far from this week’s View.

The VFYW contest has been a central element in our twice weekly FaceTime calls for nearly a decade now, connecting us even as we lived several thousand miles apart. The Saturday call usually focused on the Reveal — congratulating ourselves if we got the View, or wondering at the diversity of tangents that sleuths could dredge up for even the most mundane locations. Not to mention our reactions to Andrew’s sometimes-excitable but always provocative columns.

The second call focused on that week’s guess and what we might add to the conversation. He loved helping me brainstorm my ecotourism adventures, especially when they paralleled something he had tried himself — a great hiker, sailor, and kayaker in his day. Immensely proud whenever we got some content into the blog, he could be miffed if you, Chris, didn’t pick up every scrap of digression. Famously long-winded (and I realize the apple doesn’t often roll far from the tree), he never did appreciate the value of a good editor. (But I’m thankful for the dozens of times you’ve saved me from myself over the years!)

I know I’ve been lucky to have my dad around for my 64 years — and the family is very happy that he made it into his ninth decade. We always imagined he would kick it after capsizing his kayak in the waves of his beloved James River, or crashing his eBike on slippery leaves littering the Williamsburg-Jamestown bike paths — two activities he continued until just last year, despite objections from my mom. But in the end he went quietly in his sleep, dosed on the hospice cocktail, in his house among family.

The Dish is most verklempt. Here’s a fond memory from a sleuth in Chestertown, MD:

I’ve been a Dishhead forever, but I’m not as well traveled as most, so it was a thrill to recognize this right off the bat. In my younger days on a summer-camp sailing trip to Annapolis, our counselors rented a single room in this hotel so we could get out of the heat for a night. Almost 50 years later, I remember the excitement of sneaking past the front desk, walking up the stairwell, and packing 15 kids into a room meant for two.

Next up, the “a-maize-ing sleuth” in Ann Arbor labels the nearby streets:

Right behind the window’s hotel is the City Dock, at the confluence of Main Street, Compromise Street and Ego Alley, the waterway. (From Ego to Compromise seems to be an archetypal story arc in a relationship sitcom.)

I first came upon the name “Annapolis” in Tom Clancy’s book The Hunt for Red October. Later, after finishing all the Clancy novels (including those that were made into movies: Patriot Games, Clear and Present Dangerand The Sum of All Fearsand some that were not, like Cardinal of the Kremlin), I learned so much about the city and the US Naval Academy. For Clancy readers, “he was from Annapolis” carries clear meanings: someone thoroughly trained, drenched in naval pride and lore, career-oriented, and lineage-tagged just like West Point and Quantico serving as codewords for the character and tradition of other professional networks.

Finally in 2023, I visited Annapolis and turned familiar place names into my own photos. At the City Dock: