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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Tine and Rubob Sail Toward Home

Tine and Rubob have been so preoccupied with their doughty sloop Puffin this spring and summer that they haven't had time for their walks in the village. Villagers who've set their clocks by Tine and Rubob's passage along the village sidewalks have had to resort to other accurate methods of timekeeping, such as sundials, clepsydras (water clocks) and atomic clocks.


Clepsydra

"We need to go for a walk in the village soon," Tine said to Rubob this past Sunday as they sailed by a lighthouse at the entrance to Narragansett Bay.



Rubob asked Tine to pass the bucket in the cockpit, and Tine thought he was looking a little green around the gills.

"Perhaps Rubob needs to sit under a tree," she thought. She'd read that Queen Elizabeth had asked the captain of the royal yacht Britannia what the best cure for seasickness was, and he'd replied, "Sitting under a tree, your Majesty."


Royal yacht Britannia on the River Tyne (as it happens)

Tine and Rubob did have an opportunity to walk in Newport, along the Cliff Walk.



It was all very beautiful and the cottages were quite remarkable, of course, but it made Tine a little homesick for her own village.



"I wouldn't mind stopping there for a cup of tea," Tine said to Rubob as they approached the Chinese Teahouse in front of the Marble House. "But I suppose it's out of the question. Shame, really. We'll have a cup of tea on Puffin."



Queen Elizabeth used to take her afternoon tea in the teak-lined Sun Lounge on the Shelter Deck on Britannia, before the royal yacht was decommissioned in 1997.



On Tine and Rubob's boat, the Sun Lounge was the cockpit, but it wasn't very sunny when Tine and Rubob set out for home on Sunday.



You might have seen them passing if you'd been looking out over Narragansett Bay from Newport that morning. On the stern of Puffin, their home port was listed as "Farmington, CT."

"Curious to think of Farmington as a home port, isn't it?" Tine thought. But for all her sailing, Tine's home port really was her little village far from the coast.