In The Navy (FT “A” School), Part 3

Through the summer that year and the next, we found one excellent beach to hang out at. On the New London Side on the Thames River and to the South was this place called Harkness Memorial Park. It’s an old mansion that at that time was being renovated to be a tourist site and even had its own small light house.

We liked the west most part of the beach there because of some topographical qualities. There was a stream that we could easily wade through at low tide which separated us from the throngs of people/kids on the main beach. The stream caused an ever shifting beach front and some weeks would spill into a large pool, other weeks, be pretty straight into the Ocean. It was neat to see it change over time. If we were coming or going and the tide was high, it was not an easy task to cross the stream. Sometimes it would be up to your waist!

A link to a satellite picture is below;
http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&z=17&ll=41.30183,-72.115642&spn=0.00328,0.006512 Zoom in and out to see more.

To the right of the frame is the mansion. At the top is a parking lot that they installed right before I left town, it was a dirt lot before. To the lower left is the stream and beach. If you want to you can zoom out a few times, then pan right till you get to the Thames River (the big one) and follow the right bank of the river north and see the General Dynamics boat Yard (before the bridge) building something. Pan farther up and you will see the base and all of the piers. The site used to not let you zoom in too much because it’s an active base. It’s classified info when you talk about what boat is at any given place at any given time. Later on I will drop providing any dates, when I start talking about my time on the boat. I don’t want DOD coming over and knocking on my door.

This beach was our main hangout for the two summers I was in school. We would start going in the late spring and be there most weekends till early fall and it got windy. More than once we went to the beach too late in the season and froze our butts off.

We would bring hotdogs, buns and of course a large cooler of beer. We would hunt up and down the beach and gather dry driftwood for a fire. It was a short walk over the dunes to gather enough dry beach grass to get the fire going. We were very good at the whole beach fire thing and I guess it was legal, because we never got basted over having a fire going.

We would walk farther west (left on the picture) if we wanted to get away from the crowds even more, or even just have some time alone, to think. It was much less crowded the farther you went. If you just kept walking that way, you would wind up in New York, but that would take a long time.

If you go back to that map and zoom out, you can see the Islands to the south that we could see from the beach most days and pondered going to visit some day. We always wondered what was on them and someone spewed a rumor about an abandoned old Navy base being out there, or a Nuclear Weapons storage site. None of which are true. We never bothered to actually go to any of the islands.

Fall began to wear into winter and our days at the beach would be over. So we regressed into playing cards in our free time (Study for class?? Yeah right!). We would also go out on the town more in the fall/winter, which I will reluctantly dive into next.