We’ve noticed only a few among seafood restaurants that we patron where Manhattan style clam chowder is regularly offered, if at all. Crab Pot and Walt’s Wharf, seafood icons in Long Beach & Seal Beach, respectively, do not. The Fish Tale, which was Long Beach’s oldest seafood restaurant but sold a few years ago, did not at the time it was sold. (It’s now an Irish-themed pub and restaurant; good food.) The Boat House on Alamitos Bay, Long Beach, does but only Friday-Sunday @ $12/bowl . However, at Mersea’s here in PSL it’s available daily @ $7.50/bowl and it’s quite good. The common substitution at the other places is a red seafood chowder that may, or may not, have much clam ingredient. So, it’s delightful to have me Manhattan only a short dinghy ride away!
Truth-in-Advertising Statement: The “short dinghy ride away” from here in the anchorage is half a mile to the Harford Pier. What you arrive to is a transient-use mooring ball 20 or 30 ft from a steel ladder attached to the pier beneath a sign that says Transient Skiff Tie-Up 48-hr limit. You “tie” a stern line off to the mooring ball, then “propel” yourself forward by whatever mode you choose to grab a worn-out rope hanging from the ladder on to which you snap your painter. Then pull yourself and dink to the ladder itself and step on to it from the dink. After climbing 8 or 9 rungs you emerge onto a wooden platform before a gate that is bolted shut with a rusty barrel bolt. Struggle with that a few moments, opening the gate inward toward the pier, thankfully, and through it you go! Then it’s a short walk down the pier to Mersea’s. DELIGHTFULLY rustic!
BTW. If you are on a guest mooring ball (not at the anchorage), someone will come fetch you for free (on a schedule of rounds; not by demand) to a floating platform, a.k.a. loading dock, under the pier which leads you to a conventional wooden stairway w/rails up to the pier. But it’s against the rules to tie up there and leave the dink.
Truth-in-Advertising Statement: The “short dinghy ride away” from here in the anchorage is half a mile to the Harford Pier. What you arrive to is a transient-use mooring ball 20 or 30 ft from a steel ladder attached to the pier beneath a sign that says Transient Skiff Tie-Up 48-hr limit. You “tie” a stern line off to the mooring ball, then “propel” yourself forward by whatever mode you choose to grab a worn-out rope hanging from the ladder on to which you snap your painter. Then pull yourself and dink to the ladder itself and step on to it from the dink. After climbing 8 or 9 rungs you emerge onto a wooden platform before a gate that is bolted shut with a rusty barrel bolt. Struggle with that a few moments, opening the gate inward toward the pier, thankfully, and through it you go! Then it’s a short walk down the pier to Mersea’s. DELIGHTFULLY rustic!
BTW. If you are on a guest mooring ball (not at the anchorage), someone will come fetch you for free (on a schedule of rounds; not by demand) to a floating platform, a.k.a. loading dock, under the pier which leads you to a conventional wooden stairway w/rails up to the pier. But it’s against the rules to tie up there and leave the dink.
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