Breaking The Sound Barrier

Amanda and B.K. are back in the newsroom writing stories and editing photos. Day One turned out well, although it did take longer than expected.
On Sunday, Frank Juliano will be finishing the Milford section of our trek. He’ll cover the area from Milford Harbor to Milford Point.

Here’s a video taken by Amanda and B.K. on their adventures in Breaking the Sound Barrier.

So, after five hours and God knows how many miles (I was initially told that my leg of the walk was four miles, but I’m pretty sure that was a blatant lie), we are done. Yaaaaay!!!!
My feet and back are killing me, but I do feel like I accomplished something. I’m on way back to the office to write the full account of my adventures, so stay tuned.

This is where Frank Juliano will be on Sunday on his walk.

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It’s now noon, and we’re entering our fourth hour of the Sound walk. If I’m not mistaken, we’re in the Point Beach area. Who knows where Gulf Beach (our supposed end point) is or if we will ever get there. Plus I think I just heard thunder. Yikes!
– Amanda Cuda

Walking the Milford shoreline on hazy Saturday morning, you’ll see lots of things — ducks, egrets — even those Monk parakeets. You know what you won’t see a lot of? People. Seriously — there is almost no one here. Just the odd fisherman, dog walker or guy hosing down his driveway. It’s peaceful, but a bit spooky.
– Amanda Cuda

So, around 8 a.m., we started our jorney along the Long Island Sound in Milford. It’s now about 10 a.m., and we’re not even halfway through. Oof. We just finished walking through the Woodmont area. It’s a beautiful area full of history and wildlife. However, I won’t get into that now because I have a LOT more walking to do and it looks like rain. Gotta go.

One of the places that we won’t be able to take you on our beach walk is UNDER the Sound. But if you want to see what it looks like, here is a cool site with sonar and digital photos. Check it out.

http://www.lisrc.uconn.edu/lis_uwtour/

After weeks of planning, we’re ready to hit the beaches. Not running, but walking. Step by step from Milford to Greenwich.

Reporters and photographers from the Connecticut Post, The Advocate and Greenwich Time will be embarking on this project on Saturday.

We going at this with a full multimedia assault with videos, blogs and iPhones. And of course, the stories will appear in all three newspapers.

From these posts, we’ll let you know the progress each day.

Reporter Amanda Cuda and photographer B.K. Angeletti will start the first leg in Milford starting at the Oyster River and ending at Gulf Beach on Saturday. They should start walking by 9 a.m.

Let’s hope for good weather.

Here’s a video of Amanda, Rich Weizel, Rob Varnon and MariAn Gail Brown sharing their thoughts on the project.

Long Island Sound.

It’s the spectacular backdrop for our lives – a great mixing basin of waters fresh and salt, more of a bathtub than an ocean, surprisingly shallow and therefore particularly susceptible to the pull of the tides and the push of pollution from the millions who live around its edges.

Here in Fairfield County, the coast of the Sound is a constant source of beauty and mystery – beauty too often seen from afar, and mystery because many of us have very few opportunities to see it up close, to know it well. The Sound is much less a workplace than it used to be, much more of a rich person’s private playground than it used to be. The issue of access to recreation on the coastline has been hotly debated in Connecticut for decades, as Neil Vigdor’s story relates Sunday, and it’s certainly not getting any better.

Neither is the health of the Sound. Its biggest threat is not the industry that still dots the shoreline, or even the stubborn toxic residue of the industries of yesteryear. The biggest threat is us. That threat comes in the form of the pollutants that storm water carries from our lawns, roads and drainpipes. Runoff is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, literally on steroids – a turbid mix of all the substances that fuel our modern lives, from motor oil to fertilizer to pharmaceuticals.

So what’s it like up close, the long, crenellated coastline of the county? It’s twenty-some miles as the crow flies, but at least 80 on foot – probably a lot more than that when you figure in all of the tiny inlets and coves and crannies.

Which is where we come in.

In order to answer that question for our readers – what’s it like, up close? – we’re dispatching dozens of reporters and photographers from our three coastal dailies – The Connecticut Post, The Advocate in Stamford, and the Greenwich Time – to walk each step of the coastline. It will take them three solid weeks – and we’ll be bringing you dispatches from the edge every day, starting with Amanda Cuda’s accompanying story today and finishing in early July on Byram Point, where the county meets New York state. For a part of that final stretch, we’ll invite you to come out and walk with us, to celebrate this beautiful place. More on that later – for now, and over the coming weeks, we invite you to share our journey in the pages of our newspapers, and on our Web sites, where we’ll feature a running blog, photo galleries, video and an interactive map.

We hope you enjoy the trip.

David McCumber is editor of the Greenwich Time and the Advocate in Stamford, and is editorial director of the Connecticut Media Group.