First let me say that if it wasn’t for Long Island (and don’t get me wrong I have nothing against Long Island it’s just “in the way”} we who make our homes on the shoreline of Connecticut would be on the ocean, not the Sound. Those fabulous south shore beaches on Long Island would be the fabulous south shore beaches of Connecticut, thus saving me the money of having to go to, say, Montauk, to have some ocean time.

But Long Island is there because of what I can best describe as some “glacial hokey pokey” and thus we live on an estuary and not the ocean.

A girl can dream.

These days I am content and feel blessed to live in a house high on a hill that overlooks my beloved Long Island Sound (they even got to name it….why not the Connecticut Sound??). No flood insurance needed.

I grew up swimming in the Sound off the shores of New Rochelle and Mamaroneck in Westchester County, often fully submerged in said Sound for the bulk of any given summer day, resulting in swallowing what must have amounted to gallons of salt water. “Underwater Tag” was one of our favorite summer games. My parents believed me to be part fish. My family belonged to a “beach club” (sounds fancy, I know, but it really wasn’t in those days) where both my sister and I joined the swim team. I was a good swimmer but my sister was a GREAT swimmer. And ours was the last of the swim club circuit to get a swimming pool; while the kids we competed against increasingly became used to training and competing in the safe and contained environment of a pool, we were all still doing it in the good old Long Island Sound…and sometimes even at low tide. Practice would start around 8am rain or shine (except of course if there was lightning…then all bets were off) EVERY day, and that Sound water could be mighty cold even in the middle of August. No excuses. Dive in and swim.

And we did. Day after day.

And it was our training in the Long Island Sound that gave our team the edge. See, when the other kids who were pool-trained came to our turf for a meet we used the Sound to psych them out.

“Watch out for the jelly fish,” we’d tell them. “They can really sting ya…even the clear ones. Oh and the eels and the water lice. Nasty.”

Of course the clear jelly fish didn’t sting at all; in fact us “Sound” kids loved to have jellyfish fights which included shoving them in each other’s bathing suits. What fun!

We’d have the competition terrified and hanging from the lane markers. Bunch of wusses.

When swimming pools were finally built at our club, we were rewarded by having practice at 7:30 every morning. And then a 3:30 afternoon “sprint” practice.

Still, outside of swimming practice we always spent our leisure time IN THE SOUND.

I meet people all the time who won’t put their big toe into the Sound let alone swim in it. To this day, I’ll take the Sound over a pool any day. Just like being a Mets fan, growing up in the Sound “builds character”.

And now I live on the Connecticut shoreline with a view of the Sound from nearly every window. I get to see the sunrises and the rainbows and the storms approaching. Once a water baby, always a water baby and I can’t imagine living anywhere else in Connecticut but on the shoreline.

- Pam Landry

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