The Trail Blazer

Pat Mundus arrived late to our interview on a bright morning in mid-May, wearing sunglasses and sandals, her preferred accessories these days. “Sorry I’m late,” she said and admitted that she forgot it was a Tuesday. That’s how time moves in retirement, especially in a maritime community like Greenport, New York, where water, like the days, flows clean and timeless.

But Pat isn’t actually retired; a good mariner never is. Part of the reason we were docked on the 57-foot Surprise, which in 2019 she sold to her neighbors along with her charter business, East End Charters, was for Pat to visit the boat with whom she shares much of her history. So Pat, fashionably late or right on time, sat barefoot on the starboard side of the boat, her toes dangling.

She left home for the first time when she was 17. She put her name on index cards on those “cheesy” yacht club bulletin boards in Montauk, which in the 1970s was not the tourist trap and haven for twentysomethings with hangovers, but a sleepy fishing village with a shark-obsessed culture.

Pat’s Montauk was one where artists like Andy Warhol lived atop the bluffs and where the valleys were comprised of middle- and lower-class folk, such as the Munduses, who ate fish nearly five days a week; meat was a luxury. It was a place where yachting or sailing, which is as prevalent today as moon jellies lining the