I arrived in Old Saybrook, Conn., too late to catch sight of Katharine Hepburn, who’d lived here until her death in 2003. But a small town like this would never let a legendary woman like that be forgotten.

“I hear Katharine Hepburn stories all the time,” said Chuck Still, executive director of the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, mentioning the town’s fire marshal and a security systems installer as examples. “People think of her as Citizen Hepburn. For many people in the community, she was their claim to fame.”

On-screen and off, Hepburn was known for her elegance, her wit, and those cheekbones as sharp as steak knives. Yet I also had to give the star credit for her fine taste in geography: Old Saybrook is a pearl born from the sands of the Connecticut shore.

“Fenwick is and always has been my other paradise,” reads a giant inscription in the Hepburn museum, which is housed in the performing arts center. (Fenwick is a borough of Old Saybrook.)

I’ve been visiting the Constitution State’s coastal area since I was single-digit-years old. My family has kept a sailboat in Noank, a few miles south of Mystic, since the 1970s. Yet my knowledge of the chain of towns, Old Saybrook, Niantic and Groton, along the shoreline is paltry. We were always rushing to the boatyard to catch the optimum winds; my memory of these communities is a blur of exit signs.

On a weekend when no one was on the water after Hurricane Irene had blown through a few days earlier, I finally had an opportunity to detour. My father kept any peeps of protest to himself.

“The Connecticut shore is a community of small towns,” said Still, “and each of these small towns has its own identity.”

If I had to assign an identity to each town along my chosen route, then Old Saybrook would be Kate. Its character mirrors hers: attractive, cultured and a bit salty. On a more literal level, I could easily craft an improvised tour of Hepburn sites.

I started with the museum, two rooms containing such memorabilia as awards, personal letters signed “Katy” and photos of her boating, biking, golfing and sitting in a bathtub after the hurricane of ‘38 swept away her Fenwick home. Following a tip from Eunice Royston, a volunteer manning the gift shop, I next went to Walt’s, a supermarket that Hepburn frequented. (According to a video at the museum, she favored Walt’s lamb chops.)

“I would see her old car parked out front,” said Royston. “People were always very polite and let her shop.”

I paid my final homage at her “summer cottage,” a stormy-weathered estate perched on a peninsula on Long Island Sound. Irene had chewed up a nearby dock, but Hepburn’s home remained seemingly untouched, a steely grande dame who stood her ground.

Across the Connecticut River, Niantic does not name-drop unless the object of affection has scales and a pouty mouth. For example, at Cini Memorial Park, under the Niantic River Bridge, you might hear fisherfolk belting out their love for a particular striped bass, porgy or bluefish. Along the boardwalk, a few lines dipped into the Niantic River, the water quiet except for the occasional splash of a bird having better luck.

The wildlife is abundant along the shore, both above (cormorants, gulls, egrets, etc.) and below (scallops, spider crabs, razor clams) the waterline. But one of the most exhilarating sightings straddles both worlds.