August 25 and 26 - Isles of Shoals to Gloucester and Lay Day There

The 31.4 miles took 4.5 hours after our 9 am departure. Like yesterday, there was no wind.Generally, blue cloudless skies mean no wind. I think I got a sense of what it feels like to be a power boater during this passage. They prefer no wind because it makes a smoother, waveless ride. For us, the joy is normally in the journey, but with no wind we just wanted to get there as soon as possible so we pumped up the revolutions per minute and made seven boring knots per hour while burning more diesel fuel than we wish to. It was quite a straight shot on the auto pilot from Isles of Shoals Light to Cape Ann. Then, along the coast of Cape Ann we saw these huge windmills, but they were still, not earning any kilowatts today -- no wind.

What they really need to develop instead of wind turbines, is how to generate electricity from tidal flow; The tide flows every day.




 We passed Eastern Point Light, guarding the entrance to Gloucester at the southern corner of Cape Ann.

From here it is another two miles into the inner harbor, passing the cute little Tenpound Island Light inside the harbor. I read that a few years ago Bill Gates purchased a painting by Winslow Homer of this light.

The huge outer harbor is created by a man made seawall from Eastern Point Light.




But we are moored off Brown's Shipyard in the much more dense inner harbor, next to these fishing boats.

Note the windmill, over the town.

This is a fishing town, not a sailing town. Sebastian Junger's book, The Perfect Storm is set here. Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt, Cod, and The Big Oyster, wrote a book about Glooucester, The Town That Refused To Die.






The historic town proper is off the northern spur of this inner harbor, less than a quarter mile away, with warehouses at the water's edge.

Here are other views from our mooring - we are certainly centrally located.

Brown's marina

Furthest end of the northern spur of the inner harbor

Looking into Smiths Cove at Rocky Neck

The exit from the inner to the outer harbor

Before dining out, we explored the old town, its galleries , restaurants and churches including the Sargent - Murray - Gilbert House, built by John and Judith (Sargent) Stevens in the mid 18th century. (Photo is after the views from ILENE.)This is the back entrance to the house from Middle Street, by which we came upon it.

It fronts on Front Street, which was on the water when the house was built but is now called Main Street, after landfill created two more blocks of city at the expense of the inner harbor.We had an excellent excited docent who explained the several famous people who lived here. Judith Sargent was an early feminist -- not a suffragette, but seeking for women to be educated and informed of the family's finances for example. John Singer Sargent, the painter , also lived here as did the Reverend John Murray, who got kicked out of their colony by the Puritans and founded the Unitarian Universalist church here in Gloucester. And a Governor Winthrop also was in this house. Here is the front of the house, set high above what had been the waterfront street.

We perused a book store and I noticed two books, one fiction and the other not, about Dogown, a village on the Cape Ann Peninsula. I noticed an apparently much higher percentage of the books on its shelves were authored by women as compared to that percentage at Barnes and Noble.
During the night we did have some wind and a few minutes of rain but it was otherwise peaceful. And a light rain fell for half an hour this morning. Worse had been predicted.
In the morning we did the laundry and borrowed the car of Brown's Marina's manager, Valerie, to get groceries. After lunch we explored Rocky Neck, an old yet still functioning artists community, sticking out into the harbor to form Smith's Cove. First a large juried art exhibition in the North Shore Arts Association, a big red barn on the outside, which opened in 1923, near the laundromat. Then we walked around Smith Cove to Rocky Neck. On the way we stumbled into Vintage, a used clothing place, and Lene got these Frye boots for $30.00, quite a bargain she believes.

I almost got a pair of Bruno Magli shoes, as if I care about labels, but they were half a size too small for me. We ended up at the far end of the neck and Lene's legs were giving out on her so I left her there, walked back the 3/4 mile around Smiths Cove to the dink, and drove the 150 yards across the cove to pick her up.

A quiet night aboard. I did some plotting to figure out the tides for our passage through the Cape Cod Canal.