August 31 -- Plymouth to Catumet

I had a poor night’s sleep, thinking we had to cast off earlier than the 7 am I had told Lene, because we would be needing to tack to get to the Cape Cod Bay entrance to the CC Canal in time to get through the canal before the tide turned adverse. This is one body of water where you have to get the tide right. I compromised with myself and we left at 6:30 with motor and reefed main, in anticipation of 20 knot apparent winds. We jibed twice heading out of Plymouth and once clear, at 7:30, came on a starboard beam reach with 10 to 15 knots. We added the genoa, shut off the engine and made well over six knots. The wind was from the west, not from the SW, as predicted. Fast and pleasantly uncold. But at 8:30 the wind fell to calm so we furled the genoa and motored the rest of the way, arriving at the canal entrance at ten. Half an hour before this the wind came up from the SW, but less than ten knots so we put up the small jib to compliment the reefed main and left the engine on. Before entry we tried to furl the jib but an overlap required me to go forward and play with the drum for a while to get it furled. At the entrance there were swirly currents which caused me to second guess myself as to the tide. But once in, the tide was giving us 2.5 knots above speed through the water, peaking at 8 knots over the ground. But toward the western end of the canal, we experienced big waves with strong winds, now 20 knots apparent, from the southwest, opposing the tidal current. And once we got out into Hog Island channel, the extension of the canal, the waves were six feet high and very close together. ILENE’s nose was diving into waves, which caused water to flow into the forward head because the big hatch there, while dogged down, was not dogged tightly enough. The last couple of miles, the tide had turned so we were making good only about two knots while being washed around in that washing machine.  But we escaped all that eventually, turned to port and found and entered the well buoyed narrow shallow channel in to the Kingman Yacht Center in Catumet, Mass.

Here, at about three, Bennett, and his friend Rick, picked us up and drove us about 45 minutes to their summer home overlooking a golf course near the Atlantic side of the Cape. There we met Rick's wife Jane. We took showers, I took a nap, Harriet took Lene to get groceries, and after just hanging out we all packed into one car to return to the Marina, where we ate in its restaurant, The Chart Room. This place has been here since 1966 and is in an old barge used by the N.J. Railroads as a repair facility. It is very popular, very crowded, quite noisy and the food was fine but not what I had hoped for. We had eaten here in 2008 and it seemed better then on all fronts. Sorry about the lack of photos in this post.