Lots of photo will be added in September.
Learning from yesterday, we left Mattapoiset early, at 8:45 and sailed under main and small jib (though Genoa was doable) with wind from the north. Just a pleasant easy gentle starboard reaching sail on a sunny day. But when we reached the long channel (about five miles long) leading into New Bedford the wind got light, the tide was wrong and the course would have required tacking up the channel. And it is frequented by large commercial fishing vessels. So we motored. We passed the huge sea wall with its movable gates open. It is designed to stop storm surges from wrecking this harbor in hurricanes, leaving open a closable channel 150 feet wide. We took a mooring at Pope's Island Marina at 11:30. That island forms a second barrier to the sea, in terms of waves, filing most of the space, shore to shore. The marina is on the seaward side of the island and our mooring is very close to red "10", which flashes all night.
The rest of out first day here, after checking in, was devoted to food shopping, cleaning and laundry. The staff here are very friendly and helpful. They even gave us one free pass to the Whaling Museum, not advertised as an amenity, and offered to drive us to the Shop and Stop. The mooring price is only $35, with free wifi at the picnic area. But they have an interesting wrinkle: $5 per person for showers! We showered aboard. They have more slips than moorings and in one of the slips is a Solent rigged Contest, of about 45 feet, which looks much like our Saga, called "Watercolors". I took a good look at her from the finger dock in her owner's absence. Another Solent rigged boat took a mooring near us on our last day here. The Marina has a launch, to any part of the harbor, but it is $3 per person each way, so our dink got good use, except the last afternoon when the outboard temporarily acted up again. The municipal dinghy dock is right in the heart of town, three tenth of a mile across the Acushnet River from us, free and very underutilized. When we visited the Glass Museum (you can skip it) we dinked over a mile upstream to a small dock just shy of the low I-95 bridge and walked back a bit.
The city, at least the downtown part, with its cobblestone streets that we crisscrossed, is small, perhaps eight blocks square and has many old stone buildings formerly and currently used to support the fishing industry as well as many elegant former banks, now housing other businesses and the full array of municipal governmental buildings. This was a very wealthy town in its nineteenth century day. I'm sure it has a suburban and mall based part too, but we did not get that far on foot. I sensed that it got down on its luck but is trying to rebuild with tourism, in addition to its still active fishing industry, bringing in more dollars worth of seafood than any other port in America.
We visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the largest of the museums in town. I give a lot of credit to the the whaling museum in Cold Spring Harbor, reviewed in this blog right after the Fourth of July, for covering much of the same ground, with a much smaller budget. New Bedford calls itself "The Whaling Capital of the World" and "The City that Lit America" with whale oil. An early chapter from Moby Dick was set in the Seamans Bethel, an interdenominational religious center built by the Quakers to serve the spiritual needs of the Whalers. It is across the street from the museum and temporarily closed for renovations. Though the Pequod's ill-fated voyage began from Nantucket, Moby Dick's Ishmael visited the Bethel.The whaling industry was a multi million dollar industry but today, with conservation, the whale watching industry is a multi billion dollar industry, albeit with inflated dollars.The museum has a large permanent display devoted to the human contribution to New Bedford's whaling industry mostly from the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, but slso including Eskimos, blacks, native Americans and South Seas Islanders, a very diverse group. In fact the whalers picked up crew wherever they could find them. That diversity is one of the reasons that the
Underground Railroad was so big here, with more runaway slaves here than in any other US city. In other places the black runaways would stand out in the crowd like a sore thumb as a prize for bounty hunters. Here they blended into a diverse crowd. The Museum has a half scale model of the Lagoda, an actual whaling ship, masts and all, indoors, that visitors can board -- if they duck to avoid banging their heads. They also had a vast and somewhat disorganized section on the history of the area and its peoples and a large art gallery featuring nautical paintings including icescapes by William Bradford, who was a friend of Albert Bierstadt, one of my favorite artists for his western landscapes.
We also visited several gallerys, the U. Mass. campus here, which is its Art School, and the New Bedford Art Museum. The latter had an temporary exhibit of Bierstadt, what luck! But the museum was small, not very good and so a disappointment. But interestingly, the signage was in English, Portugese and Spanish, in that order, with about one third of the 95,000 folks who live here being of Pertugese descent.
We bought some clothing, very inexpensive, and did the Underground Railroad tour led by a ranger of the National Parks Service. In additions to the Pilgrims and later the Puritans, another religious sect settled in this area: the Quakers, and in addition to their being pacifists, they were leaders in the antislavery movement.
We had lunch in both of the most popular waterfront fish places, The Black Whale and Waterfront Grill. Both are on the waterfront, but at the land end between piers at which the large commercial fishing boats were docked -- so one gets a narrow view of the harbor.
One afternoon, I gave Lene some alone time when visiting the Rotch -Jones - Duff house. Built by the first owner, a Quaker merchant (whaling ship owner) which displayed an elegant lifestyle in its day. The whaling men risked their lives for wages while the owners risked their assets but not their
asses, for profit. Mr. Rotch broke the Nantucket cartel of the whaling industry by moving his operations to New Bedford, which also had the advantage of being a deeper harbor. Another famous local was Rodman, who developed the use of spermaceti into very clean burning candles. The local
fort is named after him, and I wonder if Rodman's Neck, across from the Harlem YC is named after a
relative. I'll check that out some day.
The reason for our fourth day here is that thousands or runners are convening for a road race in Falmouth and Woods Hole, making moorings there unavailable. Plans keep changing.
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