Day 83, September 8 -- Mattapoisett to Cuttyhunk -- 16 NM

During the night, the hook of the snubbing line fell off the anchor chain. So we were not snubbed and the anchor was "noisy during the night.
Today's sail was longer than the nominal 16.4 NM. We put up sails in the harbor and these were double reefed main and genoa. The Admiral feared a rough passage and it was a beat but with gentle winds from the SW. So as we beat we were heeled but it was sunny and comfortable and with the short distance and an early morning start, the four knot average speed was all we needed. We began and ended on starboard, on the mostly westerly course, interrupted by half an hour on port, headed north.
Cuttyhunk is frequently quite crowded but not not after Labor Day; those white dots are not lobster pots but mooring balls.

No reason to lower the dink: none of the attractions of the shore remain open.We anchored in the square of dredged inner harbor, toward its NE corner, in 14 feet of water at high tide on 50 feet of snubbed chain.
Cleaning  the boat, cooking and planning where to go next were major afternoon activities. Block Island is the winner for tomorrow, with a possibility of connecting with Leeds The Way there. The two also-rans were: Point Judith Pond and the little bay just inside the western headland of the Sakonnet River. The former had the advantage of permitting me to confront and overcome the memories of a very bad night there in a Noreaster about seven years ago. But calls for local knowledge generated intelligence that the upper portion of the channel we would have to traverse to get there was not recommended except at high tide. Sakonnet had only one advantage: I have never anchored there.
After Block we currently plan to pick two harbors, each about one each third of the way home, which, subject to change, would get us home on the twelfth, two days ahead of the non-schedule.

Day 82, September 7 -- Redbrook Harbor to Mattapoisett -- 12 NM

I read an interesting "column" by Tanya Aebi, last night. She circumnavigated (solo, except for one short leg on which a boyfriend hitched a ride), as a teenager on a 26 foot sloop back in the 80's, I believe. Her column was in the summer issue of "Cruising Outpost," the quarterly magazine by Bob Bitchin, formerly the publisher of "Latitudes and Attitudes", both of which magazines support:  Bob's life afloat, beer drinking, and the liveaboard lifestyle. Kingman Yacht Center is one of the authorized outlets for the magazine. A copy was given to us in a nice cloth totebag, along with the right to use a mooring, for $50 per night.
Tanya described her experiences as a leader of group charter cruises for folks who save all year with the wanderlust dream to go charter a sailboat for a week or two in paradise. And when they get unpacked on their boat, their temporary home in their great tropical location, most (but not all) of them decline the opportunity to get off the boat and explore that paradise on foot, preferring instead to remain aboard their comfortable temporary home and look out on paradise. Tanya thought it noteworthy but while I like to get off the boat and explore my new surroundings (more often than Lene), I too am often content, as in Isles of Shoals, Plymouth, our second night at the Kingman Yacht Center and tonight in Mattapoisett, and many other places we have visited, to remain aboard and eat the delicious food Lene cooks and enjoy the comforts of home. We enjoy each other and quiet time and there is always something to do -- I have a "to do" list that seems to be getting longer.

This morning I called Brian of Headsync, the installer of ILENE'a Spectra Ventura watermaker. It has been making water all summer but water is readily available here and we do not really have to make our own. And funny noises and lights suggest to me the need to have it looked over by a pro. This will be next summer. I got to thinking how useful the watermaker was when we were  in the tropics where potable water is neither readily available nor inexpensive. But the needs to service our toy once each five days while it is in commission, and twice a year,  are a minor nuisance up here. I will get a gallon of pink antifreeze and "pickle" and winterize the system as soon as possible.

Well the rain eventually went away late in the morning but the strong SW winds did not. We set out at noon and used only double reefed main and engine the whole way, tacking twice and helped by the ebbing tidal flow, arriving in Mattapoisett after only 135 minutes.

We started west and crossed the extension of the Hog Island Channel behind two big tugs with their barges that crossed in it in front of us, one set going each way. Then south and finally west again. The wind and waves were not as big as on our last passage, just uncomfortable.

With the big SW wind we anchored off the west side of the harbor between and 100 yards from each of two empty moorings. 60 feet of snubbed chain are out in 14 feet of water. After dinner Lene is watching the US open on her Ipad. The winds have died down for the evening.

More adverse wind is predicted for tomorrow but slower in the morning so an early start is indicated.

Days 80 & 81, September 5-6 -- Plymouth to Redbrook Harbor and Lay Day -- 33 NM

This was our roughest day of the summer, caused by the wind, from the SW, at 20 to 25 knots, gusting to 35 and 40 and waves. Not so bad motoring the 4.8 NM out from Plymouth to Cape Cod Bay, nor in the Cape Cod Canal which we timed perfectly and during which the wind opposed us but was not as strongly as the 3.5 knot current which aided the engine in pushing us through at about nine knots.

The hard parts were the fifteen miles in Cape Cod Bay and the five miles in the Hog Island Chanel of Buzzards Bay, into which the Canal let us out.

As to the first, of these rough parts we sailed with double reefed main and small jib beating toward the entrance to the Canal, heeled to about 30 to 35 degrees and not going that fast, though we did cover the ground on "schedule" having left the mooring at 7:45 and arriving at the Canal entrance at noon. We started SSW, which took us out into the open Bay, I tacked back toward its west coast, with the partially successful hope that by being close to shore, we would have less  . During all this Lene was afraid and complained but kept her cool and did not panic. The errant batten popped out of rear end and quite a bit of its length out of its pocket, AGAIN!. This time I went up on the coach roof, fully slid the batten out  and stored it in the cabin. (As soon as we arrived on our mooring I reinserted the batten and sewed up the end flap of its pocket so it can't pop out again until I cut out the threads at the end of the season.) During the tack back toward the coast we were going slowly and our course was making our distance to the canal entrance longer rather than shorter. We tried to use engine as well as sail, but the propeller was cavitating which, I understand, is not good for it. Once we got close to the beach and tacked back to SSW, we made it to the Canal entrance without another tack, using both sails and motor, and then furled all sails for the passage through the Canal.
Hog Island Chanel, in Buzzards Bay, after the respite in the Canal, was worse, and here it was waves because we were not sailing. The wind had built up the waves for more than the length of Buzzards Bay, and they converged in a channel that the chart says is 250 feet wide. Big  steep waves, five to eight feet tall, were coming straight at us. The kind that come onto a beach after a storm. These were not the lovely ocean rollers, perhaps two hundred feet or more apart. Those are a pleasure as we ride up and over them gracefully, effortlessly and pleasantly. Our engine was powering us but most of our four knots of speed over the ground was due to the tidal flow pushing us forward against the waves. By getting to the Canal early in its six hours of favorable current, we had the benefit of that current out in Buzzards Bay. Whenever wind and tide run strongly in opposite directions from each other big close waves result. Our last experience of this was coming out of Government Cut in Miami, early in 2015.
Our bow faced directly into the waves and we were constrained to continue on this course by the narrowness of the channel. In hindsight, though, had I steered back and forth across its width, the effect would have been to prolong the unpleasant passage but lessen the intensity of the unpleasantness. The waves lifted ILENE's bow high out of the water, after which it slammed down into the trough in front of it with a loud crash that caused Lene to fear that the boat would break apart. Alpha Girl gave us her very loudest yell  - of fear, not a meow, and Lene sought to cuddle and comfort her. Immediately after plunging downward, the bow would plow through the top of the crest of the next wave, repeatedly sending gallons of water streaming back over the deck. A picture would have been useful here but I had my hands full. We closed the companionway hatch, but had not battened down the hatch over the port settee quite tightly enough: about a half gallon of seawater infiltrated onto the cushions there. They are drying out as this is written.
We were given a choice mooring by the Kingman Yacht Center in Redbrook Harbor; our mooring is very close to the dinghy dock. This is our fourth visit to Kingman, which is a marina. It is windy here but no waves get in. I had planned to anchor or take a free mooring in Pocassett Harbor, behind Bassetts Island, where we stayed last summer, a mile away. But our plans to meet up with Lee and Patty did click so we had to go ashore to meet them (they drove an hour to us and drove us to a supermarket and the restaurant and back; Thanks again, guys!) Two reasons persuaded use of the marina: (A) it would have been a rather long dinghy ride to shore in this wind and especially back to the boat near or after dark, plus (B) a glimpse into mouth of the anchorage area as we passed suggested that there were a lot more boats in there than last year. And heavy rain and thunderstorms the next day caused us to lay here, giving us a rest, a laundry stop and for me to get caught up on this blog.

Day 79, September 4 -- Gloucester to Plymouth -- 43 NM

In the morning the rain had cleared a nice sunny day for a longish transit across the wide mouth of the bay that includes Boston. Wind of 25 to 30 knots was predicted so the Admiral ordered second reefed main and small jib. And we wasted quite a bit of time at the beginning on the eight hours of the passage before I persuaded her that the winds were lighter than expected and that we could not make our speed without keeping the engine on unless we put up more sail. First we swapped the jib for the genoa. Next we shook out the reef. In that process, my instruction to Lene to come back to port "if we were losing it" was not explicit enough as to what "losing it" meant. So we ended up with backwinded genoa and not enough speed to get back onto course without turning on the engine for a minute, which I elected to do, or doing a 360. And for some inexplicable reason, ILENE's otherwise always reliable engine did not turn on (or even whine) until I combined, momentarily, the two battery banks. The next time we turned on the engine, that problem did not occur. Yet another of our boat's mysteries.
Though it was a bit hazy we saw the Boston skyline from the time we left Gloucester until the skyline was blocked off by the bluffs of the south coast near the end.
Unlike Nova Scotia, the waters were full of watercraft of all sort: tugs with barges, a Chinese container ship, fishing boats of all sizes and sailboats.
In the navy a crew member was assigned to keep a deck log of all the course and speed changes (except in battle when the log read, for the time period indicated "Steered various courses and speeds during exercise.") We don't keep such a log on ILENE; we don't have an extra guy with nothing to do but write such stuff down. But if we tried to keep such a log today, it would have had a long list of speed changes as we tried various combinations of sails, with and without engine, running at various rpm, to try to keep up a decent speed,  though it did drop as low as 3.3. And eight hours for 43 miles means we made just a bit over five knots, on average. The predicted wind did not materialize until we entered the bay that contains the harbor of Plymouth, 4.8 miles "upstream" through a channel marked by several very sharp turns. "Water, water,  everywhere" but most of it too shallow. I was impressed that the Pilgrims, who having decided that their first settlement, at Provincetown, was untenable, were able to find their way, with the ungainly Mayflower, all the way in here to Plymouth Rock in the now dredged inner harbor at the lower left end of the pink line. That line is now marked with eighteen red and green marks.

Just before the sharp southward curve is a rock and a light called Duxbury Pier, to be kept to starboard on your way in.

I was also very impressed by a ketch, operated by someone who is obviously a local sailor: he sailed the 4.8 miles, tacking across the channel. The dredged mooring field area is not very deep - as little as eight feet when we came in at low tide. The Harbor Master assigned us a sturdy mooring at the far end of the field and requested that we pay by "Dockwa" a new, to us, program that let's (makes) the sailors do the paperwork (and pay), electronically, which Lene, ILENE's electronics/ communications officer, struggled with, but finally mastered.
Dinner aboard.
Here is a view of the town, the mooring field and the protective seawall at the right, that was not here in the 1600's as seen on our way out next morning.

Days 77 & 78, September 2-3 -- Isles of Shoals to Gloucester and Lay Day -- 29 NM

As rough as it was yesterday, so was it calm today. We passed close by the east side of Isles of Shoals and saw, for the first time from the sea, the rocks of Star Island on which we had scampered in 2013.

Sort of like those at Peggy's Cove but not so large and with many fewer people, none at that hour. See Blogpost of August 2013. No foot touched on land this year.
Not much wind so the motor was on until near the end We put up all big sails, close hauled on a starboard reach; they did not help much until we passed the twin lighthouses of Thatcher island (why did they put up two of them?),

just off Cape Ann. and then more so after rounding Eastern Point, the eastern entrance to Gloucester.

We also passed Ten Pound Island Light inside the harbor.

Labor Day weekend in Gloucester - the good news and the bad are both the same: this is the happeningest weekend of the year -- Schoonerfest, so no moorings were available for us. During the two prior visits to Gloucester we took a mooring of Brown's Yacht Yard. This time no moorings; but they had one spot available for us on their dock. It cost more but put us at the center of the action. But first ILENE got her first real scrubbing since the spring, with soap and a brush as well as water (all except the starboard freeboard which was not very accessible). A lot of dirt got rinsed off and the plastic inserts in the dodger and the side panels now let in a lot more light.
Come nightfall the annual parade of powerboats, with lights and sounds. Right past our dock which was crowded with spectators. The participants did a lot of work and someone won a prize. My favorite "float" was a fishing boat that hung lighted lantern from its poles, appearing as colorful jellyfish slowly pulsating in the air as the boat moved slowly past us in the dark. Superman flew from another with the soundtrack from the movie. The last time we saw something like this was Christmas in Florida 2014: but it's too cold do this at Christmastime in Massachusetts. The parade was followed by a pretty good fireworks show for a town this size and all the while rock dance music emanated from a wedding party in a rental tent 150 feet away. In 2013 we "did" Gloucester --  its shops, artists peninsula and museum so we did not feel compelled to go touring here.
We had planned a short passage to nearby Marblehead the next day, as we did in 2013, but it rained, causing the lay day in Gloucester.
The port was full of schooners,

including the biggest of the fleet of them the one we last saw in Shelburne, Nova Scotia.

A schooner race was planned for Sunday but it got put off to Monday because of the all-day off-and-on rain.
So we read and wrote, I booked a trip to visit family on the west coast, tried to set up for a rendezvous with Lee and Patty, friends on The Cape who we had visited at their home in Hyannis last summer, and with PC Mark and Marsha, from the Harlem, who are cruising their 31 foot sloop, "Leeds The Way," hopefully to Martha's Vineyard; and we paid our bills.
In the afternoon it was "date night" We took a cab across town (around the harbor) to see the new movie, "Wind River," a well acted but gory detective story set on an Indian reservation with empathy for the plight of Native Americans, followed by dinner at The Causeway, a family seafood restaurant with zero ambiance, next door to the movie, that was full of people because it serves huge portions of pretty good seafood at very reasonable prices. We could have saved money on the cab rides had we lowered the dink and driven it to the other side of the harbor before the movie and back after, but in the rain, Lene said no. She is wise

.

Day 76, September 1 -- Portland to The Isles of Shoals -- 49 NM

We put Yael on an 8:50 Greyhound bus to New York, stopped at a nearby supermarket, taxi'd back to Hamilton Marine for more stuff, filled our water jugs, hoisted the dink, put in a reef and were underway by 10:10 a.m. Portland's pretty light, seen from the Observatory yesterday, to starboard:

The distance was 49 miles and we got there in seven hours and five minutes, meaning average speed was almost seven knots with some hours at eight and a peak of 8.3. I'm rather glad that Yael was not with us because she would not have enjoyed the passage; Lene didn't! But we still have a long way to the Harlem Yacht Club and this will have been our longest passage between our entry to Maine and the Club. Many days at this season will be presenting strong winds in our faces, so one has to make one's "westing" when the opportunities present.
Apparent wind was sixty degrees off our starboard bow at 20 to 25 knots with higher gusts.  It was cold but clear and sunny. We started with first reefed main and small jib. But the reefing line, which was frayed and is a candidate for replacement next season, parted. So I put in the second reef. It did not slow us much. (In the calm of next morning I restored all systems. It turns out that the reefing line did not part; rather, though I pride myself on my knots, the bowline I tied toward the aft end of the boom shook loose!). Also, the Velcro closure at the aft end of the second-from-bottom batten pocket came out again. If this happens a third time I will sew it closed.
We were heeled at 25 to 35 degrees and the pressure on the rudder was intense. Autopilot could not handle it so it was hand steering. The rail was buried and a bit of one crest entered the cockpit. We furled the small jib which cut our speed to 3.5 knots (under just the second-reefed main)  so we put most of the jib back out again but did not trim it as tight as before, which corrected the problem. For the last five miles we motorsailed with just the main and were very tired at the end of the day.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that we were the only boat in the large unnamed cove created by a breakwater built between Smuttynose Island to the north (these pictures taken next morning when it was calm, and do not show the white surf crashing on the nearby rocks)

and Cedar Island to the south. (Another island in this group is called Appledore. I wonder where Harry Potter's names come from.)

Gosport Harbor (between Cedar and Star Islands). with its free moorings, is where we have stayed every prior time we have been in The Isles of Shoals. It has great protection against the prevailing southwesterlies. But it's totally open to the northwesterlies of today with their big waves rolling in. This picture show the top of the large dowager hotel on Star Island, over the top of Cedar.

The anchor set in 18 feet with 70 feet of snubbed chain out. ILENE is, as some restaurants call their dishes, "salt encrusted," providing a good reason for a dock tomorrow night, where she can get a bath and the electricity can provide heat through our air conditioner/heat exchanger because it has been cold.

Franks for dinner-- too tired to cook. Not a quiet night with some rolling, but not bad.

Days 73-75, August 29-31 -- Three Days With Yael: The Goslings, Jewell Island and Portland -- 20 NM

We had three lovely days with our niece, Yael, who is about to graduate from college. The only problem on the three short passages in the western half of Casco Bay was lack of wind. Clockwise from the top are South Freeport, The Goslings, Jewell Island and the City of Portland.

Yael and Ken arrived at about 10:30 and we loaded Yael's stuff aboard. Then up to Freeport for a mini clothes shopping spree for Yael and Lene. The Bow Street Market is a classy but not pricey supermarket where we provisioned, forgetting only butter, a non-essential, and plastic cutlery, needed by Yael's observance of the kosher laws. The latter was remedied at the Harraseeket Lobster Company, adjacent to Brewers Marina: I asked to buy five each of their plastic knives, forks and spoons, but they gave them to me, gratis.
Ken took off on his long drive back to New York and we left Brewers dock at 4 pm. On the way to the Goslings, I took a slightly longer but more traveled and buoyed route. Along the way we saw the head of a sealion which passed us swimming the other way. I had told Yael that we might see them and felt that this "promise" had been met. The anchor set well in mud, 22 feet below us. Only four boats in the anchorage.

We enjoyed keeping kosher with a Yael. She brought a pot, used for non-meat dishes and a pan for the chicken cutlets she brought and the Hebrew National hot dogs we had.

Her cooking knife was dull but I remembered that in the fall of 2010 I had acquired a fish filleting knife that was keenly sharp and had never been used for any food and hence was kosher. Frying the blueberry-mango-sweet potato pancakes was another challenge. We could not use the frying pan Yael had brought, because the pancakes had milk and the pan had been used for the chicken -- meat. But we had brand new disposable aluminum roasting pans and one of them did the trick. What about the spatula? All of ours had been used at various times over the past ten years for milk and for meat and hence could not be used. What to do? Well the paint scraper had never been used with any food and after thorough cleaning, it served as the spatula.

We took a ride in the dink

to the island where we had seen lots of seals in 2013, hoping that they had not found some other roost in the interim. We were not disappointed.

We went past the islet, cut the engine and drifted past it. These are not rocks but a portion of the seals.

(I will add a five minute video when I get better wifi. The audio is marred by my unsuccessful attempts to shush my two passengers.) Eventually, as the video shows, wait for it, most of them were spooked by our closeness and jumped into the water. Here are about 40 of them swimming

and a few brave  (or lazy) ones who stayed ashore.

I did put up sails during the passage to Jewell Island, but they did very little good. On our first drop, the anchor did not grab and we moved slowly toward a pair of rafted power boats. So we hauled and set her again, successfully, in 20 feet of water. There was one other sailboat and this home made trailerable ketch with larboards came in later.

The Punchbowl is an unusual geological formation on the NE side - the strata of rocks run vertical around the round basin.

We missed the concrete WWII observation tower and ended up at the southern tip of Jewell, where I had never been before during the four or five times I previously visited the island. There we met the only two people we saw on the island, a pair of men who had kayaked over from Peakes Island, quite far for kayaks, it seemed to me. Why were they planning to camp so far apart, I asked. "Well, my tent is on the only flat ground and his hammock needed the trees."  All told, I estimated our walk at about three miles through wooded trails.

We used full main, small jib and motor  for the passage to Portland, and chose  the  Passage, between  the  Islands. We were close reaching on port until about a mile before the passage in light air. Then, suddenly, there was strong wind but on a starboard close reach. We tacked sharply without changing course!

Then an afternoon's walk in Portland to the 1807 observation tower that Yael and I climbed, with a resulting good view of the Harbor,

the nearby Jewish Museum,

and a walk through the old town downtown area including a stop at Starbucks.

There we separated and I visited Hamilton Marine to get several small items: proper bolts, washers and nuts for the swim platform door, a better shackle for the mainsail's gooseneck, an oil filter, a postcard, boat soap, a part for the Magma barbecue to replace the one that had oxidized, and stencils to paint the registration numbers on the dink, because the stick-on numbers look crappy.