22 August 2012 Christmas Cove to Sebasco Harbour, Maine
We didn’t have a very restful night because Glenys woke up with dysentery. My joking about unfiltered beer was spot on – I’m glad that I didn’t drink the stuff.
After breakfast, we motored ten miles to Sebasco Harbour and picked up another mooring. This one is owned by a holiday resort in the bay and cost $40, but we were able to use their laundrette, which was a relief to Glenys who was down to her last few clothes. We also had access to their other facilities including a very old fashioned looking salt water pool – the resort has been here since the sixties and the pool looked like it was the original one. We didn’t bother.
We had a meal in the evening at their “pub”. It was typical pub food – steak and chips and spare ribs and chips, but it was very nice to sit and watch the sun go down from their terrace. As an added bonus, we spotted a Bald Eagle flying high above the anchorage as well as a few Ospreys.
23 August 2012 Sebasco Harbour to The Basin, Maine
Again there was no wind today. The forecast is for another week of this high pressure area, so we’re planning to stay in Maine for a few more days and then go down to Gloucester. It’s going to be an 80 mile passage, which is a very awkward distance because it will take us 14-16 hours, not enough daylight hours to do it in one day. We’ll probably leave on Sunday evening (26th) and sail overnight, so that we arrive in Gloucester on Monday morning.
We lurked around for most of the morning taking advantage of the fast internet connection. I paid off the huge credit card bill that we racked up in Deltaville, which was a little depressing.
It was a short four mile trip up the New Meadows River to The Basin. This is an amazing harbour, totally landlocked with a very narrow, shallow entrance that winds its way into the harbour. We anchored at the north end of the harbour from where it’s difficult to see how we got in here.
It was a very calm peaceful night. We’re starting to feel a bit isolated; we need to find some more cruisers again.
24 August 2012 The Basin to Snow Island, Maine
We hung about for the morning, waiting for the tide – we needed a rising tide to make sure that we got out without going aground on the shallow bend. Glenys read a book while I practised my guitar. I’ve downloaded an instruction book about the Blues and managed to work my way through the first lesson. I thought that it sounded good, but the jury is still out.
After lunch, we motored out of the narrow entrance, down the New Meadows River, around the headland and up Quahog Bay into the anchorage by Snow Island. It’s a lot busier than I expected. I thought that we were going to a remote Bay, but the shores are lined with houses and boats on moorings. The anchorage was nice and peaceful until later in the afternoon when the weekenders arrived - it’s a quarter of a mile wide with loads of space, but some knob came and anchored within 25 metres of us – I despair…
It was such a lovely evening that Glenys wanted to eat dinner in the cockpit, I reluctantly agreed and it was very pleasant until I received three mosquito bites within the space of a minute. We ran away down below – I hate mosquitos with a passion.
25 August 2012 Snow Island to Gloucester, Massachusetts (Day 1)
We listened to the weather forecast and decided to go to Gloucester tonight. Most of our day was spent trying to plan out where we’re going to go after Gloucester, there’s so many places that we could go, but we don’t have too much time, so we want to cherry pick the best places.
We put the dinghy on deck in the afternoon and pulled up the anchor at five o'clock and motored out into a light SW wind.
I was worried about navigating past the thousands of lobster pots in the dark – we were bound to hit some if we stayed close to shore, so we motored straight out to sea to try to be in water deeper than 100 metres by night fall. It worked to some extent, but there was still the odd lobster pot as night fell, even though we were in water deeper than 100 metres and 25 miles off shore.
I didn’t sleep well for my first off-watch – I kept imagining the bump of lobster pot buoys on the hull.
26 August 2012 Snow Island to Gloucester, Massachusetts (Day 2)
I managed to sail for a couple of hours around midnight, but the wind soon died on me. As we approached land at dawn, the lobster pots started to appear and, an hour later, I was weaving in and out of them. I thanked my lucky stars that we hadn’t hit one during the night – my strategy of heading out to sea worked fine.
Gloucester is a historic fishing port which was the setting for the movie “The Perfect Storm”. It was great to go past the landmarks that are mentioned by George Clooney as he heads out to sea in the film.
The fog's just lifting.
Throw off your bow line, throw off your stern.
You head out to South channel, past Rocky Neck, Ten Pound Island.
Past Niles Pond where I skated as a kid.
Blow your air horn and throw a wave to the lighthouse keeper's kid on Thatcher Island....
We rounded Ten Pound Island and entered the inner Harbour where we picked up a town mooring. The Harbour Master is a really nice guy. We’ve found that all of the American harbour masters are very pleasant – much better than the power crazed little Hitlers that we get in the UK.
We walked around town and found a large supermarket and liquor store – a big shopping trip is planned for tomorrow. We visited the Gloucester Fishermen’s Memorial, which is very sobering. It names all of the 5,368 lives lost from over 1,000 lost ships while fishing out of Gloucester. Between 1860 and 1906, a staggering 660 ships sank with the loss of 3880 men. The cost of bringing fish home a century ago was very high.
After a lunch of pizza, we went back to the boat and spent the rest of the day chilling out - reading, napping and watching the endless traffic in the harbour – commercial fishing boats intermingle with the tourist boats and yachts making it a very interesting harbour.
27 August 2012 Gloucester, Massachusetts
In the morning, we did a huge shop and caught a taxi back asking the driver to stop at the liquor store on the way back. We had so much stuff that we had to do two trips in the dinghy to get it all back on board.
After packing everything away, we chilled out for a while and then went for a short walk around Rocky Neck which is a lovely quaint community consisting mostly of artists. We had an ice cream and wandered around for an hour.
We’d met Dave and Alex from “Banyan” on the dinghy dock and invited them over for sun-downers, they left Canada two months ago and are heading towards the West Indies, so we’ll probably see them along the way.
28 August 2012 Gloucester to Salem, Massachusetts
It was absolutely miserable in the morning – it threw it down as a cold front went over the area. We had resigned ourselves to hunkering down until the afternoon, but magically it cleared up mid- morning, so we dropped the mooring and motored over to Beverley near Salem. It was impressive to see the edge of the cold front moving across the sky and by the time that we arrived at Beverley, we were in brilliant sunshine.
We picked up a mooring belonging to the Jubilee Yacht Club which only costs $20 per night. All of the bays around here are packed so full of moorings that it’s very difficult to anchor anywhere remotely close to the shore.
After lunch, we wandered into Beverley, which is a pleasant little town on the outskirts of Salem. We’re planning to take the train into Boston tomorrow, so we checked that out and wandered back through the leafy suburban streets.
“Banyan” turned up and we went to their boat for a few drinks.
29 August 2012 Salem, Massachusetts
We were up early and caught the train into Boston. It’s a half an hour ride on a pleasant train. It was interesting to watch the ticket collector. Instead of the electronic ticket printing machines that we have in the UK, the guy had a pocket full of pre-printed tickets and punched holes into our ticket to denote the year, month, day, zone and a few other bits of data. It was a flurry of confetti as he rapidly punched the half a dozen holes – very quaint in this high tech country.
We followed the “Heritage Trail” around Boston. This is a marked trail –there’s a red brick path set into the pavement, which leads to various sites of historical interest. Much of it is related to the War of Independence – the Boston Tea Party, The Boston Massacre (where only 5 people died) and Paul Revere’s famous ride to Lexington to warn of the arrival of British Troops.
Having “been there and done” the Heritage Trail, we wandered through the Boston Public Garden, which is lovely. There are pedal-powered Swan Boats on the small lake that are over 130 years old and still a big tourist attraction. The Boston Public Library is a little further away, not on the Heritage Trail, but it’s an amazing building with stunning architecture and paintings and frescos throughout the inside – well worth making the detour to see.
We stopped off at the “Cheers Bar” on Beacon Street for lunch. It’s obviously a tourist trap, but we just HAD to go – we watched Cheers avidly when we were younger. There’s another Cheers bar next to Faneuil Hall, but the one on Beacon Street is the original “Bull and Finch” pub used for the outside scenes. The hostess initially put us in the down stairs bar which is very cramped, but Glenys found the “Set Bar” upstairs and had us moved up there. This bar is laid out like the stage set in Cheers (but a little bit smaller) and is much more pleasant. We had a cracking meal, a good pint of Samuel Adams Boston Lager and like good little tourists, we bought our souvenir t-shirts.
After our liquid lunch, we wandered across Boston and visited the Charlestown Naval Yard where we had a great guided tour of the USS Constitution, which is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the world's oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat. Built in Boston in 1797, her first duties were to provide protection for American merchant shipping. The Constitution is most famous for her actions during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, when she captured numerous merchant ships and defeated five British warships. They do love us Brits over here…
Exhausted, we staggered back to the boat and collapsed.
30 August 2012 Salem, Massachusetts
We walked into Salem. It’s a town of two sides – there’s the mystic and supernatural history of the horrific witch persecution that happened in the 1690’s and then there’s the nautical heritage of a major sea port. Walking through the town centre is very odd because it’s full of witch and supernatural shops – want a psychic or palm reading or tarot cards? It’s all here.
We went to the Witch Dungeon Museum where there was a little play. It was very informative (if a bit over acted) describing the hysteria of the witch trials. We sat on church pews in front of the stage and then went down below to a replica dungeon with wax figures, which were old and tired and a little unsettling.
After wandering around the town for a while, we walked back over the bridge to Beverly which gave us an interesting view down onto a lobster boat which was unloading its catch. We watched them unload 10 big crates containing 50-100 lobster – that’s 500 to 1000 lobsters, which is not a bad catch.
31 August 2012 Salem to Provincetown, Massachusetts
We set off early in the morning, motored for 30 minutes to get out of the winding channel and then sailed all the way to where we anchored in Provincetown - it’s a miracle. It was a cracking close reach in 15-20 knot winds and lovely blue skies and flat seas.
What’s even better is that we caught a fish. I spent fifteen minutes rigging up two lures and caught a fish within five minutes of putting them in the water. It was a good five minute fight to bring in a nice 8lb Bluefish. I dumped it in a bucket on the aft deck then decided to fillet it while we were sailing along. Typically the wind picked up as I was doing it so it was a bit of a challenge.
We anchored to the west of the huge mooring field in Provincetown in ten metres of water. It’s a long way out of town and it was blowing 20-25 knots, so we didn’t bother going ashore.
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