7/21-22
Onset, MA
7/21-22
Onset, MAWe had an excellent sail from Newport to Onset, at the southern entrance to the Cape Cod Canal. The prevailing southwesterlies were right on our tail, so we got more practice with the whisker pole, and the seas were gentle until we got to where Buzzard's Bay narrows toward Onset and the canal. The tide was ebbing, the current against us, and since the wind was opposing the current a nasty chop developed. We got tossed around a little, but were really happy we weren't going in the opposite direction; we saw a few powerboats heading south, bouncing hard on the waves, and it didn't look like a fun ride.
At Onset we laid over a day because of bad weather, then the following morning entered the canal. We'd verified the currents ahead of time (Nobeltec Navigation Suite, our computer nav program, includes currents and tides, which we find very useful) so we knew we'd have a good push through. As it was, we made a max speed of 10.3, and an average of over 8.5 knots.
We exited the canal and pointed toward Boston. There was no wind to speak of, but we hoisted the main for a while as we motored and watched it flap around in our apparent wind for a while before we gave up and put it away. Because of the disgustingly calm weather, though, we were able to anchor at George's Island (actually across the channel at Gallop's Island) which is part of the Boston Harbor Islands State Park.
What, you've never heard of the Boston Harbor Islands State Park? I hadn't either -- and I lived just across the Charles River from Boston for three years. I didn't even know these islands existed, scattered across the entrance to the harbor like guardians. How embarrassing. My only excuse is that I wasn't a boater at the time.
Clearly Boston boaters are better informed, though, because on Sunday afternoon the place was packed. We hung out on a tentative hook for a few hours and watched the people gradually pour off the beaches and out of the forts, back into their boats and back to the city. By the time we set our anchor in earnest, we were the only boat in the anchorage, although two more sailboats showed up a little later.
We had a long day planned to Portsmouth, but we took a few hours in the morning for a breakfast picnic and brief exploration of Fort Warren, on George's Island. Fort Warren was built between 1834 and 1860, and used as a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. The large fort spreads over most of the island, although much of it is now only a shell. The walls are built of massive granite blocks. The earthworks above are thick with wild vegetation, but carefully cultivated flowers grow in many places, attesting to the fort's long use as a public park.
The
anchorage, on the other hand, apparently has seen long use as a
garbage dump. When we pulled up our anchor, a lawn chair came up with
it! We extricated our CQR and made our way out through the islands
and north toward Gloucester.
The Cape Cod Canal is wide and mostly straight. The Blynman Canal, which cuts across Cape Ann between Gloucester and the Annisquam River, is a narrow and twisty nightmare. All the things that we had hated about the ICW came back to us here, in this short but not very sweet stretch of inland waterway.
The first obstacle is the narrow Blynman drawbridge, which has restricted opening times and a killer current whooshing through. We called the bridgetender, who told us he'd open in 8 minutes, but that there would be a lot of outbound traffic. The channel there is too narrow for two boats to pass, and a sign on the bridge states that outbound boats had right of way, so we waited well away from the bridge. As we waited, a small cruising trawler arrived, named Puffin. They went ahead of us, hailing the "Annisquam Canal Bridge". The bridgetender responded, asking them if they meant the highway bridge or the railroad bridge, but Puffin said nothing. A few minutes later, instant replay: boat called, bridge answered, boat remained silent. Finally the bridge went up and Puffin darted forward...only to go into full reverse, engines churning the water as they fought both their own momentum and the current trying to suck them forward.
Luckily, they managed to back up to their former position just ahead of us. Several boats came through, including a big whale-watching cruise boat that looked like it only had a few inches of clearance on each side. Then the bridgetender came on the radio: "Boats waiting harborside, the bridge is clear after this next little one." Puffin nosed up toward the bridge slowly, then idled as a skiff, which could have fit under the closed draw, came through. (A few small skiffs waited behind us as well.) I started forward, figuring that by the time I got to the bridge, Puffin would have gone through. Puffin didn't budge. We got closer, and I backed off the throttle. Then hit reverse to slow even more. Finally I grabbed the mike and screamed, "Puffin, if you don't go through the bridge now I'm going to ram you!" That finally woke up their captain, who hit the gas just in time.
Going through the draw span was almost like pulling into a marina slip. It seemed like we only had a few inches of clearance on each side! The bridgetender wished us a nice day as we went through. He didn't say anything to Puffin.
We went by a marina and then came to the second bridge. This is a railroad bridge which is usually open, and it was open for us. The problem with this bridge is that not only is there a narrow passage under it, but the canal makes a sharp left directly after passing through, so it's a totally blind curve; any boat approaching from the other side would be invisible -- until it hit you. We edged in with trepidation, but nobody was coming, and we made it through with no problems.
It was the third bridge that was our undoing. And this is a 65-foot clearance highway bridge, nicely arching above the waterway which by this time is the Annisquam River, fairly wide here, with several boats on moorings to the right. The bridge arch is quite pointy, with clearance dropping fast on both sides of the high point, so I aimed right for the middle -- and went hard aground. Six knots to zero in an instant. Fortunately, the man driving the skiff directly behind us had fast reflexes, and managed, barely, to miss us.
We were right past the channel markers, so it looked like we were smack dab in the middle of the channel. At first, I thought maybe we'd strayed too far to the right. Then Britt noticed the left-side buoy ahead to the far right of us, almost hidden by the moored boats. A look at the chart verified that most of the "wide river" is less than a foot deep. The actual channel is half taken up by moorings, so the strip of navigable waterway is pretty slim. Some heavy throttle got us out of the mud and back in the channel. We rounded the buoy, then made for the center of the bridge. This time we stayed afloat.
At Portsmouth we anchored among a few unoccupied moorings in Little Harbor. The next morning we woke up in Maine. True, technically we were still in New Hampshire -- Maine is on the other side of the Piscataqua River -- but the famous Down East fog wasn't respecting state boundaries. We could see about two rows of moored boats on each side, then nothing. But we didn't want to stay in the mooring field, and the weather was supposed to deteriorate over the next few days, so we turned on the radar and steamed out toward Portland.
We have the radar mounted below, by the computer which runs our navigation software, and our autopilot control is on a handheld remote, so we can almost drive from below. The two things we don't have below are a throttle control and a view. We ended up double-teaming, one person below on radar and chart, and the other person above, avoiding things that don't show up on radar. During the periods of decent visibility the upstairs person would drive, during bad visibility the downstairs one would. We shouted a lot to communicate over the noise of the engine, but it was still tough to hear each other.
There weren't too many other boats out there once we got clear of the Piscataqua. We had a few confusing fast-moving echoes that we finally figured out were birds. One interesting thing we noticed is that most (but not all) lobster pots show up on radar at short range. It's a little hard to figure them out, but with the "echo trail" on they show up as little lines parallel to our course. We tried to stay in relatively deep water, but unlike in the Chesapeake where the crab pots are rarely in water deeper than 25 or so feet, we saw pot floats in 200-foot deep water!
I was driving from the cockpit, avoiding the lobster pots, when one lobster pot bobbed underwater and then back up again and looked right at me. It was a seal! Its cute little doggy eyes and nose just barely poked out of the water. I yelled breathlessly for Britt to come up and look. Our Maine friends tell us we'll eventually get blase, seals, ho-hum, there are so many of them, but this was our first, and it was as exciting as the first time we saw dolphins from the boat.
The fog stretched and thinned in places, then came back and enveloped us. The visibility was pretty good right outside of Portland, but just as we got close to the busy shipping lanes, the fog closed in thicker than it had been all day. From the cockpit, I could barely see our bow! Britt popped his head through the companionway and announced, "There are boats everywhere, going in all directions!" I could hear them on the VHF, negotiating their positions with each other. It was pretty scary, because we could see nothing but white.
There was a funny echo on the radar, big and curved around us off to our right, and we weren't sure whether it was real or some sort of noise or artifact. I stared off into the fog until I could make out something that wasn't fog, a light grey wall with brighter white below...suddenly I realized it was a big ship, really really close. Yikes! The ship blew its horn, another boat somewhere ahead of the ship blew its horn, and I grabbed our little air horn and gave a toot too, for good measure. We waited until it had passed by, then dashed across the channel, Britt navigating by radar and GPS and calling up to me where to go.
"Okay, look out for the buoy, you don't want to hit it. It should be up ahead."
There was nothing up ahead but white. I heard it ringing before I saw it, and I saw it just before we slid by.
"If you need to dodge a pot, dodge left. We're really close to land on the right."
We were in 50 feet, but I obligingly kept to the left. Then, suddenly, a house loomed out of the fog, closer than any house ought to be. We came out into a hole in the mist and I could see the island to the right, and one ahead of us. We turned into the clear space between, but back behind us the shipping channel was still shrouded.
We anchored off Peaks Island, in what seemed to be the only sunshine in the entire state of Maine. As the sun sank lower, the fog slowly dissipated. We finally saw Portland in the half-hour before sunset, bathed in a red-gold glow which reflected from the windows of the city and lit up all the islands in Casco Bay.
The next day was clear and warm. We dinghied to Peaks Island and walked around the tiny "downtown", which had a pleasant sort of hippie-yuppie feel, then caught the ferry for the ten-minute ride to Portland. One of the OpSail tall ships, the 300+ foot long Libertad from Argentina, was docked at the public pier next to the ferry terminal, and we joined the tourist throng for a lap across her huge teak deck.
We spent the day chasing down tourist and boater information, and hiking around town checking it out. Portland was destroyed by fire in 1775 and again in 1866; everything was rebuilt from solid brick and granite. The population is only about 60000, but it has the feel of a much larger city. Every other business is a restaurant, and we had lunch in one of the many brewpubs so we could taste some local beer -- our motto is, "Think globally, drink locally", and we've never been disappointed! In the evening, we got together with the Dunns, who live nearby. We met them aboard their boat Effie in Beaufort last fall, and spent time with them on the ICW and in the Bahamas.
Cruising in New England is different from cruising the Bahamas, or even the Chesapeake. I'm not talking about the obvious scenic differences, the hills and rocky cliffs, the classic grey-shingled houses; you could see those from a car. No, there are a few differences that only a boater would recognize, but these would be recognized instantly.
First of all, there's a tide here the likes of which we haven't seen since the Georgia ICW. Boston has a nine foot tidal range, Portland ten, and it gets even bigger farther east. The channels all seem ridiculously deep at high tide, and all the docks are floating. You need to take this into account for anchoring: if you anchor at high, you'd better make sure you'll have enough water at low, and if you anchor at low, you'd better make sure you'll have enough scope for high. That is, if you can anchor at all. Because the second thing we noticed is that all the "anchorages" are filled with moorings.
I don't know why New England has mooringitis. Maybe they don't trust anyone to anchor properly, given the big tides. But one of our great skinflint pleasures is our self-sufficiency, that we can travel somewhere and anchor and it doesn't cost us anything; we put ourselves down, we pick ourselves up, and we leave no trace of our passage. It's like we enjoy walking up the stairs, and we resent being forced to have to use the elevator -- and pay for it, too! So far we've managed to anchor almost everywhere, but that's partially because we've avoided the places where the moorings are the thickest. Which are some of the nicest places, so we're going to have to give in every once in a while.
The final thing (so far) we've noticed here has to do with VHF radio usage. No, it's not the Bahston accent, although we've been reduced to tears of laughter a few times listening to it. Five separate times, which is five more times than we've ever heard before, someone has come on the radio and asked for the time. Don't New Englanders know they can get a time signal off the GPS? Or at least wear watches?