My two crew
The four of us met in Marblehead at 14:30 on Sunday afternoon and all piled into the car of one of the crew in order to shuttle ourselves to Boothbay Harbor, arriving there at about 17:45. My son would stay at Harborfields in Boothbay Harbor with his grandparents while I and two crew would be sailing the boat down to Marblehead. We went out to dinner at a local lobster wharf, and then spent the evening going over some of the boat's systems with the new crew.
We arose around 06:00 on Monday morning, and worked on re-rigging the boat for the trip. We finally got underway under power at 08:30, raised the main off Mouse Island, rolled out the jib off Burnt Island, and cut the engine off Squirrel Island. The course to our destination, Marblehead, Mass., was directly into the wind. So set off beating into the southwesterly breeze on Starboard Tack, heading out into the Gulf of Maine. The winds offshore were forecast to build but shift to more southerly, which would give us a lift when we changed over to Port tack. Eventually the land disappeared over the horizon astern.
My two crew
Sometime in early afternoon, we got headed and backed the jib, so we re-set the sails for port tack and continued on. But this course brought us back towards shore, and the expected southerly shift never materialized. Nonetheless, the winds and seas continued to build. As it got dark and we reduced sail, we lost some of our pointing ability. We ended up sailing inshore of Boon Island (although the lighthouse was apparently out!), and tacking back to Starboard once we'ld cleared it.
Conditions were rough through the night -- winds of 25 knots (on our nose) and closely-spaced seas of 5 feet. One of the crew, athough he'ld previously made a passage from Bermuda to Long Island, said these were the roughest conditions he'ld ever encountered! GREYHAWK and I, of course, have been out in this kind of stuff before. We ended up dousing the main and sailing under just the jib, well rolled up. But because our course was on the wind, a bit of lee helm was noticable, and our pointing ability was basically shot. We were not making as good progress as I would have liked.
By morning it was raining, and we were still north of Cape Ann, sailing on Port tack back to the west. Eventually conditions moderated in the Lee of Cape Ann, we tacked back to starboard and made a course for the outer marks off the cape. Conditions continued to improve through the day, and we had a quite moderate (and leisurely) sail up Massachusetts Bay past Gloucester to the Salem Channel, where we dropped the sails and motored the rest of the way into Marblehead. We tied up at Marblehead Trading Company's Cliff Street boatyard at around 15:00, rather exhausted from lack of sleep over the past 30 hours of hard sailing.
The crew after a hard night
We spent an hour de-rigging the boat, and then headed off in my van to retrieve the crew's vehicle and my son at Harborfields in West Boothbay Harbor.
I was to come back later that evening or early the next morning to finish de-rigging the boat and preparing it for hauling out and trucking to my inland home in Keene, New Hampshire -- on to Part 2!
Last Modified January 15, 2006