Chicken Sailors?

As we were prepping to leave Provincetown, we were chatting with the marina’s launch driver. He said that the wave forecast from the offshore hurricane had basically ended their season, everybody had cancelled their visits for the coming weekend. I was incredulous.

The weather forecast was beautiful! Yes, there was going to be a large swell running, but not at all an issue if you stayed out of the surf. Sure enough, when we got out in to the open ocean, the waves were high, but they were so far apart that the boat never even rolled, the boat just went up… and down… I am all for being careful, but anybody cancelled plans to take their private boat from Boston out to P-town missed a great weekend on the water.

Stopping On the Way

Yesterday we left Provincetown and headed north, with a stop on the Stillwagon Bank to see if we could hook a Bluefin tuna. The way you do this is you catch a bunch of mackerel, put one on a hook out behind the boat, and then cut the rest of them up in pieces and slowly dribble those pieces into the water to attract the tuna. Catching mackerel is easy. You can fill a bucket with them in 20 minutes. Catching the tuna… not so much.

A few hours of trying left us with a bloody mess from chopping up chum, but no tuna. As the wind was picking up, we cleaned up and put out sails, setting a course for Gloucester. In the category of hope of expectations, we dragged a large diving plug behind the boat, still thinking a tuna might be on the menu. About half way to Gloucester, we had a tuna grab the lure and run off a LOT of line very quickly. Unfortunately, he never really got hooked, so we were still tuna-less.

We visited Gloucester a few years ago. It has a nice harbor, and is both a pretty tourist destination and a real working fishing town. We hope to explore for a day or two and then jump north again.