fetchinketch

Almost any new place we go to we arrive with some idea of what it is going to be like.  Since I had never been to Block Island before, but knew of it most of my life, I came here with a pretty good idea of what I’d find.  Much of what I expected I found, but other things surprised me.

We are anchored in the Great Salt Pond, a marvelous  harbor with complete protection in all directions.  The anchorage is deep,  and crowded.  There are a good number of boats that spend all summer here, but since it is only a 16 mile trip from the mainland many boats come for the weekend. Watching the “weekend warriors” anchor has taught me many new ways to anchor boats–all of them bad!

There is a launch service here that you hail on the radio, and for $4 they take you into shore.  We went in on Saturday morning and had our first walk-about.  This introduced me to a face of Block Island that I hadn’t known about.  Walking the marina docks at one in the afternoon, they were crowded with mostly small boats full of twenty- and thirty- somethings who were already working very hard to get very drunk.  The “party-hardy” side of Block Island wasn’t one I expected.

Here in the harbor, there are a huge variety of boats.  Several from Canada starting their annual migration to the south.  Some boats obviously serious cruisers, and a lot of boats that are just kind of not really very much into the technical details.  Take a look at the pictures for some highlights.

Yesterday we sailed around the island, stopping to fish in a promising looking spot.  For dinner we had the largest black sea bass I ever landed (see pictures again…)

Harmonie from the shore launch.

Sunset on Great Salt Pond.

“Downtown” Block Island is dominated by the National Hotel.

The Lynx announced her arrival into the Great Salt Pond with a salute from her cannon.

A beautiful setting for a home.

“Petersburg”, the former Navy tug that is our closest neighbor here in the anchorage.

The brick lighthouse on the southern tip of Block Island.

One thing Block Island has is beautiful scenery.

The “Lynx” crossing the bow of “The Tree of Life”

An old Navy tug anchored here in Great Salt Pond that serves as a summer home.

The lighthouse on the Northern end of Block Island.

Not huge as fish go, but a sea bass is a very tasty dinner, and this is the biggest one I have ever caught.

We had a delightful sail over to Block Island today.  Steady wind, we sailed almost the whole way.  The only issue was that Block Island is southwest of Dutch Harbor.  So which way was the wind blowing from?  If you are a sailor, you already know the answer, from the southwest of course!  The weather was so perfect, we really didn’t mind the extra tacking it took to get here. We had a few other sailboats go by who were in more of a rush than we were, and just pointed straight into the wind and motored. We felt very much more sailorly, using our sails to get to where we wanted to go!

When we got here, and came in the channel to Great Salt Pond, we were greeted by a LOT of boats already in the anchorage.  And I mean a LOT!  It is a deep harbor, so finding a place to drop our anchor in water shallow enough to give us confidence in our holding and still being a bit away from other boats was a challenge.  We took a couple laps around, and found “our” spot, dropped the anchor and settled in. We got here late enough that we haven’t had a chance to explore at all yet.  That will come tomorrow.

While hanging out on deck after dark we were very glad that we arrived during daylight.  Watching people drive around, trying to find a place to anchor in the dark makes me very glad I am not them!

One of the great things that came to us when we purchased this boat was the experience of the yacht broker who arranged the sale.  Joel has a vast store of information about how these boats are put together, and the best way to use and take care of them. He is happy to share that information with his customers.

By email I asked him a question about our engine installation.  After answering that, he mentioned that I might want to look closely at the transmission cooler.  They had a history of corrosion and if they corroded to the point of failure, the engine room could fill up with seawater.  Not a good thing!

The other day we drove a bit to get a new cooler, and I spent most of today in the engine room getting the old one out and the new one in, after a few modifications.

Sure enough, the old one was badly corroded!  All on the inside.  The outside looked just fine.  Thanks again to Joel for the heads up on this!

The new and the old…

As you can see from the picture, several parts of the old cooler have lost a lot of metal compared to the new one.  Sharp eyed viewers might notice a hole in the new one.  I drilled and tapped a hole to take a zinc anode which will hopefully reduce or eliminate the corrosion in this part in the future.

New cooler modified with zinc installed.

Here is the new cooler, modified to take a zinc anode, ready to install on the boat’s transmission.  Now, instead of changing a $200 transmission cooler because it has corroded, I can change a $2 zinc.  Getting this project done took most of a day, but it  will help us follow the first, and most important, rule of sailing, “Keep the water out of the boat!”

We have been exploring some of the local area by rented car.  Beginning Karen’s education about the finer points of New England geography, flora, fauna, and culture.  She has already noticed an important trend:  The further north you go the cheaper you can get a good lobster roll!

One of our stops was in Worcester to get a part for our transmission. A few minutes of conversation with the supplier, and he gave us his phone number and said if we were out by Block Island this weekend to give hime a call and he’d give us a tour of the island.

We have left the Dutch Harbor mooring field, and are now anchored just a few hundred yards north of there, still just west of Jamestown. Since we are not paying for the mooring, we no longer have the launch service, instead we have to get to shore with our own dinghy. We did a provisioning run this afternoon, so our food stocks are good, and I have some materials for projects to upgrade our engine installation.

We’ll be heading a bit further into the bay tomorrow to top off our diesel tanks for the first time since Florida.  Depending on what time we get that finished, we might head out to Block Island tomorrow afternoon, or maybe Friday morning.  The weather has been beautiful and the forecast continues to be delightful. We have been very much enjoying the cooler northern climate.  It was cool enough we had to put TWO blankets on the bed last night!

We spent the other day wondering around downtown Newport. One of highlights was the Newport Shipyard.  A boat yard that specializes in REALLY big superyachts.  Just amazing the money flowing through that place.  I am used to boatyards and  marinas where Harmonie feels like a big boat.  Against most of these, she’s a toy!

Right next door, for full contrast, is the commercial fishing dock with it’s “rough” looking boats and the associated smells and sights.  From the commercial fishing docks, comes our blog quiz for the day.

Stacked all around the dock were lobster traps and fish traps of many kinds. Most of them I had a pretty good handle on, and could at least come up with a good guess for what they might be used to catch.  But one trap had me totally at a loss.

A stack of “whatsitfer” traps….

It didn’t look like it could catch anything.  Just a simple rectangular box with half the top open.  A bag or screen inside to hold bait.  Some weights to hold it on the bottom.  That’s it.  No doors, no tapering baffles.  Just an open box. Certainly easy and cheap to make, but not something that looked like it would hold anything inside long enough to bring to the surface. Only when we snagged a friendly commercial fishermen walking by was the mystery solved…

So today’s quiz is:  What animal is so dumb it can get into this trap, but can’t get out again?

A hint:  They sold for $4/pound at the dock.  OK, that’s not much of a hint, but it’s the best I came up with!

I’ll post the answer in a day or two.

Getting to Newport is a pretty easy excursion from where we are.  First, get on the radio and put a call out to the boatyard launch.  They come out and pick you up and bring you to the dock.  From the dock, it is about a mile walk to Downtown Jamestown where you pick up the Newport Ferry. A 20 minute boat ride and you are right in the middle of downtown Newport. The ferry runs until 10:30PM, so we could make an evening of it.

This time of year the Newport waterfront is full of huge superyachts and fancy boats.  It is a delightful town, lots of colonial era buildings lovingly restored.

We walked around yesterday afternoon and finally picked a dinner spot.After we relaxed and ordered, I had a horrible thought, “What time does the boatyard launch service stop?” A quick consult, and we realized that although we had plenty of time to catch the ferry back to Jamestown, we were running out of time to catch the last launch out to the boat!  If we were not going to spend the night sleeping on the picnic tables in the boatyard parking lot, we needed to get back faster than the ferry could do!  Uber to the rescue!

Many times in our travels so far the Uber car service has been a lifeline.  Many of the drivers are interesting people, and the overall experience has been great. It has always been easier and cheaper than finding a local taxi.

I have attached some photos from our excursion yesterday.  Enjoy!  Hopefully I’ll be getting more tomorrow as we explore further.

Our favorite boat in Narragansett Bay, our very own Harmonie!

This beautiful old wooden hulled yacht was docked in Jamestown across from the ferry landing.

Karen is happy to be out on the water again!

We arrived here at Dutch Harbor in Narragansett Bay after a delightful 24 hour sail.  It would be tempting to say we arrived “without incident” but that wouldn’t be true, we had plenty of fun and entertaining incidents in just 24 hours on the water.

We motored out of Sandy Hook Bay in variable and contrary winds, but once we were on the ocean, a sea breeze built up from the south and we sailed along all day at a good speed in nearly flat seas.  Sunny and warm, but out on the water it was not stiflingly hot like

Looming thunderstorms make for a pretty sunset.

many places we could see on land.  Afternoon thunderstorms built up over Long Island, for our visual pleasure, but steered clear of our course.  Over night we were treated to a continuous lightening show, but again we never saw bad wind or rain where we were.

Sometimes the entertainment came from our fellow humans in the form of traffic on the marine radio.  On fellow had taken his jetski from Montauk to Block Island in the morning, a distance of about 12 miles. In the morning, it was an easy trip.  Block Island would have been easily visible from Montauk.  Not the brightest knife in the drawer, this guy had no compass, and no gps with him.  Late in the afternoon, a light fog settled in. He leaves Block Island, and once he realizes he can not see Montauk OR Block Island and he NO IDEA which way to go.  Lucky for his life, and for our entertainment, he has a radio.  He calls the Coast Guard, “How do I get home?”

They explain he needs to go west, “toward the setting sun”.  The Coast Guard realizes from their radio fixes he is actually driving in circles.  Finally, they have him follow a cargo ship he can see that is headed in the direction he needs to go.  The cargo ship slows down so he can keep up.  They finally give up on trying to talk him home.  When the cargo ship passes a buoy, they tell him to stay right next to the buoy, we’re sending a boat to pick up up.  Darwin is not always right, sometimes the unfit DO survive!

In a less comic, and potentially more tragic scene, early this morning a call comes in to the Coast Guard, “I have lost a diver!”  A young guy was free diving and spear fishing with his friends.  In the fog they lost track of him in the fog and currents.  A very tense 15 minutes was spent on the radio with the CG getting them the information they needed to start a search.  Suddenly, the boat skipper says, “I have to turn off the radio, I can hear him!”  A few minutes later, everybody was safe, very scared, but safe.

Here in Dutch Harbor, we are on a mooring, not in a marina.  More services than if we anchored, and more money, but much nicer.  A beautiful breeze.  We have both taken naps to recover from our overnight excursion, and new we are ready to call the water taxi to take us to shore and explore! It’s picture postcard pretty!

The view from our mooring: Dutch Island Light.

I got the “all clear” from the eye doc this morning, so tomorrow we will be headed off to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.  Not exactly a major sailing trip, only 24 to 30 hours.  Except for the possibility for scattered thunderstorms, the wind forecast looks great.  We should have an easy trip of it.

We have a mooring ball reserved in Dutch Harbor.  It will be nice to live life out side of a marina for a while!

We’ll have an early morning getting the last minute things ready and the boat good for an ocean trip.  An early bed time, and tomorrow we are sailing!

Our plans aren’t all that precise, because there really are not any big consequences to changing them.  We had hoped to be headed north to Narragansett Bay near Newport, Rhode Island in a few days.  Unfortunately, I (Bill) caught a nasty eye infection that left me looking like the star of a zombie apocalypse movie (and NOT one of the good guys!).

After a week of dosing with various forms of antibiotics, you can once again see the whites of my eyes.  Since the Doctor wants to see me one more time before I leave, our departure plan has been modified to Saturday the 13th.

We’ll spend as much time as we are comfortable with along the coast of New England, going to where ever we can find space and entertainment.  Our only goal after that is to be in the Chesapeake Bay in early October, and then in South Carolina in early November, then the Caribbean before it gets too cold!

Of course all that is subject to change at the whim of the weather, or just our own fickleness!

For those of you who have followed our travels, we have been a bit quiet with posts recently.  My (Bill) family is almost all located within an hour’s drive of the marina where we have settled in, so a lot of time has been devoted to family and friends who I haven’t seen in a long time.  That’s my excuse for my lack of posting!

The marina here is nice, with a few caveats.  When they quoted a 7’6″ depth they were a bit optimistic.  Our 6’7″ draft bumps bottom when ever the tide is less than zero, and the entrance has a significant shallow spot I have found several times.  The marina is also right on the edge of the main channel in and out of the Shewsbury River, a very busy boat highway.  Even though it is marked as a “No Wake Zone” the locals seem to regard that as little more than a suggestion.  As a result we roll and bounce to boat and ferry wakes especially on a nice weekend day. From our dock we have a view across New York Harbor to Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

We have been out sailing a couple days since we got here, mostly to go fishing.  Slowly I am reacquiring the skill set need to catch the local aquatic culinary delight, the summer flounder, locally know as the “fluke”.

We have been making progress on a couple of boat projects. Yesterday was a bit of an unusual day.  I actually crossed more projects off the list than I added!  A cause for celebration.   We have a new dinghy, and I have worked out a safe, easy, and reliable system for going up the mast which was needed to repair our anemometer.

We are enjoying the weather here more than in Florida.  While there are days here when is it hot, those days are separated by days when the temperature stays below 85, and more importantly, at night it drops below 70!  The other night it went down to 62, a temperature lower than we have seen in many, many months.

Here is an example of our time use these days:  Tomorrow Karen is hopping on the ferry to Manhattan, and I am visiting my Dad and some of his friends. Saturday we are going to visit my brother in his new home, and Sunday we are sailing with some of my oldest and best friends.

We’ll be here for a couple of weeks before heading a bit further north.  We are expecting our first stop to be in Newport, RI.  Then further north as remaining summer time allows.