In which Nereus takes us past Nantucket, through the Cape Cod Canal and on to Newport.
Suddenly Joe tells us we have a new plan. We will leave Rockland on Sunday afternoon and make an overnight passage to Newport. From there it is a shortish hop on Tuesday to Dave Snediker’s boat yard at Pawcatuck (yes, really) and then through New York’s East River to journey’s end.
But we get ahead of ourselves. Hands up who does not love a journey at night? A road trip, the night train or a passage at sea sailing into the dark and the dawn. Even the Caen ferry is great.
Sid and Doris (the junior Beaves), Joe and Captain Wes are all on for standing watches and seeing the night through. We set off mid afternoon when we are back from Rockland’s galleries and are soon out in the Atlantic Bay of Maine heading past Boston and past Plymouth (of Mayflower fame) for the Cape Cod Canal which is about eleven hours steaming away. Nereus does a steady 10kn, in contrast to modern motor boats which their owners require to do 20kn, at a proportionately higher fuel consumption. We all agree that life at 10kn is much more charming.
Do have a look at Doris’s charrts (charrts is Poirate for maps).
We cook the booty from the amusingly expensive Good Tern whole food store and begin to settle to the task. Either Wes or Joe have to be on watch while Sid and Doris get acquainted with the radar and AIS screens. The first part of the journey is about dodging the lobster pots. Then there’s almost nothing on the water.
8pm and the US ensign has to be taken down. Nereus is punctilious about flag protocol, including having a New York Yacht Club burgee of precisely the right proportions, which is apparently 5/8″ per foot of boat.
Sid takes a watch with Wes and then with Joe. There is no tiller wrangling or wheel twiddling. A course is set in the autopilot and occasionally there is a tweak with a little joystick. The radar picks up a couple of sailing boats on passage, a few fishing boats and some weather which misses us. The night passes companionably away with stories and silence. Doris comes back to the bridge at two and Sid goes down. More pertinently, Joe hands over command to Cap’n Wes. Doris gets to use the more exotic section of her Lights And Shapes book as we pass a trawler which is having problems with its gear (green over white, and two vertical red lights).
Dawn dawns, slowly and then suddenly as it does at sea, and the weather on the ocean side is happening to other people.
Cape Cod Canal joins natural tidal rivers to make the seven mile long canal (with no locks) that cuts 62 ocean miles off the journey from New York to Boston. While there were other attempts it was not until 1909 that the successful project was under way. The effort was hampered by immovable moraine boulders which had to be blown up. On opening in 1916 the channel was only 30 metres wide and difficult to navigate so tolls did not meet business plan. In 1928 the government bought the canal and as part of the Roosevelt New Deal make work build infrastructure scheme it was widened to 150 metres with two road bridges and and a lifting rail bridge with two big towers to hold the track out of the way of the masts below.
We get clearance from the Army Corps of Engineers, who dug the cut and still feel quite protective about it, and in we go. Sid discovers a fellow bridge nerd in Wes and all other conversation is suspended.
Soon we are out and passing Rhode Island with the ‘cottages’, actually mansions, built in the late nineteenth century by the Astors, Vanderbilts, Berwinds and others. Sid had never heard of the Berwinds. The family produced two thirds of the world’s coal, or maybe their employees did. We should come back to see these wonders that are now open to visitors.
We come to Newport and turn in past Fort Adams. We have no picture but if you have seen one Vauban style fort then you’ve seen this one too.
Wes was hoping to use Black Watch’s permanent mooring, but as Cap’n Kyle has observed if you pay for 63′ you get 63′, and for 105′ Nereus it looks too tight to the other boats around. We try that one but decide to move over to a much larger mooring in the tall ships zone out by the breakwater. Wes was a tugboat captain. He puts the boat right by the tin and Joe uses a grappling hook on a line to pick up the strop. Another no fuss Norris and time to sample the delights of Newport.