From the Mountains to the Sea: Pleasure Cruise

My mom came to visit over the summer and we decided to sail to Newburyport. It seemed reasonable enough, you can pretty much see Newburyport from our house (not in a Sarah Palin/Russia sort of way, but actually in fact). We figured we'd get up there, tie up to the town dock, and get some lunch. The wind was at our backs and we got our spinnaker flying for the first time! It took a little trial and error (truth be told, we're still not 100% sure that we've ever rigged it correctly) but up it went! We even had my mom at the helm for a little while.

As we came up to the mouth of the Merrimack River that we would have to travel up to get to Newburyport there was lots of boat traffic and big rolling waves. The large mouth of the river is made very narrow due to a break water coming in from either side, and people stall their boats right in the current and cast their lines, because apparently that's the best place to catch fish. We hadn't timed the tide right and we were going against a strong current, in big waves, with power boats drifting this way and that, in a 16 foot wide boat, with nothing but our little 8 horse motor to push us along. It was pretty intense, but Cody navigated the obstacles well and we made it past the mouth.

It took us about 2 hours to make it from there to the town dock (it had taken us only 2 hours to get from home to the river) because we were going about half a knot against the current. Ouch. Eventually we made it and found a slip at the very end of the dock so we didn't have to try to parallel park our boat between two pristine yachts. We walked up to Grog, a fantastic little pub in Newburyport, and had lunch and cocktails, then walked around for a bit before deciding we should probably try to make it out out of the river before the tide changed and we had to go against the current the other direction. We barely made it, and this time, at a slack tide, it only took is 30 minutes to get from the dock back into the bay. We were heading into the wind on the way home, though, so it took us significantly longer to make it back. We stopped for a swim, and then the wind picked up so that we were moving pretty good, even though we had to tack back and forth to make any headway.

Not much of an exciting story, and really we were due for a pleasant day on the boat, but it feel so awesome to get somewhere on our boat. It's like the first time you do a long ride on your bike (only with more sitting and much more alcohol) - the world looks so much different than when viewed from a car. When distances are put in terms of how long it takes you get there under wind power they take on a whole new meaning.