After a few years of treating Buzzards Bay as a road to Woods Hole and points beyond, I've finally toured the Bay itself. Trevor and I launched in New Bedford Harbor early in the evening of June 26 with light winds and a beautiful sky. We rode an ebb tide and fair wind down the Acushnet River and hooked east around West Island in the failing light; as fog closed in we sought a place in the shelter of the island with the help of gps. We anchored inshore of Whale Rock about 9pm, ate a quick dinner of stew, chowder and cookies, and settled in for a quiet night.
The gps track goes counter-clockwise around the Bay. It is a rough track: not fine-grained enough to show shorter tacks. The red line I added is 5 nautical miles.
A panoramic view of our anchorage in a little bight on the east side of West Island.
The morning was beautiful, though the midges were biting. We had coffee, scones, and granola as the terns around us dove for their own breakfast. I rowed us ashore to walk a beautiful and unpeopled salt marsh, where a nesting mother flew at me, angrily calling bdip! bdip! bdip! We were underway again by 10:30, sailing southeast 5nm across the Bay for Quissett Harbor, where we'd stayed overnight several years ago.
The terns are a blur here, or too small to show up easily. They dive obliquely with a great splash, then struggle to get airborne once more, then repeat.
Beatrice Ann on the beach.
The salt marsh.
Momma bird on her lookout rock, just right of center.
Whale Rock, which we saw in the fog last night.
From Penzance beside Woods Hole, we sailed sedately north along the Bay's eastern shore, passing Quissett, and Great Sippewisset Marsh and its wind turbines, and putting our nose into Wild and Megansett Harbors. All the while I relaxed at the tiller with the chart book in my lap and my cruising guide in my hands, reading about each place, while Trevor took his nose out of his book long enough to take the air on the foredeck.
Penzance
Stone Point dike and the entrance channel to the Cape Cod Canal.
Soon after 4pm we passed the "traffic light" for the Cape Cod Canal on Wings Neck--and it WAS a traffic light, apparently appropriated from some street intersection somewhere. Soon we were passing the end of Stony Point dike, which marks the entrance channel to the canal. It suddenly occurred to me that we could make Sippican Harbor that evening --a destination I'd been looking at since last season--if we were quick. After an afternoon of broad reaching and running, we turned hard on the wind, and cleared Butler Point by sailing over the shoal inside lonely Bird Island, opening Sippican Harbor at 5:30pm.
Bird Island looks too exposed and frail to exist.
Marion's harbor is long and lovely and chock-a-block with moorings. The harbormaster's office, (scoped out by land long ago) is a small room raised above a veranda near the top of the harbor--but was hard to spot amid the clutter. We dropped the hook a mile away in a marginally protected spot off Ram Island (after an abortive attempt to close to some sort of shellfish farm around the corner). With so much daylight left, I sprawled out in the cockpit with a book, while Trevor polished off his in the cabin. We ate our stew and bread and turned in relatively early.
Ram Island
Next morning, I recovered from a sleepless night (back pain) well enough for a cheerful paddle to the town dock, where we abandoned the inflatable for a walking tour of downtown Marion. We spent a long time in The Stall, where I perused the nautical section, Trevor added to his Fablehaven books, and we utterly failed to find a book on the famous and mysterious Mary Celeste incident. On a bench in front of the Historical Society (alas, closed) we ate a lunch of sandwiches from the General Store, then followed it up with ice cream from the shop around the corner.
Lunch stop.
Trevor eats ice cream in the shade.
Back aboard in the early afternoon, I got the anchor aboard and stowed while Trevor sailed us out. Without actually planning it, he ended up sailing the whole way home, working us to windward of points and shoals, taking us up the river, and sailing through the hurricane barrier back into New Bedford harbor. I mostly lounged about the cabin, looked at the chart to plot strategy, and napped a bit. Trevor was quite pleased with himself. Fog came and went as the day wore on, and even the hurricane barrier was invisible from more than a hundred feet away--giving us quite a start when it loomed suddenly up. We landed before 8pm and tucked-in to a late supper at home shortly after 9pm.
Trevor practices with the inflatable as I begin to rig for sail.
Trevor has the helm for six hours straight.
Trevor, the chart shows the daymark at the eastern end of a rocky shoal--let's keep it to starboard.
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