Around Cape Cod: Day 4

the red line shows a distanc of 5 nautical miles, so our rough position.

We woke about 10am, having dropped anchor behind Long Point only six hours earlier.  Thinking it was already rather late to be starting across Cape Cod Bay to Plymouth, we might as well go into town.  The shore was about 100 feet to leeward, so I let out all the scope we had, added a second length of rode, and then brought the transom within reach of the beach with a paddle.  (On reflection, the whole affair took longer than it would have to simply inflate the kayak and paddle ashore.)  Leaving a second anchor from the stern to ensure a wind shift didn't carry the boat out of reach, we walked the quarter mile of beach and the mile of picturesque stone dike into Provincetown.  It was about two hours before high tide.  Our plan was the same as in Chatham: scope things out with an eye to finding something to eat and drinks in cool AC comfort.  We settled on a pizza place that also advertised ice cream.  

The dike is about a mile long, and a pretty walk into Provincetown.

The salt marsh and pond maintained by the dike.

These great fat ducks--common eiders, I think--seem to prefer swimming to flying.

Beatrice Ann anchored off Long Point.

We were back aboard about 3pm, half a large cheese pizza inside us and the rest in hand.  The ebb had begun.  I phoned Beatrice to get the latest NOAA weather forecast.  Winds southwest at 5 to 10 going west about 6pm, and possible thunderstorms from a coming cold front late at night.   Not great--but the frontal weather was to be with us right through the weekend.  I decided we would go for it.  It would mean doing most of the crossing after dark, but I was used to this, and had long-since laid in the gps coordinates that would see us safely into either Plymouth or the more northerly Hingham, near Boston.  (On an earlier crossing years before, we had started even later than this.  It was my first long night-crossing, and I still remember that night on Cape Cod Bay as a magical.)  Although I should have been tired, I felt pretty good.  Beatrice didn't exactly object, but I could hear worry in her voice.

Returning to the boat, tide falling but a bit higher than we left.  The Mayflower Memorial tower is visible at left in Provincetown.

 We got things ship-shape with all speed and got the anchor up.  I told Trevor that, to make so long a trip after so short a night, he would have to do a good deal of the sailing.  In his confidence he was ready to do all of it; we compromised: he could sail until full dark, then we would see.  He had rather enjoyed a little night sailing under a fingernail moon the night before.  I settled into my bunk and pretended to nap.  In reality, I was evaluating Trevor's sail trim, his course-keeping, and his reactions to events.  He did pretty well, even after a wind shift headed us, so he was no longer able to stay on the gps line.  I relaxed and daydreamed.

Five or six nautical miles off shore, I noticed that Trevor was luffing pretty continuously: I went into the cockpit to find him spilling wind to keep her on her feet.  He was ready to hand over the tiller.  On that day a new idiom entered Trevor's vocabulary: "out of my league."  While I explained that we could balance the boat better with both of us on the windward side (my bunk was on the leeward), and reef if we needed to, it quickly became apparent that a reef was an urgent priority.  The sky ahead was dark, lightning flashed in the distance.  Events were getting way ahead of me: I initially planned to reef the main alone, since the boat can't ride hove-to while reefing the mizzen, but by the time we were hove-to and I was on the foredeck, I couldn't even do that.  This was out of my league, as well.

My sails are sleeved and furl around the mast.  Furling or reefing the main in any kind of wind requires rotating the mast--usually not difficult. But the increasing wind put so much strain via the flogging sail that I couldn't budge the mast, no matter how I positioned myself on the tiny bit of deck.  Added to that was a new worry: the mizzen was unable to hold the boat head-to-wind since it was drifting backward so quickly that the rudder would steer it on the wind, then the boat would heel perilously on mizzen only, round up with agonizing slowness, repeating this at seemingly random intervals.  Wind and waves still building, my mind rapidly shifted gears, from "we need to reef" through "we need a way to ride this out," and "we need to turn back," to "I don't want to die."

Fearing a capsize, and unable to come up with a plan that couldn't make things worse, I told Trevor to leave the tiller alone and hang on tight.  Since I couldn't deal with the violently flogging mainsail, I reached into the forepeak and got out the drift sock.  I had long ago thought that this cheap fisherman's drift anchor might help with reefing under way, but my few experiments had been disappointing, and the sock was stuffed in among the anchors "just in case."  With no spare rode in easy reach, I tied it to the other end of the main rode and lowered it carefully over the bow.  In moments the strain on the rode was too great for a hand alone, and I cleated it off perhaps fifty feet off the bow.  Instantly the bow came obediently into the wind and the boat began riding properly.  Enormous relief!

 Now my undivided attention returned to the main just as Trevor cried out and pointed: the cheap aluminum carabiner (really a key ring) that I used to fix the sheet to the clew had carried away, and the main swung free of any impediment.  I shouted to Trevor that that was good news: had the sheet caught on anything for even a moment, we would have been swimming.  I knelt on the deck on the lee side of the mast and pushed with all my might to counter the pressure of the wind, and was able to rotate it a quarter-turn.  Once it had made a few rotations, the shrinking sail area began to make the job much easier.  By the time I had secured the sail, a plan had formed in my mind.

 The mizzen furled more easily, since I could stand and lean against the mast and its area was smaller to begin with.  Without the mizzen, the sock alone held the bow about forty-five degrees off the wind.  I explained to Trevor that we would sail back to Provincetown using just the wind on masts and hull as power--fortunately P-town was now almost directly downwind.  The bit I wasn't sure about was how we would come around, and what would happen when we were in broach position, with the increasing waves rolling us sideways.  Plan A was for Trevor to steer us around backwards as soon as the sock was aboard, and plan B was to release the centerboard if that prevented us from turning downwind.

 Plan B it was, no harm came of the moment we spent turning, and in a few minutes we were running before the wind and surfing four foot waves at a steady four knots plus under bare poles with centerboard up.  I called Beatrice to tell her the situation, and told her to expect another call when we were in shelter.

Waves breaking to port.  At that distance, not a worry.

Doesn't look like much, but we're doing a little modest surfing.

I was now pretty sure we weren't going to die today, but there were still some worries: the lightning had us as far from masts as possible--but on a twenty-foot cat ketch that's not very far.  We lightly discussed possible outcomes of a strike.  My happiest scenerio involved large holes burned through the hull at either or both mast steps, cabin and cockpit flooded, but the boat still afloat and reasonably stable due to the buoyancy of her storage compartments.  I sat in the back of the cockpit, four feet from the mizzenmast, while Trevor stuffed himself and a book at the forward end of the cabin, about four or five feet from either mast.  The lightning flashed behind and before, but never came within earshot. 

Increasing wave height worried me as well; I learned not to fear the waves I heard breaking well behind us, but concentrate on those that threatened to break right on the transom and poop us.  The cabin I had added to this open-cockpit design has only the merest division between outside and in: a six-inch high bulkhead beneath the thwart/mizzenmast partner was meant only to keep rainfall and spray in its proper place, outside the cabin.  The cockpit floor is below the waterline, so hasn't any scuppers.  Three feet of aft deck between transom and cockpit is the only thing between a breaking wave and a flooded boat.  The good news is that the boat is virtually unsinkable in the short term, having eight separate compartments totaling over twenty-four cubic feet in volume. Hatches to the largest compartments in bow and stern were on centerline, and would not go underwater unless the boat turtled.

A final worry grew on me as we approached the Wood End light that marked the beginning of shelter: These waves might increase further in height and begin to break as they approached the shallows near the point.  I began to bear away a little, adding some centerboard to better control my direction, as I sought to balance my fear of breaking waves against the possibility that we'd be unable to get into the lee of any land for shelter.

As Wood End light turned from a flashing abstraction into a solid white tower, and darkness fell, the wind and waves fell with them, and my fear followed.  What had happened to the violent wind and seas that had ended our passage?  It now seemed a thing half-imagined, blown out of proportion by my own inadequacy.  Rain came and went, but never amounted to anything.

In trying to turn up the coast, I discovered that, even with the full centerboard down, we could not sail under bare poles more than about twenty degrees off dead downwind.  We managed to get the trolling motor working, and slipped quietly up and back behind Long Point against a fading wind.  The big but untrustworthy old battery I had brought along as backup surprised me: it drove our half-ton on at a steady two knots for about an hour with no sign of exhaustion.  A call to Bea assured her we were well into shelter.  Battery still going strong, I decided to make for the corner close beside the dike so we would have easy access to town.  In the darkness I had to do this by judging the relative distance to Wood End and Long Point lights.  When I judged we were close, I headed shoreward until the centerboard touched, figuring we would have no problems being grounded so near low tide.   By ten o'clock we were celebrating being alive with left-over pizza and warm lemonade.  We slept well.