Point Judith Pond to Block Island 8/21-8/23

Not a gps track, but my hand-drawn approximation of our route.  (Forgot to show tacking at se corner.)

This, I decided, would be a good year to return to Block Island.  Our first trip had been the first season we had the boat, and it was also the first time we went into open water and the first (hopefully only!) time we would be threatened by a hurricane.

We put into Pt. Judith Pond, Narragansett--a much saner ramp than the open water ramp we had used last time.  One goof: left cockpit drains open; once drained, some water still sloshed in lazarette for awhile.  NOAA called for winds of 5-10mph all three days, strengthening late the third day, with ideal directions: northerly for the first half, southerly for the second.  Downhill both ways!--and this time they got it right. 

          We left much later in the day than I'd intended, needing to catch the early ebb out of the Pond to negotiate the narrow tidal race.  Fortunately the wind cooperated splendidly and we sailed out of Pt Judith Pond two hours into the ebb on a broad reach, and headed out the west exit of the Harbor of Refuge.  A watcher on shore called "beautiful boat!" as we headed out.  I liked him immediately.

I love sunsets!

Seas were only 2-3 feet in Block Island Sound, and we made fair time, sailing past the North Light as the sun set and the reflections in the windows on the island changed from yellow to orange to pink and gradually dimmed and winked out.  Some sort of shearwater (I think) passed by on its own business--a notable event, since these birds are seldom seen from land.  Searching for the harbor entrance, I learned that F on the chart = "fixed" meaning not flashing: that's what the light marking the entrance was doing.  We entered Old Harbor soon after full dark and sailed to our "accustomed" northwest corner. We drifted into shin-deep water to set two anchors, in hopes that the north one (a new homemade weed anchor) would keep us from bumping other boats, and the south one (the big danforth) would keep us from going onto the rocks of the nearby breakwater.  Only a few yards from shore at low tide, I had to trust that an easterly wind wouldn't put us hard aground on a falling tide.  But being so close certainly simplified going ashore!

We ate a late dinner of stew and bread, and at 11pm settled in for the night.  I was tired enough that I didn't even pick up a book to read in bed, but went straight to sleep.  Although it wasn't completely quiet with downtown New Shoreham right there, the boat was rock still thanks to the light breeze, well-protected harbor, and the Block Island ferries' 9pm bedtime.

North breakwater.  Walking north on Corn Neck Road.

After a breakfast of coffee and juice, granola and oatmeal, we headed ashore before 10am.  We looked in at a few sights, walked the main roads a little north and south of town, played chess with a couple of fellow sailors at the Island Free Library (Mike from NY aboard his Contessa 32, and young Sally from her parents live-aboard trimaran), had a nice pizza lunch, fed a variety animals at Justin Abram's farm, bought books in the Island Bound bookstore, and then finally returned to the boat so the boys could practice paddling Speedbump, which we'd towed as tender, and so that I could look about the intertidal zone for seaweeds and critters.  I was in good spirits the whole delightful day.

Going south: a salt pond.  Looking south from Spring Street.

Dodging the larger waves, the boys go out on some sort of old pier or breakwater.

At Ocean View--site of a hotel that burned down in the 60's--I relax and read from my new book, True Spirit by 16-yr-old solo circumnavigator Jessica Watson.

Beatrice Ann at anchor, near high tide.

Darkness found us back aboard, where I fried up onions and peppers and sausage for dinner.  Both boys turned down fresh strawberries, but not me!  I took a bucket bath in the cockpit--not a comfortable thing with teenagers with flashlights scrambling over the nearby breakwater!  Then each of us settled into our berths with new acquisitions: Trevor with The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan, Stephen with Ghost Ship: the mysterious true story of the Mary Celeste and her missing crew, and me with teen solo circumnavigator Jessie Watson's True Spirit, and a glass of cabernet.

Hard on the wind toward the southeast corner; Southeast Light.

Strange clouds.

We were late leaving the next morning owing to a broken main sprit, but after an hour or so I jerried it together (who'd have thought I'd want a drill in my sailing tool kit?) and we were on our way.  Even with the delayed departure, we had ample time before the 5:20 top of the flood that would carry us back into Point Judith Pond, so I decided to complete a circumnavigation by continuing south around and coming up the west side of the island.  The boys were both tired for some reason--maybe their detours to climb out on old jetties and such--and stayed in the cabin nearly the whole way back, leaving me to single-hand.  Mostly I didn't mind, but when we got home and I found my backpack soaked and a book nearly ruined by the fountaining of the centerboard trunk I was a bit upset.  (The boys had rescued their own backpacks, but neglected mine.)

I took many photos of the sand cliffs around the south end of the island.  Studied closely, the patterns in the cliffs tell the geologic history of the island, how the sand got there.

Southeast corner looking north.  With the wind ahead of the beam, the boat steers herself for long periods.

Hundred-foot bluffs along the southern end.  Blopck Island is made of two distinct layers of till (unsorted stuff buldozed by glaciers): gray Montauk Drift of unknown age studded with metamorphic boulders, overlain by brown New Shoreham Drift of the Wisconsinan (last) glaciation.  Stream deposits left by melting ice cap all.

Coming up on the entrance to Great Salt Pond, which has New Harbor, where most boats anchor.

DInside Great Salt Pond.

Coming up the west side, I decided on another detour.  Great Salt Pond has a tidal race entrance usually denied to motorless sailors, but even with the state of the flood at 2pm, I figured the strong, favorable wind would get us out again.  We stayed in the pond only for the few minutes it took to look around, then proceeded out against the current on a run.

North Light, this time from the west.

 

The wind strengthened further as we surfed wing-and-wing down the waves the 10nm back to the Harbor of Refuge.  The boat balanced nicely with the sails at nearly 90 degrees from centerline, centerboard about 30 degrees down, and tiller locked on centerline; I didn't have to touch the tiller much for upwards of an hour.  It occurred to me to wonder how we would fair in this stiff wind when it was time to sail into it, but I also knew that reefing was not practical in open water.  If I'd really been desperate, I could have anchored once in the pond and reefed, or even moved masts, but that would have meant a later arrival home.

Entering the Harbor of Refuge.

Entering Point Judith Pond.

We are hailed: "Are you Jeff?"

Joe, in white, in a pretty little wooden sloop.

We made our entrance well before slack water, entered the pond, and almost at once dragged the rudder in the shallows just as Stephen announced he could see bottom.  I knew the Pond was very shallow in spots, but couldn't believe it was this shallow at this stage of the tide.  We also dipped the gunwale briefly sailing hard on the wind--the first time in years we've done that.  (Stephen, fresh from a long nap, immediately retreated back to his bunk where it was "safe!")  From then on I kept the mainsheet in my hand.

Halfway up the Pond we were hailed from a nice little traditional wooden sloop: "Are you Jeff?"  Rather taken aback, I eventually thought to heave-to and see if he would come up with us (with his sloop rig reefed and a shorter waterline, he appeared to be no match for us downwind).  He and his friends came by fairly promptly and he introduced himself as Joe Anderson whom I recognized as a fellow messing-about member and EC22 builder.  He was very pleased to see another B&B boat in the Pond.  I returned his greeting and told him we would meet online.  I since discovered he had emailed after seeing us on Monday--he had been the admirer on shore, and I suppose had been on the lookout since!  Unbeknownst to me, he and his wife have a house on Pt Judith Pond and spend part of the year there.  His beautiful Everglades Challenge 22 is nearing completion and should be on the water this fall.

We got a little lost trying to find the way between islands back to the ramp, but finally made a creditable landing at about 6:15, were on the road by 7 and in the driveway at 8:30, a great trip completed.

Camping Trip to End All Camping Trips

 

"It is my sad duty to write down these unpleasant tales, but there is nothing stopping you from putting this book down at once and reading something happy, if you prefer that sort of thing."

          -A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning  by Lemony Snicket

          It all began with a Boston Harbor Islands camping trip with my youngest son Stephen--our one-on-one adventure last year--when Stephen suggested we do such a trip again, only this time with his older brother Trevor.  We left from the same ramp in Hingham that we'd used last year, but this time with a reservation for a camp site on the newly-opened Peddocks Island.  Like Grape Island, where we'd stayed last year, and most of the other islands of the Boston Harbor Islands park system, Peddocks is a stone's throw from the mainland, has areasonable anchorage, composting toilets, eager park rangers, and both regular ferries to Boston and inter-island taxis.  Although the park information calls this "rustic camping," I think of it as luxurious.  Peddocks Island lay only 4 or 5 miles from the ramp in Hingham, so this would hardly be an adventure.

          Of course, last year's trip had turned out to be more of an adventure than we'd bargained for: grounded on a falling tide on Georges Island, finally getting off at night only to discover the centerboard case was jammed with sand and gravel, sailing for our site on Grape Island until we couldn't point, then anchoring for the night; a morning visit to the nearby shore to get a rock big enough to hammer the centerboard loose, and finally arriving at Grape Island at check-in time--but a day late.

          For this year's trip the first sign of trouble was a forecast of rain.  The NOAA forecast for Boston Harbor was characteristically brief: Winds of 5-10 miles per hour.  Rain.  I had reserved the campsite over a week in advance, not having learned that the BHI campsites are not as sought-after as, say, seats on a cross-country flight.  Now we would pay for this.  But how bad could it be?  We had mild winds, roomy tents, lots of good food, and we all love to read.  Surely we could do some nice hikes and visit other islands during the drier bits.

One consequence of having to go back for the cooler is leaving Hingham Harbor at dead low tide, snaking out between sandbars.

Here are some lessons learned, in roughly chronological order.

·        Hingham Harbor is a lovely place and easy to sail in and out of.  unless you have to come back to the ramp for the forgetten cooler.  and it's dead low tide, which features a beach with an incredibly deep and sticky ooze studded with broken shells, and a channel that threads the mud banks fit to break a snake's back. 

·        It's better to lose a sandal to the muck than your life.  Especially since we're unlikely to recover the sandal either way.

·        Threading a harbor's mudbanks at dead low tide takes much longer than sailing straight across them just an hour or two earlier.

·        Although park rangers are always on call, they can be pretty scarce at 8:30pm.  And the phone numbers printed on the BHI registration confirmation don't reach live humans outside business hours.

·        The surest way to get a ranger's attention is to put your tent up in plain view but completely outside the official camp sites.

·        Rangers are Very Nice and Excruciatingly Helpful people--especially when you are the only campers stupid enough to come to their island to camp in the rain.

          The boat securely anchored, all our stuff ashore, safe from the hordes of mosquitoes in our tents at the officially-sanctioned site, we ate a simple midnight supper as the first drops began to fall.  We drifted off to sleep to the pitter-pat of rain drumming on the nylon.  Yes, I said "drumming."

          Awake in the middle of the morning, we discovered that our tents weren't entirely waterproof--little puddles were dealt with using drinking cups and a washcloth.  I went out in the light rain to put up the free-standing umbrella and folding chairs I'd cleverly stuffed in the cabin.  If I arranged it right and the wind didn't shift, I could keep one chair mostly out of the rain and a second about half out of it.  If I needed a good stretch, this would be the place.  Breakfast was granola, oatmeal and coffee without sugar (forgotten on the boat).  After eating, we went to check out another possible shelter: a little house built on the dock optimistically equipped with some dozen or so bench seats for tourists waiting for water taxi or ferry.  It would be an adequate book nook, and came with a view of nearby Hull and the bay we'd sailed across yesterday. 

The view from our campsite.

View inland from the dock: the old chapel, the portajons, and our campsite near center.

Beatrice Ann is anchored on a short rode only 20yds off beach.  No worries: light winds!

          Spying a schedule on the dock and feeling hopeful about the small drizzle falling, we decided to chance a tour of nearby George's Island, home to a historic Civil War-era fort cum military base cum prisoner-of-war camp, etc, etc.  Stephen and I had gone last year and he had put it on this year's itinerary also, partly for Trevor's sake, and partly because he wanted to return with flashlights to explore the darker and scarier recesses of the big granite structure.  Of course, we forgot the flashlights in the tents.

Leaving Peddocks Island and heading across the Gut to Hull, then on to Georges Island.

          The (free!) water taxi brought us the mile or two through Hull Gut to George's Island, which strategically commands the only original deep-water entry into Boston Harbor.  We wandered the well-designed exhibits of the visitor's center, then ventured into the light rain to explore the fort itself.  Funny story: the fort was originally built as part of a huge network of congressionally-authorized coastal defenses designed to protect us from attack by ships-of-the-line that might mount a hundred guns up to forty-two pounders.  When it was completed in the 1850s, there was only enough money left for one gun. 

          The design was all but obsolete even as it was being built: a memorial to the star-shaped French designs of Medieval days.

          Of course, Ft. Warren eventually mounted respectable batteries and was updated many times over the next century--always for the last war, of course--playing a role in the Civil War as a training base for Union recruits and later a notably humane prisoner-of-war camp for Confederate soldiers.  (Another story: the the camp commandant was so highly-regarded by the confederate soldiers imprisoned there, that when his son went off to war he carried with him a letter signed by many of them which desired that the son be well-treated in the event of his capture.)  Later the fort was ready for the Spanish-American War that fizzled suddenly after the Spanish fleet was destroyed, and became a base for remotely-operated mines that protected Boston from submarine attack during the world wars.  (With all the shipping that comes through Boston, the thought of Coast Guardsmen at the fort with their fingers on mine detonation buttons makes me shudder.)  In the end, the fort never saw an attack. 

          On this second day, we learned yet more lessons.

·        The water-resistant "Dri Ducks" rain suit works pretty well, but isn't very durable.

·        Cheap plastic ponchos are as apt to rain inside as out, and also aren't very durable.

·        If you are repeatedly approached by rangers who tell you that ferry service will be shut down early due to the weather, you should enquire further about the developing weather.

·        Often times NOAA marine forecasters cannot get wind directions right even one day out, but can generally be relied on to tell you maximum wind speeds.  But sometimes they do it backwards: right about wind directions,  wrong about speeds.

·        A thirty-foot catamaran water taxi with twin 225HP engines can be scarily unsteady in biggish waves and twenty-plus mile-an-hour winds.

·        Cheap, leaky tents in an open field generally fair even less well as winds build to almost thirty miles-an-hour.

·        A twenty-foot boat should not be anchored near a lee shore in such a wind--unless the anchor can get a good grip on something more immovable than sand.  (More anon.)

·        Even if you were not present to witness it, you know your boat grounded at low tide if you find your rudder afloat from its gudgeons, and your centerboard jammed in the trunk by sand.

·        Despondency is a powerful enervator: I had equipment I could have used, but couldn't get up the energy to look thoroughly through my wet gear.

Outside the outermost wall of Ft. Warren in the rain and fog.

          Back on Peddocks, we returned to our tents to discover they leaked a good deal more than we'd thought.  I bailed over a gallon of water from the floor, one quart sauce pan at a time, as more rained down on me from the sides and roof.  Eventually I discovered I could sort of sqeegee the water out the door, saving the bailing for the puddles in corners and edges.  Luckily I had brought a cushion from the boat that enabled me to sit without being in standing water.

          It was about this point, sitting on my cushion and wondering what to do next, that Trevor commented that it wouldn't be an adventure if we weren't cold and wet.  Never mind that I maintain that hot and wet can be just as adventurous--my heart was warmed by his fortitude and good humor.  As we laughed and joked about this, I reflected that at no time did either of my boys whine about the situation or ask to go home.  I can think of no child of my acquaintance who would show such spirit, and I was immensely proud of both of them.

          With nothing to do but feel sorry for ourselves as we watched the tent walls shudder with the wind, showering us with rain, then occasionally collapse almost flat with gusts, I decided it must be time for a story.  Fortunately I had thought ahead, choosing from the shelf on the way out a book I had never read: Peter Pan.  It's well worth reading--especially the beginning, with its description of Mrs. Darling whose "romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the righthand corner" and Mr Darling, who "was one of those deep ones who knew about stocks and shares.  Of course no one really knows, but he seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him" and who "got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss.  He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss."  Over the flapping and clatter of wind and rain I read aloud, stopping only every other chapter to rest my voice and bail water.  Interrupted only by a belated supper (the lighter refused to work for a while) and a visit from the rangers, I read 10 chapters before we tried to sleep.  Both boys were quiet, but whenever I paused both insisted on hearing more.  The rangers came to give us a positive weather report for the morrow--wind slackening to 5-10mph and less rain--and to suggest we move the tents into the shelter of nearby rose bushes, which I promptly did.  (This made a difference in that, instead of near-constant drizzle inside the tents, less-frequent gusts meant heavier downpours of accumulated drops.  Also, the rose bushes were hell on my bare legs and feet.)

          We awoke about 8 the next morning to find rain and wind both much diminished.  Breakfast was even more delayed: the lighter took an hour and a half to light, refusing to work until after warming in my pocket and being tried until my trigger finger began to cramp.  After that it was time to pack.  I wanted to get into Hingham near the 1pm top of the tide, to avoid the difficulties of the outbound trip.  I worked away steadily at my tent and wondered what was happening inside their tent.  Eventually I found out: nothing, since both boys had decided to take off their wet clothes, and there were no drier ones to put on instead.  Eventually I got the stove going and found a solution.  More lessons learned:

·        A few minutes in a saucepan on a hot stove is enough to warm wet clothing enough to put on.  (Not dry it, mind you--just make it feel less miserable going on in that critical first minute.)

·        Don't try this with nylon.

·        The organizational skills of children with ADHD are not improved by being tired and cold.

·        Yelling may make you feel better, but won't necessarily improve the outward situation.

I did not manage our departure well at all.  After my instructions went unheeded and I found the boys throwing apples at each other three separate times, I decided to leave the remainder of the packing to them while I paddled out to the anchored boat and brought it to the beach.  The last equipment came on board very tardily, out of order, and covered with sand.  The boy's tent was a random bundle trailing tent stakes and pieces of pole.  (Bags for all of these came separately later on.)  I kept the boat on the beach--its bottom grinding against the shingle with the wake of every passing boat--for an hour, to do a loading job that should have taken ten minutes as first one boy, then the other, shuffled to the beach with an arm-load of miscellany.  I'm afraid all my shouting did not leave a good impression with the rangers, who wisely kept out of sight.

          My inability to get the deeply-buried anchor off the bottom meant that I had brought the boat ashore by bending on additional rode to reach the beach.  Now we hauled off, rigged to leave, and stood taut-rode and directly above the anchor. which I expected to do the trick fairly quickly.  It didn't.  Even taking up the slack and cleating off in the troughs of boat wakes so that the full buoyancy of the boat was on the rode didn't unearth the anchor.  Squinting, I could just see the end of my six feet of chain standing above the bottom.  More than an hour later, I finally had the whole anchor chain hanging below, but still the boat did not move.  More pulling, and the chain came to the gunwale in the 8 feet of depth, but still the boat felt stuck.  If you do the math, you'll see the anchor must have been above the bottom--what was going on?  All at once we realized the boat was adrift, with the magic anchor seemingly still pulling nearly as hard as ever.  I cleated it firmly below us and we sailed very slowly and unsteadily out into Hull Bay.

          Finally, by passing my painter through one link after another in the chain and using it as a two-part hoist, I managed to get my anchor into view: it had hooked solidly through a big rusty Danforth that had fouled with its own chain.  The old chain-and-anchor had formed a loop that my own Danforth had gone right through the middle of.  Unwilling to try any further to hoist it on deck (having already chewed-up my gunwale in the exercise), I gave up our efforts as lost and cut the whole mess loose in the deep waters of Hull Bay.  But at least the mystery was solved.

Stephen is positively cheerful at the tiller.

Now we can read Peter Pan in the sun!

Nearly sunset; Boston skyline at right.

Sunset over the Hingham Yacht Club.

More lessons learned:

·        I have a lousy sense of direction, and--for all my experience--can't read the shoreline for beans.  --I'm a poor navigator with a gps in hand, a worse one without.

·        The spare gps isn't much use if you can't find it.

·        A "simple straight shot" might not be so straight at low tide.  It's even less simple at night.  and even less simple when the buoys marking the winding channel are unlighted.

·        A wife and mother who will put hot food on the table for you at

any hour is a priceless treasure.

·        I don't care if it is only 4 miles--BRING THE GPS NEXT TIME!

A busy July has ended

I spent July running a summer program building boats with kids at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, New Bedford.  Yesterday we launched the boats, culminating an experience that pleased the kids, their parents, the church, and even the occaisonal passer-by.  It left me feeling a bit smug.  Take a look at http://standrewssummer.blogspot.com/

Two days and nights in Buzzards Bay

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.