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Crew: Andrew, Koby, Lena, Sergey
The Eliza
The Boston Sailing Center (BSC) had heard us and had felt our pain. Back when we were on the Anne on Martha’s Vineyard we had had significant “head” problems and left them several messages and emails asking for help. They were not able to help us at the time and as a result we lost a whole day of vacation doing work that none of us was equipped or motivated to do. So, to compensate us for our troubles, the BSC gave us a free 3 day cruise on one of their newest boats—the Eliza, a Jeanneau 349, a little sister of the Pura Vida, the Jeanneau 440 that we had sailed in the Spanish Virgin Islands back in January.
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The original plan had been to cast off Friday morning, September 11th, and return on Sunday. However, we heard some bad news on Thursday: Sergey would not be able to make it on Friday and would have to join us on Saturday. That, combined with the forecast of NE winds of 15 to 20 kt with gusts up to 25 kt and seas 4 to 5 ft, made me wonder whether we should cancel the Friday sail and take off on Saturday morning. A quick call with the crew and we settled it—we would have the Shabbat dinner on the boat on Friday night (and potentially sleep there) but not cast off until Saturday morning.
You will do everything today
It was almost 6AM, and I could not sleep. The waves under the hull of the Eliza made for an uncomfortable night. “I’ll just get up,” I thought, “and wait for the sunrise.” One arm out of the sleeping bag and I lost all of my resolve—it was cold! I allowed myself to stay cozy inside the sleeping bag for another few minutes. Panic of missing the sunrise got me jumping out of the bed at 6.20AM and onto the bow to watch the sunrise over the airport.
It was better than I could have imagined—this was only my second time waking up on a boat in the sailing club, and the previous time the weather had been overcast so I had not seen the sunrise. Multiple cormorants perching on the pillings around the sailing center made for an entertaining show while the sun came up over East Boston. I wondered for a minute whether I might be happy living in a building by the seaport but as soon as I heard the roar of the first airplane lifting off at the airport I quickly realized—nope, not for me.
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When Andrew arrived at around 8.45 I was in the cockpit reading my book when he said “Today I am just a passenger, you guys will do everything”. OK, this was new. First things first—we had to undock safely, so Sergey, Koby and I deliberated and decided that we would let the wind push us away from the dock. That worked well, and soon we were making our way to the middle of the inner harbor.
Then, it was time to raise the mainsail and unfurl the jib, which we did easily and without any drama after Sergey turned her into the wind (the perks of a newer boat are that her lines and sails are still new and glide up easily). We had good speed, perhaps 5 knots, and Koby was at the helm. We started feeling the 3-4ft waves upon passing Deer Island Light and venturing away from Boston Harbor and into Massachusetts Bay. At this point we had to make a decision about our route—with Andrew acting as a passenger only, Sergey and I had to put our heads together, look at the chart, consider the current wind and the wind forecast and make a decision. Since the wind was coming from the east, we could either go north or south. The forecast indicated that the wind would shift to the southeast, which would still work for either a return to Boston from the north (we would return on a beam reach) or the south (we would return on a run). Sergey made an executive decision to go north and attempt to make it to Gloucester before nightfall.
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But before we ventured too far into North Channel that would take us there, we decided to reef the jib and the mainsail. The Eliza had the lines for the first and second main reef on the port and starboard sides of the mast, respectively. Without confirming which one we should be trimming, Koby and I started trimming the starboard reef line (second reef) before Sergey asked “are you sure you’re trimming the first reef?”. We weren’t. After clumsily fixing our mistake we were back in action and sailing at about 4 to 5 knots. It was my turn to navigate and plan our course to Nahant first, then Marblehead and finally—if we had enough light and wind—Gloucester!
Saying goodbye to Boston. For now... |
Sea Sick
Maybe it was because I spent too much time staring at the chart, maybe it was because I had gone into the salon to grab my gloves, but at some point I started feeling sea-sick before we had even reached Nahant. Koby was also not feeling 100%, so the crew decided to stop in Nahant for lunch. Sergey asked if Nahant would be protected enough from the winds and the waves. A quick glance at the chart was all it took to realize that Nahant (bay) was too exposed to the east to make for a relaxed lunch. I had given up on Nahant at this point and was ready to keep going when Andrew had to intervene (the first time he did that day, he had been very disciplined so far letting me make navigation mistakes) and point out that there was another side to Nahant—Nahant Harbor.
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Making good progress toward Nahant. |
Andrew was at the helm, going around in circles while Sergey and I figured out how to operate the windlass since pushing the “down” button on the control didn’t do what it was supposed to do which was locking the chain and slowly letting it out. When we figured it out I shouted back “we can anchor”—I think I naively assumed that Andrew was going to take that as a hint to decide where to anchor but he just looked at me and reinforced his resolve: “You guys tell me what to do, I am not making any decisions today”. And we did.
Lunch was nice and relaxed. When it was over, there was some deliberation about inflating the dinghy and visiting Nahant. We ended up not doing it—which was a good thing too because we would not make it to Salem before the nightfall otherwise.
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Winging it in Salem Sound
Either Sergey or Andrew (I can’t remember who) asked me to take the helm for cast off. Since the windlass would not work while the engine was off, we did not cast off under sail (although it would have been a good opportunity to do so otherwise). I asked the crew to raise the sails but something was off still. I could not sail very close to the wind—which was coming directly from where we needed to go—and tacked a couple of times to try to get out of Nahant Harbor and yet we were still stuck and tacking at 180 degree angles. Andrew said nothing, but I’m sure he was burning up inside. Still drowsy from seasickness, I handed the helm over to Sergey, and he quickly diagnosed the problem: both of our sails were still reefed even though the wind had slowed down! Which was a problem—what little wind that we had, we were not using. After shaking the reefs, we were able to travel much closer to the wind!
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Our next milestone was the red buoy number 4 which marked the end of a shallow area by Marblehead neck. There was not a lot of navigation to be done between Nahant and our next milestone. Andrew showed me how to use parallel rulers to precisely determine our heading. Once we got to the red buoy number 4 which, as usual, magically appeared in the horizon exactly where it was supposed to be, we would have to make a decision about how to actually enter Salem Harbor.
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We had two options: we could either take Marblehead Channel, which was clearly marked with lighted buoys or we could take the “shortcut” South Channel, which was more exciting (i.e. more narrow) and marked only with unlit buoys. Andrew, upon witnessing our deliberations, said “South Channel is tricky… like Woods Hole tricky”... Oops… that definitely raised all sorts of flags in my mind before he added “minus the currents”—I remembered all the planning that had gone into planning that woods hole crossing back in July and Sergey and I had done no planning whatsoever.
Andrew’s note. I did say so to make sure the crew paid attention in a tricky channel, but I didn’t mean to scare them off: I honestly misremembered that channel’s difficulty. It turned out to be nothing like Woods Hole (though honestly, Woods Hole itself also turned out to be not such a big deal). There were no side currents and related dangers in South Channel; the crew just had to carefully follow the buoys—which they did with flying colors!
It was getting close to nightfall so depending on how early we arrived at Marblehead Channel we would have to make a decision to either go through the safe (and long) route or go through the adventurous (and short) route. Furthermore, we had to consider the direction of the wind, particularly if it would force us to tack in the narrow South Channel (which we definitely did not want to do). Since the wind was still blowing from the east, and it was approximately 6PM when we approached Salem Sound (sunset was at 7PM)—we decided that we could make it through the short route! I felt brave—we were doing this!
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Koby was at the helm and he steered us through the channel masterfully! Sergey had anchored in Salem Harbor before, so he knew where to go (Andrew also knew but he kept his professorial silence). In the distance we greeted the Fort Pickering lighthouse as we made our way to the massive mooring field in Salem Harbor ahead of us and dropped the anchor. The timing was perfect, too: the sun was going down and we were greeted with a wonderful sunset as we settled for the night. I was very proud of us.
Our anchorage site was as quiet as it could be—no wind, no waves. To our port side, there was an ugly fishing boat, and to our starboard there was a gorgeous two-mast, pale-green ship. Needless to say, we preferred to rest our gaze on the starboard side.
Salem Harbor |
A morning in Salem Harbor
Waking up in Salem Harbor was magical. I admit that I had considered—just for a few minutes on the previous Friday—bailing out of the trip altogether out of fear that the waves that had been forecasted for Massachusetts Bay would make me seasick. That would have been a huge mistake—on that Sunday morning there was absolutely nothing I would rather be doing than enjoying the amazing sunrise with my friends and drinking my (french pressed) morning coffee surrounded by the ocean.
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The morning had another surprise in store for us—seals! Lots of them! They were swimming around the moored boats, occasionally swimming just at the surface and making a big splash. Sometimes we would see their small black heads sticking out of the water. What a show! We watched them for a while, and then a guy came over on his pale green dinghy—he just wanted to chat. His name was Frank and he owned the two-mast boat that I had been admiring the night before. He gave us lots of great tips and where to go ashore. When he left I turned around and saw a feast was taking place in the cockpit table behind me—bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon, tomatoes, eggs—you name it! Koby had everything (except capers—but I forgave him! :D ).
Frank & a bunch of fish |
Frank's boat |
Andrew was able to snap a photo of a seal having her breakfast |
The boat needed a pump-out so around 9AM I called for the pump-out boat on channel 9. He told us that he would be with us in 45 minutes give or take. We had been very spoiled by the pump-out boat back in Vineyard Haven which had shown up only a few minutes after we called them. In the back of my head something told me that we should probably plan to head back to Boston early…Preferably right after pump-out. But it was so nice in Salem… and I really wanted to go to town (I had never been there before)... And we had come all this way to Salem… Also, I was very aware that this would probably be our last cruise for the year and wanted to make the best of it. So I said nothing.
The crew started preparing the dinghy to go to town while we waited for the pump-out boat. At around 10.15AM there was still no pump-out boat in sight so I called again. We learned through the radio that the guy had some issue with his pump so he would not be able to pump us out for a while. I rationalized that there would be no harm going to town while we waited for the pumpout boat to get fixed. In retrospect, we should have made plans at that point to get to Boston early and get pumped-out there. Well, hindsight is 20/20 and we ended up going to town anyway and using up precious sail hours there. Furthermore, thinking we were doing the right thing, Sergey and I called the pumpout boat and told him to get us off his waiting list since we were not going to be on the boat for the next few hours.
Koby found a dinghy dock at Pickering Wharf using his phone and guided us there (Andrew would have probably argued that the cruising guide would have been the right way to learn that but Koby’s solution did get us there)—it took about 20 minutes just to get to the wharf and dock our dinghy. On the way there, I kept remembering how we had once broken our motor in Hadley Harbor and had to row all the way back to our boat. If we broke our motor now, we would have to row at least twice the distance that we had to row back in Hadley Harbor. As we went around the tiny Derby Wharf Light, a couple sitting on the wharf smiled at us, possibly entertained by the bright orange life jackets that we were all wearing.
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Bacalhau-à-braz
At this point I was totally in “island” mode (even though Salem is not an island, but you get what I mean). Sergey and I made the decision to return to the dinghy by 1PM, which sounded reasonable. I think neither of us really appreciated the fact that we were 20 nautical miles away from Boston and that it would take us a good 6 to 7 hours to cover that distance.
We walked along Derby Wharf to go checkout the lighthouse, took lots of pictures, and saw the Friendship of Salem on the way. We were just relaxed and having fun. As we were walking back from the lighthouse, I proposed we had lunch in Salem before heading back to the Eliza. There were no enthusiastic “yeses” but no disgruntled “nos” either so we found a place that had outdoor seating.
That masts that belonged to the Friendship of Salem were lying on the grass and their cleets were huge. |
To my surprise, the place we had chosen was a Portuguese restaurant. The main menu was filled with Portuguese dishes! I hadn’t had Portuguese food since my lightning visit to Lisbon in March just before the pandemic closed down borders all over the world. I was thrilled that I got to introduce the crew to a little bit of the Portuguese culture. There’s still a smudge of nationalistic pride in me, I admit. Codfish was never my favorite food growing up in Lisbon, but whenever I find a Portuguese restaurant in the US, I am always compelled to order codfish… perhaps because salted cod is such an odd thing to order at a restaurant.
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All of this delight and excitement also meant that I had totally lost track of my priorities at this point. As the appointed navigator, I should have known that we would be very, very late getting back to Boston. Getting back safely to familiar waters before the sunset should have taken precedence over a Salem visit, but it would have been a tough decision that I had not been willing to take.
On our way back to the Eliza we saw what appeared to be a floating, moving, tiki house. Turned out it was a bar. It was around 1.30PM when we arrived at the Eliza, and we still needed to pump out our boat. I called the pumpout boat again but got no response. They must’ve been backed up (no pun intended!). We could not wait much longer. We tried calling the Marblehead harbormaster to see if they could pump us out on the way but got no response either. This was when I realized our predicament: we would not be able to pump-out; we had to return to Boston ASAP to avoid sailing in relatively unfamiliar waters in the dark.
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Night Sailing
We left Salem Harbor via Marblehead Channel—Salem Sound was a popular place that Sunday, and there were lots of boats sharing the channel with us. We did our best to tack our way out of Salem Sound, but our progress was slow—we needed to travel southeast against the wind, which meant a lot of tacking before we cleared the Sound. Sergey had considered reefing the mainsail but gave up on that plan given our experience the previous day at Nahant. As a result, the crew had to contend with some heeling (well, maybe a lot of heeling ... I was too focused on the chart and sailing as close to the wind as possible to notice that the crew was uncomfortable… )
The helmsman and the navigator |
It took us what felt like forever to get to the red buoy number 4—the part of our course that was supposed to be the “short” one. But it was fun, I admit, to be on a tack facing the open ocean and then back to seeing a familiar (i.e. charted) landscape, zigzagging between the adventure and the familiarity. The only non-fun part was having to dodge lobster traps, there were dozens of them!! It reminded me of that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Han and Chewy fly into an asteroid field (“never tell me the odds” ;-) ).
It must’ve been around 5PM when we cleared the red number 4 and anxiety settled in–Sergey and I looked at each other, and we both knew our predicament: we had 2 hours before sunset and we were not going to make it to Boston before dark. In a moment of blasphemy and weakness we considered turning on the engine for the passage to North Channel. There was a problem with that though (other than the obvious problem of motoring when we had a perfectly good set of sails)—Andrew had promised the sailing club that he would return the boat with a full tank of diesel. Even if we motored we would not be back in time to refuel (and the tank would not be full). But if we didn’t motor we would be potentially putting the crew in a perilous situation: we would have to sail against the wind, at night in unknown waters and thus unable to precisely track our position or detect rogue waves and treacherous lobster traps with enough time to react. It took one look at Andrew to know that there was only one option in that situation: we were sailing all the way.
Getting ready for some night sailing |
The sun disappeared behind the cloud as we cleared Nahant. There was still a long way to go, and soon enough the water would turn pitch dark and the green islands would become dark shadows against the landscape. Our next tack had us facing the Graves Lighthouse, which was reassuring … for a little bit. Then we saw our first lit buoy: a dot and a dash (representing an “A” in Morse code) from the red white buoy that marked the entrance to North Channel. Night sailing had begun.
We still had a long way to sail to get to Boston when the sun disappeared |
At this point we could see Boston’s many lights in the distance—some blinking, some not. The new mission was to try to find the “right” blinking lights and avoid the unlit buoys (we would not be able to see them) while at the same time avoiding the lobster traps sneaking up on us. But we had a plan! Since we knew—based on our previous tacks—that we could travel closed-hauled at both 120 and 210 degrees, Sergey and I looked at the chart and figured that we could just tack into the North Channel (~210 degrees) and that heading would take us back home. Turns out we were wrong about the 210 heading (either that or the wind had shifted)—we ended up having to tack between the North and South Channels multiple times. Also, we had failed to account for the huge and very well lit dredging barge that was anchored in the middle of North Channel!
Andrew was at the helm at this point, and he decided to tack before we were too close to the barge. It’s really, really hard to tell how far you are from an object—even a well lit one—when everything around you is dark. The problem with this tack was that we were moving quickly across both North and South Channels and would soon pass beyond South Channel, which had its own dangers in store: Sergey and I estimated that we were heading straight to Ram Head, which is appropriately marked with a green buoy but one that was unlit and thus completely invisible to us—we would not be able to see it until it was too late! So we asked Andrew to tack back toward the North Channel. It was then, I think, when I lost my bearings. Examining the chart felt so safe, as if it was clear where we were supposed to go. But then looking around me, all I could see were blinking lights—from Boston, some from buoys. I was not able to tell if a blinking light was near or far. Was that buoy flashing every 4 seconds or 6 seconds? And how the heck do you count 2.5 seconds?
I had never been so relieved for clearing Deer Island Light before. This meant that we were finally travelling in familiar waters. The familiar President Roads channel was finally within our reach. I relaxed for a few minutes as we made our way to the inner harbor. And then Andrew asked—so are there any obstructions in Inner Boston Harbor? Oops… I was not prepared for that question. I never noticed before! He reminded me of the airport landing strip that stretches out into the Inner Harbor. But where was that on the chart? I looked and looked but it was not there! Koby pointed it out before we found it on the chart. Stressful indeed!
We asked Andrew—who was still at the helm—to steer towards Zakim Bridge and bring us back home. We passed Rowes Wharf, dropped the sails, and that was the end: no more charts, no more planning. Or so I thought. Turned out that the Boston Sailing Center boat house was really hard to identify in the dark. When we finally saw it, Andrew asked me and Sergey to figure out how to approach it and how to dock. We barely had time to discuss it, and Andrew was already reversing into the dock. I grabbed the stern line, jumped on the dock, and totally botched the landing by running forward instead of back. No harm done though—Andrew yelled “tie it behind the stern”, and I did. We finished docking, and we were home safe.
This whole experience—of learning by doing and making mistakes—made me realize how much I used to depend on Andrew to make decisions and to plan our sailing trips. And there are a LOT of decisions: where to sail given the weather conditions? anchor or moor? Where to pump-out? Where to refuel? Will we be able to get back before the nightfall? I admit that most of the time I just want to “wing it”, but that’s not the right approach. It’s not like going on a road trip where you can count on some gas pump to be open at odd hours or some motel to have a room for you in the middle of the highway. There are a lot more constraints in sailing, and you have to work within those constraints.
The feeling I remember the most though was the quiet confidence of knowing where I was and where I was headed: when I was at the helm heading toward North Channel, and I had a firm grasp of the chart and a firm grasp of how my heading and speed translated into a specific course on that chart—THAT felt awesome. If Andrew were a GPS-dependent type of person, I don’t think I would ever have been able to feel that.
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