Sovereign Nations

Where we go from here.

About a million years ago when we were in Norwalk, Connecticut, I (James) noticed a little crack in the bulkhead between the main saloon and the head just under the mast.  Well I’d better let Dena tell you about that…

Last summer, we pulled the mast to repair rot in the bulkhead James just told you about.  I (Dena) patched the damn thing rather than tear it all out, because to do otherwise would require us moving off the boat.  In that big ol’ job, one piece of rot was right under the mast.

This part of the bulkhead is thin because of the passageway cut through it.  A crack developed where the weight stressed the rotten section.  I cut and chiseled out the bad parts and beveled the edge of what remained.  My repair looked like this after the new pieces were cut but before they were fiberglassed into place.

The process of working on the boat in Norwalk got us looking around at the boat, thinking critically about some things we hadn’t focused on.  Like the doors getting out of whack, harder to close.  And then James pointed out the crack.

We hoped that it wouldn’t matter much but as we made our way up the Eastern Seaboard the crack slowly widened from the stresses of being under sail all the fucking time. Last Friday after getting underway from Beverly, MA, just after we set sail, I (James) grabbed a couple of flat-head screwdrivers and tuned up the rig.

If you want your sailboat to point as high into the wind as it possibly can you have to tune the rig in a way that is tight, but not too tight.  It has to be perfect.  Each wire leading from the mast to the deck is tightened at the bottom by a turnbuckle so that the mast is supported from all angles equally and there is no slack on the leeward side of the mast (which doesn’t get any stress from the wind and sails).  The best time to tune a rig is when underway but not under heavy stress.  You can tell if there’s any slack on the leeward side and it’s easy to take out that slack without over-tightening the rig.

As the crack under the mast increased in size, the mast got lower and the rig loosened up.  After tuning the rig twice in only a couple weeks, and sailing the boat harder on this last leg than we have the entire time we’ve been underway, the crack turned into a break and now, before we can sail any further, this part of the bulkhead has to be replaced.

Instead of leaving a seam in the weakest section, we’ll remove the entire top of the bulkhead and replace it.  This will entail removing the mast again at great expense, but not nearly as great an expense as finding a slip in the only two months that keep these places in Maine profitable.  They wanted to charge us more than we paid for an entire year in Baltimore to have a slip for one month in Portland, Maine.  Even the service manager was shocked at the price, but he couldn’t get them to lower it.

Lo and behold, the answer is strange and awkward, as on-the-fly solutions often are.

In Maine, most boats are stored on land in the winter.  They all get launched in the early summer and they all get pulled out of the water at the beginning of September.  The best time to haul a boat is when the boatyard is empty and the marinas are full.  Therefore, in order to save $1000, we have to haul our boat out of the water, have it set up on blocks, and then relaunched when we’re done with the project…all so that we won’t take up valuable real estate in the water.

Sound familiar?  Yes, we just did this a month ago.

And we’re about to do it again.

No need to go into detail again about why living on a boat out of the water is not optimal.  Not pleasant at all.  No, we’ll focus on the job to be done.

One of the James specials that I picked up and used both at work and on the dock whenever someone complained about having to work on their boat.  “It’s the only work worth doing.”

And it’s true.

We love to work on our boat.  Working on it together, on our own schedule, with defined goals and a completely firm knowledge that it will be done soon – this is the good life.  We are living the dream in every way.

We get to do the only work worth doing and then take the fruits of our work and sail off into the sunset…sunrise, whatever.  It is a beautiful way to live.  It’s not easy, but it is what we love to do.  It is satisfying and fulfilling and promising.

So here we go again.  Working and living and loving.  No wonder we call ourselves Itinerant.

…the end.

We started our day in Plymouth very early to catch the tide and come up with the wind.  That we did.

Waving at Boston as we slipped north, we eased into the island complex around Marblehead and into Beverly, MA.

A small, 3 generation marina, the Beverly Port Marina, became our temporary home.  In the evening, the 91 year old grandfather, Jim, was chopping wood out front of the chandlery.  For real.  Adequate facilities gave us the crucial opportunity to SHOWER.  This was a very big deal being as though we hadn’t showered in a week.  Swimming in salt water takes care of the muck, but leaves behind a salty residue.  It’s not entirely unpleasant and we didn’t smell bad (at least to each other), but it doesn’t get rid of oils in hair, creating lanky protodreds on Dena and a ratty beard on James.

I (James) pulled out all the cleaning supplies and went to work on de-salting the boat.  This was a project that I very much got into.  On my hands and knees, I scrubbed with a hand-brush from stem to stern for 2 1/2 hours in the 90 degree Beverly heat.  In the end, the boat was Bristol and the water tanks were full and ready for the next leg in our adventure.

I (Dena) pulled entertainment off the internet and charted out/planned out the next phase of our travels.  We had debated heading straight to Portland and I planned out a few options – hit or miss New Hampshire was the question.  We’d heard from some friends living there that the coast was rugged and the entrance bars have to be timed absolutely perfectly – also that they’re not really worth it.

Dinner at the Anchor Restaurant consisted of real New England clam chowder (in New England!), a 1lb lobster served with roasted garlic potatoes for $8.95 (really!), and a baked and breaded, lemony haddock with mashed potatoes and cole slaw for  about the same price.  That’s a somewhat smaller lobster than the fancy places give, but what a deal.

And the next day, we walked.

Knowing that we’d cover more than 5 miles, we took our time.  The first stop after crossing the bridge into Salem was Nautical Traders, a new-and-used chandlery that is literally run by a mom and a pop.  We saw some intriguing pieces there – like shelves full of bronze stuffing boxes, packing boxes, rudder post boxes, etc, etc.  Also, a whisker pole, which we’ve needed since the previous owner of our boat refused to give us the one that was supposed to come with it.

Then we zigged toward the water and, what do you know?  We found a replica of the old square-rigger Friendship.

Being a slow weekday and a work day for their volunteers, they allowed us access to the ship without making us pay.  We got more cool stories from the workers than we would have from a tour guide.  They were all very impressed that we’d sailed there in a 32′, 50 year old boat…by the way, about 5 times older than the ship you see above.

The rigging is kevlar so that it won’t stretch and doesn’t need tarring, but in the traditional configuration, it’s a match to the original.

This ship was one of 5 tall ships that were invited to the War of 1812 reenactment in Baltimore this year, but because of dry-rot issues, they had to decline in favor of spending the entire season working on her. Something about using American White Oak, a wood that has to be well-brined.  Easy to do at sea, not so easy to keep up with in port.

From there, we hit a used book store.  Loved the smell and piles of books, less excited by the airport bookstore selection.  Then through Salem to Marblehead.

In direct contrast to the walk we did two days before, this walk was solemn, quiet.  We spoke less and about more generic topics.  It was, nonetheless, beautiful.  Especially once we reached the Marblehead Rail Trail, which cuts through the peninsula and got us most of the way to our destination.

That destination was West Marine.  Ugh.  But there was shopping to do and as much as we’d like to support the locals, we could spend $200 on chain at WM but we couldn’t eke out the $400-$500 for the same amount of chain at a local store.  Not everyone gets as good a deal – it’s all about that employee discount.

Though we joked about splitting the chain between our backpacks and walking home chained together, 90′ of chain is 100 pounds…and we called a cab.  The rope rode and whisker pole, we did buy from Nautical Traders, and the woman running the shop gave James a ride home with the load.  One chain/rope splice and a bunch of length markings later, we loaded it all into the chain locker and – gasp – the bow didn’t come down a bit!  We really thought that would do it!  Our painted waterline is about 4″ above where the water touches the boat.  This isn’t true on the stern – just the bow.  Putting more weight in the bow should bring us down in the water, giving us a longer waterline, which increases our maximum hull speed through the water.  It didn’t work.  We needed the chain anyway, for anchoring in rocky, deep, narrow coves in Maine and beyond.

Over the course of the day, we settled into the idea of heading straight for Portland next.  Bye-bye, New Hampshire.

The next morning, Friday, we did some chores and took care of odds and ends with no real goal in mind.  We had a bit of a decision-making deadline, though.  Portland should be a 24 hour sail for us with decent but not full boost from the wind.  The forecasts called for 5-10 knots from the S and SW, putting the wind behind us.  We’d need to leave around noon if we were going to go, so that we had a lot of sunlight whether we were early, on time, or late.

As noon approached, we both started cleaning up our projects and messes.  The boat came back together so neatly and quickly that we shrugged at each other and started the engine.  By 2:15, we had hoisted sail and finished the engine for good for the rest of the trip.

Coming around Cape Ann put us dead down-wind and I (Dena) tested out our new whisker pole.  There’s a latch that attaches to the jib sheet and a couple lines to hold the end of the pole up and forward.  The other end of the pole attaches to a fitting on the front of the mast.  Once that was all set up, I pulled the jib out to 100%, snugging the back corner of the sail up near the outer end of the pole.  This gives the sail a structure, holding it out into the wind and letting it fill and create a lot of power.  The main sail is doing the same thing but on the other side of the boat.  This is called wing-on-wing and it creates a giant kite effect.

Boy, did it ever work!  We were going 6.2-7.4 knots with an ever-increasing following sea.

By the time 6pm rolled around, we came to a shelf in the Atlantic bottom contour.  The sea swells changed direction and turned choppy.  For these conditions, we were going too fast so we had to strike that rig and reef the main.

In our West Coast sea adventures, we used the navy schedule of 4 hours on and 4 hours off, trading watches.  Since beginning this trip, we’ve split the daylight portions into 2 hour shifts so we can get out of the sun regularly.  This has worked out really well.  The shifts aren’t as long and it’s not as lonely.  You would think, being on a 32′ boat we’d be crowded into one another but when we’re doing watches, we’re doing them alone.

So we tried something new on this overnight trip.  We did the period of time between 6pm and 6am as 3 hours shifts.  This is a pretty good 2-hour sleep period with an hour for wind-down and dress-up.  It worked out pretty well.  Three hours feels dramatically shorter than 4, and dramatically longer than 2.

My (James’) 6-9 watch consisted of nothing more than a beautiful sunset and a downwind run.  As I closed on the Isles of Shoals, I was obliged to alter course to a broad reach against the following sea.  That just beat the hell out of us until we gybed, pulled in sail, and close-hauled into the waves.  We were hauling ass, the boat was performing beautifully, and the rig was at ease.  The only problem is that beating is wet.  It’s a violent meeting of boat and wave, creating constant spray, but a more predictable point of sail.

I (Dena) made mac-n-cheese and then tried to sleep, but that broad reach on the following seas was tough.  The beat was better, but it was still too early for my body-clock to send me to sleep.  When I took over at 9pm, we gybed again and immediately felt the benefit of having passed another undersea ledge.  The waves were now heading us in approximately the right direction and I hunkered down for my shift.

The first dark hour went by quickly, since I was messing with radar settings and dimming the chartplotter screen at the same pace that the light died in the sky above.  By 10, my only clues about any boats around were their navigation lights and the radar returns.  The dark was profound and I couldn’t always tell where water ended and sky began.  In order to check the sail trim, I was forced to shine a headlamp onto the sail.  It hit me that most of my night sailing had been done with the moon in the sky, providing relief from the stark blackness of the universe.  Then I absorbed the stars.

Wow.

Too hypnotic for my own good.

The phosphorescent creatures of the ocean provided my only sense of the shape of the waves.  For the first time in my life, I understood what could inspire a person to paint on black velvet, though no one would ever believe the intensity of those greens and blues.

Music from one ear-bud helped me stay awake and alert while leaving the other ear free to listen to the water, the sails, the wind, and the VHF radio.  Three hours can be a very long time.

And then the dog-watch.

The Milky Way is so appropriately named, but on land, even in the country, you really can’t see how unbelievably cluttered our universe is.  Without a moon in the sky, the only light you get is from billions of miles away.  It’s no help.  It’s this murky abyss that isn’t bright enough to see your own hand by, but at the same time is so much light that it demands your attention.

I (James) didn’t see one shooting star.  Just the universe.

I was feeling very poetic as the horn of the moon came out of the ocean.  It was heralded by a bright, fabulous green flash that shocked my vision – the green flash that is usually seen during sunset or sunrise.  The  moon was refracted in the atmosphere like the sun, shooting green first, then the crescent rising red out of the sea.

After that, my vision was completely useless.  Every time time I looked at the chartplotter and radar, I saw distorted, multidimensional meaningless blobs.  Best not to look over there.  Looking up into the sky, again, universe.  No good.  The moon was nice, but even that became a blurred mass after a while.  All I could do was stare at the phosphorescence disturbed by the bow wave.  On the starboard side, the phosphorescence seemed to come out of the reflections of the green running light but when I looked to the port side, the red light seemed to be pushing them out of a direct contrast, red to green.

At 2:45am, the alarm on my (Dena’s) phone went off.  I was only partly asleep, though I had caught some solid in there somewhere.  Rotating out of the v-berth, I moved with elderly care to the settee.  On with my sweat pants, my smart wool undershirt, a t-shirt, my coastal-weight bibs, a hoodie, and a foul weather coat.  With 5 minutes to spare, I pulled my hat over my hair and grabbed my gloves.

Joining James in the cockpit, we shared a shift-change kiss and he disappeared like he was tired or something.  The dark was alleviated by the moon, which was pulling Jupiter and Venus along behind as she crossed the sky.  I could see the basic shape of the waves and a bit of the sailing rig.  Settling in for the show, I kept alert by teasing out the slow changes that accompanied the dawn.

It started with a band of lighter darkness in the sky, then shifted to a bit of clarity in my vision of the boat around me.  By the time I could pick out the beginnings of color in the sky, I felt the world brightening.  A compact band of the visible spectrum unrolled with ponderous slowness, each color taking up more and more space as the sun neared the horizon.  By the time the sun rose, violet had been pushed back to the opposite horizon.  Red gripped the sky while it could, but blue was the dominant color already above my head.

After the sun came up, Maine rose before our eyes.  Before we knew it, we had the hook down in Seal Cove on the lee side of Great Diamond Island.

We sailed and sailed and sailed and sailed…

On a Friday, we sailed from Bristol, RI, to Sachuest, RI, off Third Beach and we swam to the beach and had a lovely walk and an ice cream cone.

On a Saturday, we sailed from Sachuest to Clarks Cove, MA (rocked, we were all alone, how’s that happen?) outside South Dartmouth on opening day and there were only a-ga-gillion boats parading outside New Bedford for “The Blessing of the Fleet”, yuk…

And then on a Sunday and the very special day of patriotic displays of explosive power, we sailed from Clarks Cove to Onset, MA, on Cape Cod.  Anchoring far from the masses, we rowed into town for a pizza and bread and eggs and soda.  When we started our row into town, we had absolutely no idea that the 4th of July would be celebrated on the 7th of July in Onset, Mass.  The beaches were packed with patchy white charred flesh and drenched in cocoa butter.  Torquemada’s dungeon could not have reverberated with as many screams as the children of Onset ripped loose as they freaked the fuck out in the water.

Making a quick escape, we rowed back to the boat with groceries at our feet, just in time for a truly delightful fireworks display.  We’ve been bombarded by fireworks that were just a little bit too far away all week long.  Then to be in a nice quiet anchorage, almost by ourselves, and to have a perfect, close experience overwhelmed us with an appreciation that usually gets lost in the cost-benefit analysis and jokes about vestigial displays of military force.  In other words, we had a great time.  We leaned against each other and held hands and it was awesome.

Thanks, Kate, for softening us up for that.

The next day, we walked.

I mean, we really fucking walked.  We walked 2 miles to a bus stop that took us 8 miles to a movie mall in the middle of nowhere, where we sat for 2 1/2 hours eating popcorn and gratuitous violence.

And then we walked.

The next bus wouldn’t come for about 2 hours, and we looked left.  Looked right.  Saw nothing.

So we walked the 9 miles directly back through some of the most beautiful landscape that Mass has to offer.  We talked nonstop.  We walked softly but quickly, at a pace we both enjoyed.  Halfway back, we stopped at a bar in Wareham (not pronounced the way you’d think, but I can’t mimic it at all), where we had some tap lemonade and conversation with a Manhattan born Asian-Jewish bartender.  She was hot.

By the time we reached Onset again, a need for the bathroom provided the perfect excuse for some ice cream.  That blasted us through the row back to the boat, after which we collapsed…no wait.  There was that other thing.

Shipping the dinghy means attaching a line that runs halfway up the mast and through a block (it’s called the whisker pole topping lift) and hauling Tinker over the lifelines, then lowering her onto the chocks that keep her in place on the foredeck.  This time, we inadvertently wrapped the line around the forward lower stay, which pulled the line off the block when the dinghy was half-way up, then tore the line and jammed it into the block, very efficiently breaking the block into pieces, but also stranding Tinker with her bow above our heads and her stern just over the toerail.

We’re too fucking tired for this.

But no, we’re superheroes and we dealt with it.  We muscled Tinker over the lifelines, onto the deck, flipped her over and put her in place…without our lifting tackle.  We tied off the line and said, “Yes – we’ll fix this tomorrow.”

Next morning, coffee ritual done.  I (James) go aloft and attempt to take the old block and tackle system down.  The twisted ring shackle that was holding the broken block in place was so corroded that it bent my marlinspike on my Myerchin knife.  You have to know that this is a really big deal!  These knives are made out of tempered steel by craftsmen.  They are guaranteed for life because bending or breaking them never happens.  Well, I managed it trying to get the block off the mast, 25 feet off the water.

No problem.  I broke the shackle.

Dena passed me up a couple of new shackles and I whipped the new Garhauer block into place, then reeved the new line through the block.  Project done.

We’re getting really good at taking care of each thing as it comes up.

Then we sailed.

Actually, sailing in the Cape Cod Canal is forbidden by the powers that be (aka the Army Corp of Engineers), therefore, we motored.  It took almost an hour to run the 7 miles.  The scenery rocked.

This is the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, and a whole mess of Tall Ships have been making their way up the coast along with us.  Just behind us, for the most part.  Today, two of them blew right past us in the canal, creating a perfect photo op.

Just past the last red buoy, we hung a left, hoisted sail, and beat feet (or keel) to Plymouth, Mass.  Or rather, Duxbury Cove.  We’ve realized that, when we’re not planning to go into town, we should avoid areas full of mooring balls and assholes.  We put the hook down, smack dab in the middle of the bay, and it is awesome.

With an early start in the morning, we should make Salem by tomorrow evening.  But hey, there’s no hurry, right?

We tried to go to the Herreshoff Museum in Bristol, RI, but it just didn’t work out.

Got the dinghy set up for a sail and set off in a brisk, beating wind.  We quickly realized that the current was against us in a big way.  Tinker is sailing to windward better than ever before, but it doesn’t matter how high we can point into the wind if we aren’t sailing faster than the tide is going out.  The tide was sucking us right into the Mount Hope Bridge channel and the wakes of dozens of inconsiderate “pleasure” boaters stopped our progress again and again.

Decidedly not the way we wanted to start the day.

After two hours of trying everything to make windward (including striking the sailing rig and rowing along the shore), we still only made a direct line from the boat across the bay.  That was when we got our first indication of how off we were.  James felt like he was being misunderstood and Dena felt like nothing made sense.

We weren’t making shit happen like we are used to doing.

Turning back to the boat, we consigned the museum to an unlikely later trip back to the area.  Making directly across the channel wouldn’t get us to the boat – we still had to beat into the wind, pointing far up the shore from the boat, in order for our lee to carry us down to the boat.

Strangely enough, that went perfectly.

The frustration was too strong, though.  I (Dena) retreated to the forepeak with my smartphone and Kindle app to read Treasure Island.  I (James) read my book for a while, but ultimately fell asleep.

When we started to stir again, just before noon, we decided it would be a good day for some much-needed projects. When everything seems to be going wrong, sometimes you can power through the day and then just sleep it off.  On this boat, the “powering through” mindset can be dangerous.  Whatever the states of mind that led us to feeling such emotions, we would be bringing them with us into a narrow channel with strong winds and currents and we have to have better control than that.

It’s a bit like calling in sick for mental health reasons.

We broke out the tools and set up our priorities.  First, we shipped the dinghy for our upcoming offshore trip to Cuttyhunk Island.  We don’t plan to go ashore before Onset (or wherever we wait for the right tide to go through the Cape Cod Canal).  That project went surprisingly well, again.

Then we went to work on our solar panel setup, which we’d noticed wasn’t producing as much as it should be.  We wanted to move the panel back onto the keel of the dinghy and lash it down properly as well.  I (James) removed the deck fitting for the solar panel electrical feed wires and discovered that it was completely encased in green and white corrosion.  I took the fitting apart and cussed a lot while cleaning and reassembling it.  Upon further inspection, I discovered more corrosion at the junction where the wires meet the panel.  I cut back the wires until I could find some uncorroded copper strands and reconnected them. The voltage tested at a fluctuating 20 volts, which isn’t supposed to happen but I decided to hook the panel back into the system anyway.  Immediately, it started producing 2-3 times what it was producing prior to my repair.

While I was doing that, Dena suited up and jumped in the water for the setup of the Aries windvane self-steering gear that has been on the boat for 4 years but has remained untested.  Our Tiller Pilot is a piston style auto-helm that drives the tiller in a linear fashion – it moves in and out in response to changes in direction of its internal fluxgate compass.  Those movements are translated to the tiller via a pin installed on an aluminum bracket and the whole system works just fine.

A windvane self-steering system uses wind and water power to steer the boat, but the Tiller Pilot draws electricity from the batteries.  Now that we’ve stopped keeping the fridge cold all the time, it is our biggest power draw.  If you’ve heard us talk about our boat, you’ve probably heard us talk about keeping our power systems small and simple.

Also, windvanes steer to wind direction rather than compass direction, so they keep the sails full more effectively.

When these systems work properly, they drive the boat better than a professional helmsman can over the course of hours.  A person might do somewhat better in the short term, but human attention wanders and windvanes never hesitate.  Our Monitor windvane drove us to Hawaii from the San Francisco Bay and we never tired of watching the simple elegance and utter efficiency of that mechanical helmsman.

Anyway.

I (Dena) pulled the control lines out of the bottom after James fed them to me and tied them to the servo-rudder spindle.  Tying knots above my head while treading water is strenuous, but I used the ever-lovely bowline, which I can tie in my sleep.  Next, I put the serv0-rudder in place, liberally coating the stainless/aluminum interfaces with Lanacote.  Still while treading water.

The rudder is supposed to swing back and forth, but also twist.  It was swinging just fine, but very stiff on the twist part.  I figured there was no diagnosing the problem from the water and climbed back on the boat.

The whole system was so stiff that we broke out the dry spray lube and coated all the moving parts.  It loosened up some, but not enough to respond properly to the wind.  I went to the internet and discovered the parts that are the usual suspects in an Aries that begins to freeze up.  It’s the roller bearings just below the vane section and the servo-rudder spindle tube itself within its housing.

Back to lubing and moving the parts, I was able to get the vane section to move perfectly well, but the spindle, though certainly not seized up altogether, never worked its way loose enough to turn effortlessly.  A light wind should be enough to turn it, and it takes a pretty good push.

This four hour project ended with us disassembling the entire thing and stowing the parts so we wouldn’t have to see it again for the rest of this trip.  We will either buy a very expensive rebuilt kit or sell the Aries and put that money toward a Monitor.  We know and love the Monitor, so that’s the way we’re leaning.

This only added to the frustration, the strange and unusual tension we both felt.  We were that much more certain that we’d made the right decision not to head off.  A bad day at anchor is far less dangerous than a bad day at sea.

In sum, we achieved an important improvement in our solar charging system and a very strong lashing system on the solar panel and dinghy.  We aren’t worried about a replay of the solar panel breaking loose.  In the negative terms that express our feelings yesterday…at least we didn’t break anything.

Today is a new day.

…Whatever.

In 1947, the reign of human terror ended on a tiny island in the Narragansett Bay.  Since then oblivious grasses, feral vines, and silver shale rule the once involuntarily populated 102 acre rock.

We sailed to the island in Tinker on a close haul from our boat to the pebbled shores of Dutch Island.  I (James) got the slow tack to the island, taking approximately 20 minutes to cross the harbor.  We carried Tinker up the beach about 30 yards to get above the high-tide mark and made fast on an ancient steel ring built for that very purpose a hundred years ago.

We went into our trip ignorant of detail, but knowing that we’d seen both a lighthouse and a tall brick wall with empty windows.  Without narrative, our experience was creative.  We told each other stories – what we thought we’d found, who we thought had created it.

Rather than leave you in the same state…here’s a bit of history.

The first European settlement on the island was established in 1636 by a Dutch West India Company trader, but all signs of that original settlement have long since been erased by the evils of war.

The next and far more powerfully successful mark left was made by the original Dutch Island Light, built of stone collected from the island in 1827.  The original structure was replaced with brick in 1857 and a fog bell was added in 1878, but the needs of mariners have been met on the south point for almost 200 years.

The very first thing I (James) noticed was the beach was sick with absolutely perfect skipping stones, carved by the salt water.  These smooth shale slabs were literally everywhere.  I was in heaven.  The size and feel and weight of a perfect skipping stone is as close to a religious experience as an agnostic can possibly get.  The muscles and sinews of my hand and forearm sang with the joy of sending each stone on a bouncing journey of Melvillian proportions.

Having landed far from the lighthouse, we set out once again on a walk of discovery.  A trail led us upward toward the heights and into the wooded interior of the island.  We struck off toward the lighthouse and kept a sharp eye peeled for poison oak (which we did not find) and nettles (which we did).

As the path wound around saplings and into and out of clearings, it split and reformed again and again.  The flattened areas were our first clue, but the spoor confirmed our suspicions – these were deer trails.

All to the good – they like going around difficult terrain and so do we.  We continued, trending south and upward, and happened upon a glowing gold clearing around the jewel of a perfect climbing tree.

What does one do when presented with such riches?  One climbs.

The next unexpected discovery revealed itself as concrete cliffs, pockmarked with iron hatches.  These were no artistic Anasazi-style designs.  We quickly recognized the telltale militaristic construction of gun emplacements.  Not being big gun fans, we decided not to rappel into the crumbling ruins of hate and fear.

This, of course, was the top of the island.  Because of the natural recovery, the trees had efficiently obscured the birds-eye view.

As we descended toward the long, rocky southern point of the island, we began to get teasing glimpses of both the lighthouse to the south and our anchorage to the east.

We’re the boat in the middle.  Seeing her out there from our hiking vantage puts our adventures into perspective.  This is us, on a very small boat, surrounded by vast beauty, ornery forces of nature, and fellow boaters of questionable competence.  Throwing ourselves into this world is joy.

We came out of the woods and I (Dena) sniffed the salt and sea-life on the air.  Moving quickly now, I stepped to the edge of the grass, before the rocky point, and simply breathed.

Tide pools have a pungency all their own. We pounced with recognition and affection.  This is the littoral zone and it is home to us all.  The place where life begins is easy to recognize and it holds such fascination that we can be entranced viscerally by a single tide pool for immeasurable time.

But sometimes, it is the death part of the cycle that is most beautiful.

The beating sea water forms different landscapes of granite and shale here than we know from the volcanic youth of the Pacific Northwest.

The history exposed in layers of shale and granite, tossed into the air by the last ice age, show us how truly young we are as a species.

A simple sweeping glance brought James to the exclamation, “If I were a geologist, I could spend a few decades here!”  Not being geologists, we only marveled at the range of texture, shape, and color.

We decided to walk northwest around the weather side of the island.  There being something iconic about the view, I (Dena) had to capture this last picture of the lighthouse.

The sharp, shifting footing along the craggy waterline was satisfyingly treacherous, absorbing our attention as we trekked north.  The symmetry of cormorants caught my (James’) eye, but they only let me get this one shot off before they fled in their often-justified paranoia.

As we rounded the island, we found to our dismay a very un-photogenic (note: no photography here) spread of blood-related humanity.  The most notable vision was a ready-to-drop pregnant woman holding a yippee dog like an infant and chattering on about babies in the abandoned tossing of the local Rhode Island dialect.

Safe again on the inhospitable east side of the island, we found ourselves directly below the brick-walled internment camp.

We scouted a route up and came upon a forgotten structure riddled with jesus beams and encased in vinework.

Nature’s creeping brutality has almost overwhelmed that of the military guards who caged German prisoners of war on this site through the first and second World Wars of the last century.

Being in these ruins, you can’t help but think of all the lives that these walls permanently, negatively changed.  Without a detailed history of the structure, we don’t know if the first inhabitants were the soldiers of the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored) or the men who sold themselves to the Spanish-American War, to fund which the illegal federal income tax was created and which swelled the US Army from 28,000 to 220,000 men.

Regardless of who lived here first, only full time inhabitants of this island today are the elusive white-tail deer that dodged my (James’) every shot.

Having circumnavigated Dutch Island, we floated Tinker and returned to our home at anchor on a fresh breeze from the southwest. The adventure left us exhausted and satisfied that we had truly discovered a perfect example of rich history that has been left alone.  Simply walked away from.

Or, in our case, sailed away from.

The last few days have been great sailing.  From New London to Mystic, to Point Judith Harbor of Refuge, to Dutch Harbor in the Narragansett Bay, we’ve sailed mostly on a broad reach, waves with us, and wind in the 10-15 knot range.  Enough to keep us moving at a good clip but not enough to worry us, though we reefed and unreefed quite a bit to maintain our comfort level.

We started in Baltimore on May 31st and sailed from Maryland into Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and reached Rhode Island on June 29th.  This kind of thing is only possible on the East Coast.  To hit 6 states on the West Coast, you have to add states of other countries – BC, WA, OR, CA, Baja, and Hawaii.  And doing that in a month?  No way.

July looks to be the month that we do RI, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, with a possible stop in Nova Scotia.

In Mystic, we ran into more of the same moorage troubles.  The waterfront association sets aside some area for anchoring, but that area seems to be getting smaller.  It used to encompass about 100 yards square of 7-9 foot depths, but that is true no longer.  The anchorage markers delineate an area with 3 foot depth, which is not enough for our boat at 4’9″ of draft.

James and I clucked over the chartplotter and decided to try anchoring between the channel and some boats on moorings.  When we sat back on the anchor rode, we were in the channel and too close to another boat.  Pulling the anchor up revealed that we had hooked onto a massive derelict mooring chain, the buoy for which had long since broken away.  The chain weighed hundreds of pounds and I (James) had to work it off the point of our CQR anchor.  A back-breaking science project that took about 20 minutes.  It’s our first experience of fouling an anchor and it added to the already frustrating New England anchoring experience.

We settled just outside the channel on the other side of the small anchoring field in barely enough water.  I mean, depth alarms going off at the bottom of the tide.  We were floating and it was only going up from there, so we set a stern anchor to limit our swing.  I (Dena) rowed the Fortress out on 70′ of line and created a tripping hazard for anyone foolhardy enough to try zooming between us and the marker for the public anchorage.

We sailed our Dyer Dhow from the narrow hole we anchored in to the city dinghy dock.  On the way, we had to pass under a railroad bridge that was closed.  Rather than wait the 13 minutes for the train to pass and the bridge to reopen, James unshipped the mast rig and rowed under.  We laughed conspiratorially at all the boats circling in wait.  The trip downwind was fast and we tied up and set off in good, James’n'Dena fashion on a long walk.

Though we couldn’t see fit to spend $50 on entrance to the Mystic Seaport Village, we got to see most of the boats headed there for the 20th Mystic Wooden Boat Show.  A couple exquisite lapstrake dories were being launched as we walked by.

The 6-mile walk is unworthy of more comment than that.

Moving on…

We sailed back to our boat upwind, James at the helm, in a trip that took at least 8 times longer than the downwind run into town.  But hey, we were sailing.  So were some other people.

The next day, we sailed out Fisher Island Sound, around Watch Hill, and over to Point Judith.  A very straightforward trip once the shoals and rocks around Watch Hill had been navigated.  The sailing was beautiful and the hook was set by 2:30.

The Harbor of Refuge is created by 3 breakwaters, one of which is V shaped and on the side exposed to the Atlantic Ocean.  One side of the V is heavily shoaled inside and the other side has been torn down over approximately 40% of its length.  Much less refuge than we’d expected.  The roll we got off the ocean tossed us back and forth over an arc of 20 degrees for most of the night, but especially at high tide.  I (James) didn’t sleep much, so I grabbed my camera and headed above decks for this shot.

A straight sail up the Rhode Island Sound got us to Dutch Harbor.

We motored around considering the wealth of riches which consisted of four separate possible anchoring spots, one of which is more or less the whole bay.  We’re not in Connecticut anymore!

Choosing a spot with good holding was not a problem.  We did the math on wind + roll + tidal current and got a sum of anchoring in the southeastern bight of Dutch Harbor in 13 feet of water.

Several relaxing hours later, I (James) was out on the deck listening to live music from across the bay, when I realized I really needed to get this shot.