Lynne | 
11 5th, 2008| 
Yesterday Brian rosolved the engine problem! She’s running again, and sounding good, although we did discover a couple more items that need to be addressed before we can head out. Got the new wiring 90% done for the nav lights, since the old wiring was sketchy, and we got the new radio installed at the end of the day.
Still lots to do, but we’re getting closer. On Sunday our friend and housesitter/dogsitter Starbuck is going to come over to the boat, and bless her heart, is going to go up the mast on a halyard and rethread our missing halyards.
And kicker of the day, we found a replacement hatch for our front hatch (which broke on our shake out sail) from Newport Nautical, and thanks to Jay and Mari, it’ll be brought up to MA on Friday when Mari get’s home.
Off to the boat for some more work and installs!
We’ve sailed the boat from Ipswich to Salem. We’re working on the last of our projects on the dock.
I’ll take a shot at the story of the trip - Lynne might have more detail to add.
First, I should say that we made a slight error in our planning/expectations of the trip. We expected the sail to Salem to be a fast one, hopefully arriving before dark.
Our exit from Ipswich was very rushed.. a couple factors made the folks at Green’s point really rush us out:
- High tide - our window of tide height was shrinking
- Bouys/channel markers - At the very same time we were leaving, someone was reportedly removing the channel markers for Ipswich. We figured we’d be better off with these than without.
In any case, we pretty much threw everything we had into (or more like “onto”) the boat, and jumped on and left. This was part of the problem in our day, as we had forgotten some important items in the rush.
We motored happily out of Ipswich, until we got the the 2nd to last channel marker, in front of Crane’s beach.. a particularly shallow/inconsistent/dangerous part of the Ipswich entrance.
I was driving and I heard Lynne yell something like “shut off the engine! it’s smoking!”. OK.. so we stopped the engine..
ok, onto plan B.. time to sail. (it was about time anyway!). After a couple minutes of fixing some issues with the genoa, we were moving and under control. We went to put up the main. Lynne discovered that we had lost our halyard for the main. Earlier in the day we were using it to try to go up the mast, and we mistakenly hadn’t tied is down after this. The line managed to go up the mast and eventually out of the pulley at the top. We have the line in hand, but it doesn’t do us any good that way. Anyway, after much cursing, we hoisted the staysail trying to make the best of our situation. No engine, and we were missing a significant chunk of our sail area/capability. But, we were moving OK and in control at least.
<note to self: insert nav light panic here>
We sailed past Essex, Rockport, and rounded Cape Ann fairly successfully. However, it became apparent that we weren’t likely going to make Salem with the wind we had and the timing of things. We decided to go into Gloucester harbor and see what we could do there. Wind was offshore at that point, not very strong, and our sail area compromised - we made slow progress getting into harbor. After some deliberation, we decided to drop anchor.
Brian worked on the diesel engine, and within a short time had her running again. We decided to pull the anchor and see if we could engine up to a marina or something. We managed to get probably 80% of the way to our intended destination, when the motor sputtered out and stopped. We were so hopeful.. what a tease! We put up the sails again, and went back to our anchoring spot and re-dropped the hook.
Now, this is where the previous comments about our rushed exit and our mistaken expectation of a fast trip come into play.
We find ourselves very hungry - we hadn’t eaten much of anything that day. All we had was 1 cookie aboard, and had left our food back in Ipswich in the hurried exit. We were cold.. it’s nightime in November, on the water. We had only brought basic sleeping gear, just 2 sleeping bags. We went to sleep with growling stomachs, and wearing much clothing under our sleeping bags and sleeping on improvised pillows. We’re also a bit stressed about our day, and wondering what the next day will be like.. when will we find food? Will we make it to Salem? At what point will we be on the radio asking for help?? I slept either a very little or not at all.. I’m not sure.
We managed to get lucky the next morning - we woke to howling wind, more that we had seen the previous day. We managed to sail more-or-less straight to our destination.
Still with no engine, we managed to sail right up to the dock in Salem, and had quite a graceful dockage overall. We wrestled the boat from one slip to the other, secured her, and all was well. Hooray!!! We wasted no time getting coffee and food!
