Crusin 2010, Day 2b

8-21-2010 0820therabouts Nashawena MA. So, the wind seems to have come up a bit. I heard voices from across the water in the night, and saw a riding light..turns out to be a 30 foot cabin cruiser anchored some distance away. No one else around, but at least one ferry between Cuttyhunk and maybe New Bedford has gone by. Not as in 'drive your car on' ferry...in fact, the main motorized vehicle on the island are of the golf cart pursuasion. But in the summer there are several connecting runs a day. People come and stay in The Bass Club, which was once the exclusive province of New York fiancial men, who came to stay, drink, smoke and be taken by carriage and buckboard to 'stands'...fishing places riveted into the rocks at strategic casting points along the shore. Each one had someone to manage the bait, of course. And the pictures in the historical museum of the fish they caught are the things of legends...dragons and monsters. Striped bass, codfish, lobsters, pythons, maybe anacondas seem to just go right on growing...most of us stop short soon after we get a jolt of testosterone or estrogen...maybe they don't? Kim Atwood asked this questions years ago, and kept on feeding his python to see if it would just keep on getting bigger...was a little disappointed when it seemed to slow down, and finally died. And I dont really know any answers, but they did have some big bass back in those days. This summer I learned, visiting the Growth and Development Course at MBL in Woods Hole, that those serrated edge giant clams we all know from pictures start as little things and actually take 400 years to grow that giant. Even the common quahog, venus mercenaria, the source of the purple wampum bead, can get to be 30 years old before its thick enough of shell to make a really good bead. So these men of yesteryear were landing some pretty big bass, perhaps 50 years old? I resist the temptation to look...still no way of recharging the iphone.
Time to set sail
Take off the sail ties. Pull out the choke. Start the motor. Throttle down. Start creeping ahead into the wind. Pull in the anchor. Stow it behind the mast. Rush back before the boat heads too far off the wind, and crack the throttle, steer the boat out into open water. Lower the centerboard. Head up into the wind. Pull on the purple throat halyard to raise the gaff where it sits crotched on the mast, and the white peak halyard to raise the sail. Make sure the sail is on the right side of the uphaul. Keep the boat pointing into the wind and raise the sail all the way up, and out of the boom crotch, piling the halyard ropes in the cockpit. Cleat the halyards. Head off the wind. Pull in the sheet until it catches the wind and set a course that will work with the wind and the trip to Penikese.
time out, will do more later.