WORLD This month we hear from Dave Bernard, who shares memorable moments of visiting "back home" at the south shore of Massachusetts and the ripe summer cruising grounds of southern New England.
A Trip We Will Certainly Never Forget As the doldrums of winter 2020 slogged on, the reality of my recent sale of my Hunter Legend Soupy Twist II (don't ask) set in. Newly boatless, I needed to book a sailing trip! Somehow, the scheduling gods at my employer blessed me with a couple of weeks off from late July into early August. This would be a great time for my wife Krista, my daughter Alyssa and me to visit "back home" — the south shore of Massachusetts and the ripe summer cruising grounds of southern New England. Swift Yacht Charters has a great mix of privately owned yachts varying from about 32 to 50 feet in various marinas throughout southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. My biggest desires were modern electronics, a bimini/dodger and a dinghy, and all were met and my expectations exceeded when I booked Winona, a 2019 Jeanneau 419 for seven nights at an excellent price. Quahogs, oysters and lobstah rolls, here we come! The months and weeks inched toward summer, and it looked as if the COVID debacle was firmly in the rearview mirror. As we neared the charter date of July 25, Hurricane Elsa crept up the East Coast, dragging what seemed to be the entirety of the moisture in the USA behind her. Halfway through July, Massachusetts had rain nearly every day of the month. Surely with the wet start to the month, we were due for some blue skies! Or not … The crew also included my sister Jess and brother-in-law Andy, and we were all in good spirits as we motored south along the Sakonnet River A classic schooner shows off in the mooring field.
toward the Atlantic. Apprehension quickly started to mount as the chop grew larger and more frequent, and the wind fought the outbound current. I assured the crew that once we entered the ocean, we'd be making a 90-degree turn for Cuttyhunk, and the wind and waves would be mostly behind us, making for a "smoother" ride (which wasn't really an outright lie). We made 7 knots with
Captain Dave
ernard dresses like a local.
a second reef on a broad reach at 1520 knots apparent, but the 6-foot-plus waves bashing the stern quarter turned the crew a darker shade of green. We toughed out the last 15 miles to Cuttyhunk, with Alyssa taking a motion sickness-induced nap. Less than two hours later, we glided into Cuttyhunk, the harbor that's been my desktop screensaver since I booked this trip back in March. A perfect anchorage that blocks the prevailing southwest wind with a small hill dotted with modest, but surely not inexpensive, harbor homes calmed our nerves. As sunset approached, we dinghied ashore, got the requisite T-shirt, and hatched a plan to have dinner on Winona after a brief walk around the few shops and docks. We hailed the famous floating Raw Bar on channel 72, and within minutes, our fresh oysters and shrimp cocktails arrived via a skiff staffed by teenagers. Dinner and wine followed, and soon we settled in for our first night of sleep at sea. We had a great night's rest and rustled up the crew for some poorly made (my fault …) percolator coffee and a quick dinghy trip ashore. Cuttyhunk is a beautiful,
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY 'WINONA' CREW
laid-back place, and we'd have loved to spend some more time here, but we decided to press ahead to Martha's Vineyard, as Jess and Andy's time aboard was short. To get from Cuttyhunk to the Vineyard, we traveled east a few miles to pass through Quicks Hole, a wide passage between the Elizabeth Islands and Martha's Vineyard, and the preferred passage in any tide other than slack. The passage was timed well, for as we entered, we were rewarded with 9-knot plus SOG and were soon in Vineyard Sound. The fog hadn't entirely burned off, and the visibility dropped to … um … the minimums prescribed in my charter contract. It quickly became clear that most of the commercial fishing boats aren't AIS-equipped, so we pulled into Tarpaulin Cove on sparsely inhabited Naushon Island. Most of the Elizabeth Islands are privately owned, with only a few homes each, and all we saw in this half-mile-long cove was a quaint New England lighthouse, one home, a moored fishing boat and us. Signs lined the beach every couple of hundred yards, which I assumed said "You're not welcome here!", so we dropped a lunch hook in 15 feet of water, swam, and had a sandwich as we waited for the fog to lift. After a bit, we were underway again toward Vineyard Haven, with a clear view of the island and 10-15 knots behind us, making great time under full sail. We grabbed a ball, headed ashore, made a beer run, and had a nice fried seafood dinner with my old friend Josh, a resident here whom I'd met over 20 years ago. Cuttyhunk, our point of departure that morning, felt like a week ago. You definitely need at least a couple of days to fully appreciate Martha's Vineyard. I finally figured out how to make decent coffee with the percolator, and the hot sun lured us into a morning swim, which was unfortunately cut short when my sister was certain she saw a shark! (It was actually a surfacing sea bird!) We slipped our mooring and motored a few miles away to Oak Bluffs. A bunch of my high school buddies and their kids planned to meet up to spend a day on the beach — and O.B. is the place to be to keep the kiddos occupied. We anchored off the beach and dinghied ashore, which, judging by the fact that I was the only boat that did this, I'm not entirely sure is legal. I didn't attract
