Our First Northeaster
08 October 2009 | Nantucket, MA
Nantucket was a 1/2 day sail from Hyanissport. Entering the harbor
there we were struck by how few boats were there. Furthermore, all
the moorings that didn't have boats on them had been replaced with
sticks in preparation for winter. We tried to find some space
between moorings and dropped anchor for the night. It was a bit
blustery but we still managed to make it in on the dinghy.
The next morning we were woken by someone screaming at us about how
we were not allowed to anchor in the middle of the mooring field.
Something about how we were going to mess up the mooring lines on the
bottom. We had understood that mooring lines were each attached so
large anchors of one sort or another, but apparently in Nantucket
they have criscrossed cables between the moorings, probably to keep
them spaced appropriately. Sure enough, we pulled up a cable along
with our anchor, but Dana was able to yank them apart with the boat
hook. We moved outside of the mooring field and dropped anchor
again.
At this point, we were faced with the onset of a fairly large storm.
An early Noreaster. There were predictions of 45 knot gusts over
several days. We might have been ok if we had immediately head out
of Nantucket and raced south but took the safe route of staying put.
After going ashore to get lunch, we enquired about getting a slip in
the marina, which was mostly empty. They offered us a rate of
$3.50/ft. This was more than we had paid anywhere else, so we asked
if there was an off season rate. Apparently that was the off-season
rate!?! Given this was a matter of safety, we accepted the offer and
brought the boat in the next day.
We spent a good deal of effort tying the boat securely in the slip,
so it wouldn't hit the sides. This was something of a challenge as
it wasn't a floating dock and the tides were pretty significant. We
used all of our docking lines and later added some anti-chafing when
we say the lines were being damaged by the movement caused by high
winds. One problem was that the winds were pushing us from the
finger dock we need to us to get on/off the boat and we couldn't
secure the boat close enough to cross the gap. After a couple of
ideas, we used one of our scrap lines and left it attached to a winch
and one of the posts. Normally, the line was left slack. When we
were getting off the boat, we could winch the boat in closer to the
dock. When getting on the boat, we could also pull the line to bring
the boat over. Sometimes, Mark would still have to clamber over the
bow to get on the boat and use the winch to pull the boat closer to
the dock for Dana.
We were quite happy about our decision to stay in Nantucket as the
storm turned out be even stronger than predicted. There were gusts
as high as 60 knots, even in the fairly protected marina.
We stayed at the marina 4 days and headed out the 5th on what was at
that point our longest crossing: to Hampton VA. We expected this to
be 4-5 days.
However, leaving the harbor, we found that the autopilot was not
working. The rudder sensor had been damaged the previous week on the
crossing to Nantucket and the quick fix of pushing it back together
turned out be insufficient. There was no way we could do the
crossing without the autopilot so we decided Mark was either going to
have to replace it underway or we would have to head back. Mark got
quite seasick while he worked several hours in the aft stateroom
soldering the spare sensor into place. It started up just fine and
after adjusting the offset, we were on our way.
We had fantastic winds the first night. We made perhaps 8-9 knots
through the night. However, it died off early morning and after a
long day with fairly slow following winds, we spent the next several
days tacking into pretty significant head winds. We figured in one
day of tacking, we only made 80nm in our intended direction. Getting
to Hampton turned out to be a long 5 days, with us entering the
Chesapeake around midnight of the 5th day.