At Block Island, we moored in the salt pond harbor in the center. The harbor master came up to collect the fee, telling us we were on the wrong color mooring: our cruising guide said transients were to use the blue moorings, but as we were above 50ft, we were supposed to be on the orange mooring balls. The balls were tightly packed, so presumably they accounted for the longer boats in the spacing of the orange balls. He said that there had been 1400 boats in that harbor during Labor Day weekend, only a few days before. All the moorings were used and then many boats were anchored between them. Apparently, they got 40 knot winds one night and lots of the boats were dragging anchors and banging into each other. While we had some curiousity about the party there, we decided we were glad to not have been involved in that mess.

Labor Day signalled the end of the season for Block Island and most of the restaurants were now closed up for the season, only a few days later. We walked over to the less protected ferry harbor and checked out a restaurant there before deciding to come back to a restaurant on the harbor where the Northfork was.

The next morning, we woke up to 30-40 knot winds. We decided that even though it would make for a rough day, this would be a good chance for us to get some experience in higher winds. The water was a bit choppy for us to hoist the outboard off the dinghy, especially for Mark to stand in the dinghy and guide it to the outboard mount on the Northfork life lines. Leaving through the harbor's narrow channel, some care had to be taken to keep the boat pointed diagonally into the cross-winds so that we didn't get blown downwind onto the rocks.