Salty Ginger Voyage: Newburyport and the Isles of Shoals

Off to Newburyport

Yesterday morning everyone was a bit tired. On the one hand the rocking and rolling lulls one to bed, on the other hand it's still a bit tiresome to be constantly rolled. The morning was windy, cloudy and chilly, so after a simple breakfast we left the mooring and headed to Newburyport where the municipal marina already had a mooring reserved for us.

The wind felt strong, but it seemed that we couldn't head into it well at all. Maybe there was current, maybe I was to tired to set all the sails right. At some point after I and a couple more adults took naps, the wind was turned off, so we finished the passage on the motor.

Thatcher island off the stern

Bundled up and heading into the wind

Peter taking us towards the channel

Much warmer! But care is needed to keep in the channel and not run aground.

Newburyport, founded in the middle of 18th century, is a small town with 17 thousand inhabitants. Maybe due to covid, maybe because it was a Tuesday, the number of people in the town was not that large. We walked around, saw a few shops and restaurants and let our kids burn some energy on a playground. After that we started looking for a place to get provisions, but alas, the convenience store in the middle of the town had nothing appetizing. The small fridge labeled "milk and coffee additives" looked particularly unattractive for either milk or "coffee additives".

There were 2 options: a butchery about a mile away and Market Basket supermarket about 2 miles away. Peter has been craving red meat, so Irina, Peter and I walked to the butchery while Alla, David and their kids went to Market Basket. It turned out that the butchery was much more than a butchery. Only half of the store was meat, and the rest had decent milk, cereals, fruit and vegetables. (Having spent 3 years living in Switzerland I don't expect a butcher to carry such a variety!) We let Alla and David know that they don't have to walk the rest of the way, and got all the food we need for the rest of the trip.

Even though we had lots of food aboard, nobody wanted to cook, so we ate at the Poynt. Food was fine, but the water tasted funny, and we can definitely cook better!

The nice thing about our mooring was that it was all of 30 meters from the dinghy dock. Therefore we didn't even put on the engine, and just rowed ashore. Since adults had a drink, we designated Vlad as our rower. He's doing rowing at the high school anyway!

Elbow grease

Irina does not know that much about sailing, at least not yet, but she does like to sail on a clean boat. So, as soon as we got a green light to use the water at the dock, we moved Salty Ginger to a source of fresh water and scrubbed the boat every way we could: deck, cockpit, seats, scruff marks on the sides. Peter even polished some stainless that looked scruffy. I pulled out oxalic acid and cleaned off dirt marks from under the wheel axes.

Dinghy folded, seats washed, and we were in the cleanest boat since 3 years ago!

Smooth passage

The Isles of Shoals were a tentative destination 4 years ago, but we didn't make it. They are only 13 miles away from the channel and in addition to nice wind we had sun and lots of warmth! Finally it feels like summer sailing!

We tried to set the spinnaker, but the wind direction was not conducive to flying it, so we set the mini-spinni again and were sailing 5 to 7.5 knots over smooth sea. What a treat!

We called the Portsmouth yacht club in the morning to inquire about the moorings, and they told us the same information that I picked up from activecaptain.com: there are moorings maintained by the club, they can be reserved by club members, and it's ok for non-members to use them if no members show up, as would be expected on a weekday. Indeed, there were a few moorings available. We picked up a white one for no other reason that we passed by a blue one with a motor boat who said the color doesn't matter.

The water is clean, with the sun it even felt warm, so some people jumped in the water while we were setting up the dinghy and taking the code-0 sail down.

Island walk

Some people rowed, some people swam ashore and we took a walk on the Smuttynose island. Passing by a little cemetery and then a grave for Spanish sailors who shipwrecked in the early nineteenth century we got into the thicket where mosquitoes were happy to see us and the gulls quite the opposite.

Once we reached the northern extremety of the island we decided that feeding mosquitoes was not that attractive and opted for the walk along the rocks along the waterline. Having once walked an island in the Long Island Sound where we collected a few bags of garbage in 20 minutes, the shoreline was relatively clean. Nevertheless, we did find some plastic, a number of lobster trap floats, and the biggest find: a huge buoy that was blown away. Vlad dragged it along the shore and then swam with it to Salty Ginger, so now we have to figure out how to stow a huge object for the next few days.