Nantucket Week – Getting Here

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This is almost always my favorite trip of the season. I love the Nantucket weather – good or bad, love the lack of crowds, and I love being in one spot for a week.

The marine forecast was rather ominous all week, but we planned on Tuesday morning because that looked like it the best weather window.

As has become my tradition, we stayed aboard Monday night in case we needed an early start Tuesday morning.

There was nothing in the forecast that might keep us home, but the last half of the trip is a 25-mile leg in open ocean, and I wanted it to be as comfortable as possible.

Baily’s Surf and Turf

A lot of restaurants in Onset and East Wareham are closed on Monday night. After a quick scan of Yelp, I came up with Baily’s Surf and Turf as an interesting option.

We grabbed three seats at the end of the bar before it filled up.

The crowd was a mix of Cape Codders and folks who might have been bikers!

With a week of Nantucket restaurants ahead of us, we ordered light and shared…

The food was decent, pretty much what we expected.

The brisk winds of Monday morning had subsided all afternoon and I had toyed with the idea of heading out at 5:30 PM. The wind died down by 7:00 and I thought perhaps we should have tried.

If we had, we would have arrived after the marina closed and surely would have had to move the boat in the morning.

A Salty Ride Over

The wind was already blowing around 15 knots when I woke up Tuesday morning, so I made the call to move up the departure to 8:00 AM.

Nantucket is due west of Woods Hole and the forecast called for unusual WSW winds until late morning. If that held true, we’d like get 30 miles of the proverbial wind-at-your-back through the shipping lanes before the final southern leg.

I expected the worst of the trip would be the first 20 minutes between Hog Island and Cleveland Ledge,

I was right!

It wasn’t too bad and I was able to run at 25 MPH, but it only took 5 minutes to cover the entire boat in salt water.

Once we cleared Cleveland Ledge, I turned further southeast and the ride got smoother. Nantucket Sound turned idyllic after Poge Light…

Needless to say, when we left the shipping lanes and headed southeast after Tuckernuck, we took constant spray in the 20 knot winds.

Slip 1257

This is our tenth year visiting Nantucket, but the first year on the piling lined straight wharf. According to the Dockmaster, the pilings are 70’ apart and 20’ from the wharf. Amazing Grace is about 65’ overall and 18’ wide, so there was virtually zero wiggle room trying the “parallel park” between the pilings.

The Dockmaster suggested backing in, but I can’t see the stern from the bridge and I tend to avoid the Dockmate (hand-held remote) in heavy winds.

Mrs. Horne was on the headset calling out the distance, but about 10 seconds in, I aborted the entire docking and headed back out of the boat basin to come up with a better plan.

Since I had great visibility of the bow, I decided to squeeze between the pilings bow first, pull past the forward piling, and pull the stern over after Mrs. Horne told me the coast was clear.

It worked, but we still had some drama getting centered between the pilings.

We were too busy dealing with the situation to take any video, but I did get a great video of the 64’ Viking Atlantic Lady doing the stern in landing in about 90 seconds…

I sped up my video for ease of viewing!