A Slow Boat to Boston

Left 0700 from Wickford for Redbrook – about 48-ish miles. It was a slow, hot ride in Buzzards bay with light winds until the last few hours. The trip finished off with some pretty fast downwind sailing (with all three wings out). Arrived redbrook around 1700 and anchored behind Basset Island. Unfortunately, not able to spend any time as we had to get moving early the next day.

We expected to leave redbrook at 0700 to get through the canal and then wait a few hours for predicted winds to fill in. But when we got on the other side, there actually was a bit of breeze already. So we just continued motoring north. Within 20 minutes or so, we had 11 kts at a great angle and we were sailing really well. We thought “ha – windy was wrong – in a good way!”. Well… it didn’t last. Within a couple hours, we were struggling to make 3kts so we went back to motor sailing – for a long time. Somewhere between Plymouth and Scituate, we got so sick of hearing the engine, we decided to just drift. We even considered swimming and probably would have if had a good boarding ladder. Our driving was actually at about 1.2kts so I engaged the autopilot in windvane mode and just tried to keep that at least in more or less the right direction (north-ish).
Before long, our drifting turned into moving at 2, 2.2, 2.6, and oh my god.. 3kts! It kept improving until we got near Hull, MA and we motored from there to Peddock’s island to Anchor for the night. Our dock slip at Constitution Marina was nut until the next day.

Checkout time was 1100 so we headed off toward Scituate. Current was opposing leaving the harbor so we did a little motor-sailing at first but then had a brisk upwind sail for the rest of the trip