By Rich

We had a couple of nice days in the outer anchorage of Vineyard Haven last week – apart from the ferry noise and wakes beginning at 6 am every day. The forecast for Friday night, however showed a strong breeze building from the east-northeast. Looking at the way the harbor is oriented, we figured we would have some beam swell from waves hooking around the shoreline but nothing worse. The forecast was off, however, and in reality we had 20-25 knots of wind from the north northeast. It was a sleepless night capped by by a 3-4 am anchor watch to be be sure the swells didn’t yank our Rocna out of the bottom. Here were the conditions when we got up, which had lightened considerably from the 3-4 am period:

Realizing we weren’t going to have a very good day for napping, we decided to pull into Lagoon Pond. Here were the conditions in Lagoon Pond:

Lagoon Pond was crazy scenic too. Lesson learned! No more outside anchorage for us at Vineyard Haven! Other lesson learned: our Rocna kicks ass.

By Rich

Sometimes things happen living on a boat that you just couldn’t make up if this blog were pure fiction. Last week, after a month’s wait, it was looking like our repaired diesel injection pump would be fixed near the end of the week. Just as it looked like we might get paroled from Break Down Prison, though, Tropical Storm Henri formed offshore in the Atlantic. Most early models predicted that Henri would take an easterly turn and would not affect the New England coast. Around mid week I got a warning from my friend Glenn that his weather service predicted that many models had under estimated the chances of a New England landfall and that Henri posed a “material threat” to us. We began to consider options for preparation, but there was no certainty the engine would even be fixed before the prospective weekend landfall, so there was no certainty that we had any options to prepare other than removing the sails and canvas. By Thursday the forecasts made a New England landfall look much more likely, so we began calling marinas. We learned that haul outs were first-come-first-serve, and that the only marina that might be able to take us was New England Boat Works (NEB), which was 6 miles north in what used to be called Bend Boat Basin. Ironically, Bend Boat Basin is where my family’s brand new Pearson 40 was delivered to Mathews & Fales, our Pearson dealer, in 1979. On Thursday, NEB said not to leave Newport until they were ready to haul us because there were too many boats converging on the Basin, which meant they had to hold them outside of the basin in the Bay and lead them in one at a time for haul out.

By Friday morning, the forecast looked much worse for us. Here is the forecasted track we awoke to: