So I’ve done it once again – filled all of your heads with all the horrendous things I’ve done to my poor boat while neglecting to point out that the other 99% of the trip was really, really nice. OK, 90% anyway, we had a lot of fog.
All the the rampant spinnaker destruction occurred on Sunday, after spending the July 4th Holiday with friends out on Block Island. And I should say it was a LOT of fun.
Rafting up with other boats is not something we’ve done a lot of; we get out on the boat to cruise every weekend my wife isn’t working and for a couple of weeks every summer. Probably 50-60 nights on the hook every season between late April and late October. We do very little of that in the company of other boats, however. Many reasons for that, not the least of which is that we simply had not had our friends pointed in the same direction as us on the same weekend. Except for Block Island Race Week in 2007 we’d never spent more than a couple of hours rafted up with another boat.
This weekend was different – we planned to meet a couple of friends with their boats on Block Island. Block Island on the Fourth of July is a bit of a madhouse. The town moorings are jammed, the docks that raft boats are rafted seven deep, and the anchorage gets pretty full. So you need to get out early to get a spot, especially without a reservation. We were meeting some friends in a Beneteau First 36.7 and a 32 foot power boat (Wellcraft? They all sort of look alike to me…) with plans to raft for the weekend. The thinking is that Evenstar with her nearly half a ton of ground tackle could provide holding for the smaller lighter boats that they ordinarily would not attempt.
In fact this worked like a charm. We got out on Friday morning fairly early, dropped a hook and rafted with the sail boat. I then spent a good part of the day waiting for the pump out boat because somebody lacked the wit to take a free and easy pump out before leaving home…everyone else went in to town. Later that night the power boat arrived and rafted just as the fireworks were starting. Cold drinks and snacks were shared out, and much fun was had by all for the next two days.
Of course getting to Block had it’s nuisance factor, in the amount of fog we had on Thursday night on the way to Dutch Harbor, and Friday morning on the way out to Block Island. It was unnerving to say the least to discover we couldn’t really even see the pilings on the Jamestown Bridge until we were pretty much right under it. But fog (and dark) is fog, we’ve handled it before and we know how to be careful.
Throughout the weekend we watched the wind shift around and saw our ground tackle hold like a mooring, we didn’t drift an inch even with an extra 26,000 pounds of boats tied to our two sides. Hanging out with a group of friends with our boats tied together like that was just plain fun, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
