Homeward bound

Each day in Maine is perceptibly a little shorter than the last. The leaves are still green and the air is still warm -- or as warm as it ever is -- but it's time to think about heading home. Across the Gulf of Maine again -- in hurricane season this time -- and back down into Cape Cod Bay and through that awful canal and down Buzzards Bay and through the scary Race and into Long Island Sound, which is of course practically home.

It's nice here in Maine but there is that itch to be afloat again, which raises the perennial question of why we do this crazy stuff.

Penelope's brother-in-law, Ted, a wonderful fellow who hails from Australia originally, is going to schlep up to Maine and keep me company for the first few days -- that long passage across the Gulf of Maine, when a comrade who can take the helm is particularly welcome.

We will be casting off the mooring and setting sail again in a day or two.

Serpent in the garden

My own experiences with outboard motors have not been quite such fun as the image above suggests.

My little rubber-ducky dinghy -- shown below, in the very pretty Saco River below Biddeford, Maine --

... has a weensy 4 horsepower Tohatsu outboard, which I'm sorry to say has given me nothing but trouble. Earlier on, in our journey from New York to Maine, I had to spend an unplanned-for day in Port Jefferson, Long Island, getting its carburetor cleaned out, for the third time this season. I may have mentioned this. It depressed me so much I was tempted to sail back to New York and take the train to Maine -- euphony unintended.

After the ministrations of Port Inflatables, the dinghy motor worked fine all the way to Maine and continued to work fine for a week or so after I got there. Then one day, headed across the quarter-mile of water between my idyllic island and the mainland, the motor wouldn't rev up. It putted and sputtered and coughed and heroically got me within rowing distance of the mainland dock, and then died with a horrible Keatsian phthistic rattle.

Bummer. Like, majorly. I wanted to cut my throat. Am I cursed?

I consulted the outboard experts on the island. "Carb cleaner," one sage said. "Drain the sediment bowl," said another -- and actually showed me where the sediment bowl was, and how to drain it. Which I had not known, and am now grateful to know.

I tried both these remedies, and I believe they were both good advice.

But I also got to thinking.

This motor was bought used -- after the dinghy's first motor was lost, thanks to the New York City police department, a story that will be told in ten years or so, when I can tell it without going purple in the face.

Anyway. Used motor. Not much used. Looked brand-new. Chap I bought it from had found it underpowered for his boat, after a short trial. I thought I was getting a bargain -- a practically new motor for half-price.

However. He must have had it sitting around for a while in his garage. And more to the point, the fuel tank and hose must have been sitting around too, with gas in them. Gas with ethanol in it.

If I had known more about outboards, I would have discarded his tank and hose in a rest stop somewhere on the Long Island Expressway, the promised homeland of all things cruddy. But I didn't, and so (as I now think) I was feeding crud -- Long Island crud! -- from a deteriorated hose, and a varnished-up tank, into the poor motor's freshly-cleaned carb every time I ran it.

Having figured this out -- finally! -- I trashed the hose, and bought a new one, and miraculously found a Tohatsu fuel-line connector in Grover's wonderful hardware store, in Boothbay Harbor. Grover's also sold me, for thirty-five cents, a nice stainless-steel marine-grade hose clamp to attach the hose to the connector.

Just to be on the safe side, I also bought a new tank -- this, too, from the irreplaceable Grover's -- and gave the old one to one of my island sages, who has a two-stroke motor, much more forgiving of cruddy gas than my refined sushi-eating Tohatsu.

What with the carb cleaner, and the sediment bowl, and the new tank and hose, the motor miraculously started running again -- without taking it to a High Priest and paying $200, for the fourth time in one summer, to propitiate the outboard gods.

There's a bit more to this story, but we will get to that in due course, on the return trip from Maine to New York.

Back in the historical present, your narrator is still enjoying his long slow late-summer days in Maine, with the early misty dawns and the protracted glorious sunsets over the silvery Anonymascott River. The bell-buoy he nearly hit on the way in tolls the knell of every parting day. The kids are all here, Penelope curls up next to sea-weary Odysseus every night, the sweet corn is to die for.

Soon enough -- too soon -- Odysseus will have to weigh anchor again and head back to New York. But back here in the historical present, it's a very nice life, and we are loath to leave it.

Blogging from Patmos

So here I am, in the historical present, on my island, like St John, shown above. Substitute a laptop for the tablet and you have me, to the life.

St John, however, used his island time to better effect than I did. I didn't see the new heaven and the new earth, much as I would like to.

On the other hand, the old heaven and the old earth have much to recommend them, and of those, as well as the old sea, I saw plenty.

Ate well, mostly from the old sea's abundance, and saw more of my kids than I usually see during the busy weeks of what we call, with bitter humor, "normal life." Played some music on the island's old piano and even older reed organ. Took the Scapegrace out for a few day-sails -- once with my brother and sister-in-law, once with Mrs Odysseus, once by myself.

Happy pleasant tranquil times are hard to write about, and hard to make interesting. The outboard-motor subplot advanced a bit during these Arcadian days, but perhaps I'll leave that for another post.

Day 16, and the following night: Odysseus reaches Ithaca

Day 16 dawned bright and clear. Wind very light but steady and the Scapegrace would steer herself again.

About noon a tiny colorful bird came unexpectedly fluttering out of nowhere and landed, obviously dead-tired and miles from anywhere, on the Scapegrace's foredeck. I tried to take pictures of him, or her, not very successfully:

(More at flickr.)

Friends of mine who are strong in birdlore tried to identify this bold sojourner, but the sages were somewhat divided:

"A Blackburnian Warbler in fall plumage? Note the streaking and the wingbars."

"G. thinks it is a Magnolia but I think she's wrong (fall plumage is duller)."

"Or perhaps a Blackpoll?"

Since I can't tell one bird from another, it was nice to see the sages puzzled too.

Whatever his race and nation, birdie stayed on my deck for an hour and a half or so, then took wing and fluttered stoutly off southward. I wished him -- or her -- the very best of luck.

The pleasant sunny day passed without incident, apart from a gruesome Gothic floating snag that I nearly hit. A whole tree trunk, twenty feet long or so, with a limb stretching up into the air and a congeries of gnarly knotted branches that looked like a grasping ghoulish hand. Kinda reminded me of my first landlord in New York -- a chap who was actually, I kid you not, struck down by a cerebral haemorrhage at sunset on Yom Kippur.

Oh and I ran over a seal -- at least, I think I did. There was a thump on the hull and I looked around and saw, ten feet astern, the seal's sleek little round head pop up, and I swear to you he glared at me, then indulged himself in the kind of rueful "what are they thinking of" headshake that I reserve for drivers who try to bully me out of a crosswalk in New York.

As dusk fell, I entered the Anonymascott River, the last leg of my journey. (I was bound for a secret island whose name I cannot utter. It's a Masonic thing.)

Now this is Maine. So the wind died and the fog descended with an almost audible thump, so thick you could hardly see past your extended arm, and so damp that the sail and the rigging and my nose dripped, and my glasses fogged up.

It was more or less slack water, so there was no current to fight, and I was very keen to get into a real warm bed, on dry land, next to a wife whom I had begun to consider semi-legendary. I fired up the old engine and went roaring, heedless of rocks and ledges and shelves and reefs, up the black-as-your-hat foggy Anonymascott at six knots or so.

I sorta know these waters -- not like a lobsterman, of course, but I've sailed 'em before. Even so: this was an insane move. It's a miracle I didn't bring the Scapegrace and myself to grief, and sink us both without a trace, a mile or two from Ithaca and Penelope.

For one thing, I nearly ran us smack into a buoy. It's a buoy with a bell, and of course I heard the bell, but directionality at night, in the fog, is uncertain -- and then, oh shit, the damn thing materialized out of the fog, dead ahead, rearing up like a monster in a low-budget horror movie. I flung myself on the tiller and scraped past with maybe a foot to spare, and I swear I could hear the Scapegrace muttering, "Idiot!"

Then of course I mistook the island next to my destination island for the island I wanted, and nearly tore the Scapegrace's keel off on a ledge of adamantine Maine granite -- a very different affair from the soft sand of Billingsgate Island -- before I realized my mistake, twenty feet from disaster.

Finally I found the right channel. It's a narrow twisty one, say thirty feet wide. I groped my way through it and became aware of a soft light ahead -- what could that be? Moonrise? Another boat?

The weather gods must be opera fans. They chose this moment to lift the fog -- whoosh! -- like a scrim, and reveal, through the suddenly crystalline air, the old familiar boathouse, with its homey porch lamp, on the island I sailed all this way to find.

Ithaca!

Got the Scapegrace on her mooring at the first try. Closed the hatch any old how. Piled into the dinghy, whose motor miraculously started. Staggered up the boardwalk from the boathouse.

Amazing how hard it is to walk fast on land after two weeks and some on a boat -- I reeled crazily from side to side, like an old gent much the worse for country-club gin. Once actually put a leg over the boardwalk's edge, knee-deep into the mosquitoey muck.

But I knew the way, and though no dogs bothered to turn out, and no swineherds embraced my mucky knees, I soon found myself at the door of the cottage where wife and children slept quietly.

Actually, that's a lie; they were all snoring like sawmills. Not that I minded. A nice noise. Sounded like a Tibetan monastery. I catfooted up the stairs, did off my rank nautical clothing, and snuggled into bed next to Penelope.

She stirred drowsily, murmured complacently, "Oh, there you are!" and went back to sleep.

Day 15, concluded

After my visit from Leviathan, the Scapegrace continued to sail herself while the sun sank and set, and a bright clear moonless night -- did what?

"Ensued"? That's terrible. You can't say "night dawned." Why not? Why isn't there some equivalent? "Night sunsetted". Nope. No good.

You can say "night fell." But that doesn't feel right. I want to say something like "night rose".

Anyway, whatever it did, there it was, after a bit, bright clear and moonless, as I may have mentioned. You could see the Milky Way plain as anything -- an increasingly rare experience. But depressingly, the lights of Portland and its environs washed out almost the entire northwestern quadrant of the sky -- even miles out at sea, as the Scapegrace and I were, too far to see any land at all.

About 9 PM the wind fell and a following sea came up, so the boat would no longer steer herself. I steered by hand for a while, but by 1 AM I was tired, so I hove-to and went into the cabin and slept.

I woke up every hour or so and popped by head abovedecks just to be sure there was no shipping about. But I might as well not have bothered. I had the Gulf of Maine to myself -- me, and the streetlights of Portland.

Day 15: A distinguished visitor

After dropping Ishmael off, and stowing my newly-filled gas can, I took off about 10 am to cross the Gulf of Maine:

This sounds awfully bold; but it wasn't really. The day was warm, the sun was bright, the wind was encouraging but not too exciting, and the weather radio bore nothing but good auguries.

The weather radio proved to be right. About noon I was able to peg the tiller and adjust the sheets -- half an inch makes a difference -- and once I got it right, the Scapegrace sailed herself, on a course ever so slightly east of the ideal but certainly close enough. I took a long-overdue shower on the foredeck with lukewarm water from my solar shower, a funky little plastic bag that heats up a gallon or so of water when the sun is shining, and then I went below to potter and, well, to be honest, I took a nap.

Sailboats, in their own quiet way, are rather noisy, and you don't always know where the noise is coming from. Pocketaqueek -- pocketaqueek -- the 'pocket' you know is the rigging, and the 'a' is the rudder post thumping in its poorly-bushed tube; but what the hell is queek?

You never find out, but even queek you get used to. What you are not expecting is an immense unprecedented noise like God clearing his throat: a-HEMMMM!

Just such a noise jarred me like an electric shock out of my nap and sent me scrambling, faster than I would have thought I could move, up into the cockpit. What in the name of all that's holy...?!

Nothing. Nothing unusual on the boat, nothing on the horizon, nothing nearby -- no boats, no change in the weather. Nothing. Sun still shining, wind where it was, Scapegrace sailing herself as sweet as you could wish.

I was starting to think I had dreamed it. But then, just off the starboard rail, the water surged and boiled, like I remember water doing below hydroelectric dams in Kentucky, where I grew up, and a vast dark something broke the surface.

"Vast dark something" is a little melodramatic. Oh, it's accurate enough. But the odd fact is, I never had a microsecond's doubt what it was. I didn't think it was an uncharted sandbar or a log or a submarine. I knew instantly, the way I would have known my best friend's face, that it was a whale -- five, six feet away; I could have touched him with the boat pole, if I had had the boat pole, and if I were ill-bred enough to do such a thing.

Funny how an animal knows an animal instantly. We must be wired for it, on some subcortical level. Not only did I know immediately that this was another animal -- somehow I also knew he meant me no harm.

I suppose, in retrospect, that he must have been surprised to see a sailboat scudding along with nobody on deck, and he came over to check it out.

He -- or she; who knows? -- was a beautiful animal, the deep deep brown that might as well be black, smooth, glossy in the bright sun, with an absurdly tiny sickle-shaped dorsal fin.

I could only see his or her back; his head and tail were submerged -- but what I could see, above water, was quite a bit longer than my little boat.

He or she swam idly along next to me for a few seconds, then exhaled again -- whoosh!

That was the sound I had heard, the sound that bounced me out of my bunk and sent me on deck with pulses pounding.

This second exhalation seemed to have a slightly humorous character -- a hint of a Leviathan laugh. Not an unkind laugh, but a laugh expressing the unfathomable mirth of a mighty creature at a joke you and I could never share.

And then he dove -- or I guess "sounded" is the right word -- and I saw him no more. But I will see him in my dreams until the day I die.

Day 15, continued: The sacredness of the stranger

Ishmael and I raised the Rockport harbormaster on VHF -- he answered promptly and crisply, and gave us nice clear directions to the town float.

Once we were there, it turned out that the train station -- where Ishamel needed to go -- was miles away from the harbor. But the harbormaster, Scott Story, piled us into his truck and dropped Ishmael at the train station and then took a detour to let me fill up a jerrican of gas.

Perhaps I am becoming tedious on the topic of how kind and helpful to each other boating folks are. I wonder whether it's not a survival, in the suspicious self-interested bourgeois modern world, of something quite ancient: the sacredness of the suppliant stranger, a matter in which the father of the gods himself is said to take a keen interest, as in the case of Baucis and Philemon, shown below:

As Ovid sets it up --

Iuppiter huc specie mortali cumque parente
venit Atlantiades positis caducifer alis.
Mille domos adiere locum requiemque petentes,
mille domos clausere serae. Tamen una recepit,
parva quidem, stipulis et canna tecta palustri;
sed pia Baucis anus parilique aetate Philemon
illa sunt annis iuncti iuvenalibus, illa
consenuere casa paupertatemque fatendo
effecere levem nec iniqua mente ferendo.
Nec refert, dominos illic famulosne requiras:
tota domus duo sunt, idem parentque iubentque.
Ergo ubi caelicolae parvos tetigere penates
submissoque humiles intrarunt vertice postes,
membra senex posito iussit relevare sedili,
quo superiniecit textum rude sedula Baucis.
Inque foco tepidum cinerem dimovit et ignes
suscitat hesternos foliisque et cortice sicco
nutrit et ad flammas anima producit anili.

Golding's Elizabethan version:

The mightie Jove and Mercurie his sonne in shape of men
Resorted thither on a tyme. A thousand houses when
For roome to lodge in they had sought, a thousand houses bard
Theyr doores against them. Nerethelesse one Cotage afterward
Receyved them, and that was but a pelting one in deede.
The roofe thereof was thatched all with straw and fennish reede.
Howbee't two honest auncient folke, (of whom she Baucis hight
And he Philemon) in that Cote theyr fayth in youth had plight:
And in that Cote had spent theyr age. And for they paciently
Did beare theyr simple povertie, they made it light thereby,
And shewed it no thing to bee repyned at at all.
It skilles not whether there for Hyndes or Maister you doo call,
For all the household were but two: and both of them obeyde,
And both commaunded. When the Gods at this same Cotage staid,
And ducking downe their heads, within the low made Wicket came,
Philemon bringing ech a stoole, bade rest upon the same
Their limmes: and busie Baucis brought them cuishons homely geere.
Which done, the embers on the harth she gan abrode to steere,
And laid the coales togither that were raakt up over night,
And with the brands and dried leaves did make them gather might,
And with the blowing of hir mouth did make them kindle bright.

Baucis and Philemon's hospitality was recognized and rewarded by the gods, and so I hope will Scott Story's be. He wasn't the first and wasn't to be the last who received this suppliant stranger hospitably -- in fact the most remarkable story in this line is yet to come -- but if my invocations can catch any divine ear, may all of them be at least as kindly treated by the gods as they treated me.

Day 15: Solus rex, again

Ishmael and I both awoke early on Day 15, drank our coffee, and took counsel. Ishmael had concluded, during the wise hours of unconsciousness, that he ought to go do his cousinly duty, and though I was sorry to lose his company so soon, it seemed like the right choice to me too.

Day 15 had dawned beautiful and clear and crisp -- a little bracing, with what felt like an anticipatory touch of fall in the air, though it was only mid-August. We got the anchors up and then motored, with a bit of help from the jib(*), through Milk Island Channel and into Rockport Harbor.

(Does anybody know, by the way, why there are two practically identical Cape Ann lighthouses?)

One regrettable thing about the Cape Ann lights is that they are said to have preserved the life of that bloodthirsty monster, President Woodrow Wilson, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, along with Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and the current Bombdropper-In-Chief:

Among the many lives potentially saved by the Cape Ann Light Station on Thacher Island is that of President Woodrow Wilson. After the Versailles Peace Conference that officially ended WWI, President Wilson was cruising home aboard the passenger liner America, when it was caught in blinding fog. Had its crew not heard the blast of Cape Ann’s foghorn and made an emergency course correction, the America would have smashed onto the island’s rocky shore.

Usually I'm quite grateful for navaids but this story kinda makes me wonder.

I will leave the much pleasanter topic of Rockport for another post.

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(*) The roller furler was mysteriously working again. I hadn't done anything do it, other than dousing the sail and hoisting it again. Sometimes, of course, that's all it takes -- the jib gods just want a little respect. In this case the story proved to be a little more interesting, but we will get to that in its proper place.

Day 14: Farewell to Cape Cod

Normally I love to sleep late. But I had a looming deadline. My family were going to show up in Maine in just a few days, and I had already spent two weeks creeping along the coast. I was eager to get under way, and so I woke -- uncharacteristically -- at dawn on Day 14.

Ishamel and I had discussed my battery problem the previous evening. I haven't mentioned it before. The problem was that the navigation lights wouldn't burn all night on battery power. Was the battery bad? Was the motor not charging it up properly when it ran?

Ishmael and I were both inclined to blame the battery, and we had mooted the idea of going back into Provincetown in the morning -- there is a great and well-stocked chandlery there -- and buying a new battery. (Hey, it's only money).

I was tempted, but I also wanted to get going. So while Ishmael slept -- and he snores like a buzz-saw, let me tell you -- I quietly made my coffee, and recovered the anchors, and made our escape from Provincetown.

The Pilgrim Monument was just a nick on the horizon when Ishmael awoke. He took the helm while I made some more coffee, and then like a stalwart fellow he kept the helm through a very lively day, crossing Massachusetts Bay from Provincetown to Cape Ann:

The wind was brisk, from the north-northeast, and we were quite close-hauled to weather Cape Ann. A stiff sharp swell had built up, sending spray over our bow with each sea. But Ishmael has a light steady hand on the helm, and kept us going where we were supposed to go, and seemed to be enjoying himself, so I very gratefully left him to it. I updated the log and pottered away in the cabin -- there is always something to do, on a boat. This observation may already have been made.

About midday we sighted some whales, maybe a half-mile or so away, leaping out of the water and blowing spectacular brilliant white plumes of vapor. Ishmael knows one whale from another, but we were too far away for him to discern what class of whales these were -- but he sus[ected humpbacks. I had never seen whales before, on the water, so this was a red-letter day for me.

As afternoon drew into evening, the wind diminished and the sea became more calm. We soon realized that we weren't going to weather Cape Ann on the starboard tack we'd been on all day, so we decided to anchor somewhere on the south side of the cape.

The place we finally found was a little shallow cove off Emerson Point:

It wasn't a great anchorage -- looked better on the chart than it proved to be in fact. Sheltered only from due north, rocky, narrow. We came in a little close to some nasty-looking rocks just barely submerged, then dropped one anchor and spent the usual fretful ten minutes backing down that anchor line, into deeper water a bit farther from the rocks, before dropping the other.

We drank some of my crummy boat wine and, though I didn't make a note of it at the time, I believe we cooked something to eat. We must have had some fresh food -- I remember that we got a new supply of ice for the cooler in Wellfleet.

Being an old Southern boy, I never feel quite at home unless there's an old grungy blackened cast-iron frying pan somewhere close at hand, and so I have one aboard the Scapegrace:

I think we deployed this household god for dinner, though what we cooked in it is anybody's guess. I'll ask Ishmael next time I see him. Perhaps he will remember. It vexes me when something like this gets lost: the details are everything.

Ishmael's plan was to accompany me all the way to Maine. But after dinner, he got a cell phone call. Family crisis. Cousin in a jam down South. Ishmael wondered whether he needed to cut his sail short and go help out. We kicked the question around inconclusively for half an hour or so, then agreed that we were both dead tired and should defer the matter till tomorrow morning -- there was nothing to be done tonight in any case.

I raised my improvised little anchor light and we turned in.

Day 13: from frustration to fabulosity

Day 13 dawned clear off Barnstable, but there wasn't much wind, and what there was came from the north-northwest. I was pessimistic about getting anywhere, and resigned to spending the day exploring yet another unplanned-for harbor, namely Barnstable. But Ishmael was keen to forge ahead, even if it meant beating tack upon tack up Cape Cod Bay. After all, with two of us, it wouldn't be so difficult. His enthusiasm proved contagious and so we weighed anchor and set off.

Our faith -- well, Ishmael's faith -- was quickly rewarded by a strengthening breeze that also conveniently backed into the west, so we scooted up Cape Cod Bay uneventfully at four knots or so and came coasting into Provincetown harbor and anchored just after dark.

Provincetown is an interesting place. The structure shown above is the Pilgrim Memorial, and if it reminds you a bit of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, it should -- the latter is below:

Who, I wonder, thought that a knockoff of a mediaeval Italian building, from a time and place steeped in Popery, would be a suitable memorial to the Pilgrims? If any Pilgrim shades should revisit the town, just to check up -- what would they think of this oddball tribute?

They might not be too concerned. They would have other things to scratch their ectoplasmic round heads over. Shopfronts in Provincetown frequently display merchandise like this:

... and there was a very buff chap in the street, wearing a maillot bathing suit and promoting a show by a group called "The Nellies". "You'll eat it right down to the stick!" he promised.

It was kinda nice -- like being back in New York, though not on the upper West Side.

Day 12-13: Pea soup

Ishmael called me around 10 PM. The fog had gathered, wooly and thick, and the air was so wet you couldn't tell whether it was raining or not. There was a barely-perceptible wind, but it was next to impossible to steer -- no reference point except the compass, and in light air the boat takes five minutes to respond to the helm. I relieved Ishmael and he went into the cabin and collapsed in his turn.

I fiddled with the radio and found a religious station, with a preacher engaged in earnest exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans. He had actually read the book and done some hard serious thinking about a hard dense obscure contradictory text. This is a undertaking I admire deeply, and have done a bit of, in my day.

My man knew his Greek, too, and though preachers usually make me groan when they start talking about the "original Greek" or the "original Hebrew", this chap got it right. So I followed his reasoning with pleasure and respect until the aether stopped cooperating and I lost his signal. I don't know quite where he would have ended up, but I was right there with him for a rather intensely focused half hour, which is longer than I can usually stay with NPR before I snort or chortle or say, right out loud, "Thou fool!"

By the time the radio preacher went away, the wind had gone away too. The Scapegrace was, for all practical purposes, adrift -- and so, of course, was I, without my radio preacher to guide me; but I'm used to that. I take my guidance where, and when, I find it.

The wind was more often out of the west than anywhere else, but you couldn't do a damn thing with it. So around midnight I hove-to against what wind there was and went and took a nap.

By 2 AM or so we had drifted almost back to Sesuit, but the wind had come up a bit, and the air was a little less thick, so I popped my bleary head abovedecks and set sail. By 4 AM we had won our way back out of the corner-pocket of Cape Cod Bay to the vicinity of Barnstable, where the wind failed us again. In the faint chalky pre-dawn light I dropped the hook, in twenty feet of water, and went to sleep.

Day Twelve: tedium and terror

There's an old military aphorism to the effect that war is long intervals of tedium interspersed with moments of pure terror. Sailing is a bit like that too. Ishmael and I had our terror early on, as we were leaving Wellfleet harbor.

Wellfleet has a narrow, twisty, but well-buoyed channel, which leads you on a nice conservative course around various obstacles. The trouble is that the buoyed channel leads you the long way around, to the south, and Ishmael and I were quite keen to head north. So we decided to take a shortcut, over what used to be Billingsgate Island and is now a sandbar, exposed only at dead low tide. The Scapegrace only draws four feet of water, and though we hadn't really consulted the tide table -- well, to be honest, we hadn't consulted it at all -- we figured Billingsgate was well submerged. You can see it on the map below, a sinister blur of grey, like a tumor on an MRI:

You can probably see where this is going. It's late afternoon, the sky is overcast, the light has that peculiar coppery color. But then the light gets more and more yellow, the little wavelets just that bit more steep, and Ishamel and I simultaneously decide to check the depth gauge:

6.5 ... 6... 5... 4.5... 4...

... and then there's a gruesome grinding sound, like that noise when they're cleaning your teeth, except four octaves lower, coming right up through hull and deck and shinbones into your very bowels. I look over the side and there's the sand, clearly visible through barely four feet of water, racing along under our keel and grating against it with every little hummock or hillock.

Reader, I hate to boast, but I must say, to my own credit, that I kept my composure. Normally the idea of going aground absolutely unhinges me. But Ishmael is an experienced sailor, so I wasn't on my own. The ground was soft sand, not rock. The nice deep channel that we should have stayed in was maybe a hundred yards away, so if we had to kedge off(*), we could.

As it turned out, after a few more of those horrific gratings and grindings, the depth gauge started to tell a more cheerful story:

5... 5.5... 7... 9... 10.... 17... 25!

We were back in the channel, and from thenceforth followed the buoys with Pharisaic zeal, until we were well out in the bay and even your anxious old Granny would have turned off the depth gauge.

Night fell -- as it is wont to do, every twenty-four hours or so -- and we set a course for Provincetown. Ishamel took the watch and I went down into the vee-berth and collapsed.

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(*) Kedge off. You take the anchor in the dinghy and drop it in deeper water at the very end of the anchor line. Then you pull pull pull on the anchor line and with luck, you drag yourself and the boat out into the deeper water. The one time I have had to do this, it actually worked.

Day 12: Into the fog

Ishmael and I spent the first part of Day Twelve running errands: seeking butane tanks for my little gas stove -- they're not as easily found as you might think -- and trying to find a hand drill. I have a battery-operated drill but of course I left the battery on the charger at home when I set sail and anyway, who wants to depend on a battery?

I remember old hand drills from back in the day. I don't mean a downright mediaeval brace-and-bit, like this --

This sort of thing is for people doing high-end cabinetry, or building harpsichords. No, I had in mind a sturdy old pre-electric eggbeater drill, like every home handyman used to have in his garage:

Ishamel and I must have gone to six or seven hardware stores and drew a blank on every one. Finally, at the Tru-Valu in Orleans, Massachusetts -- a store I recommend without reservation to one and all -- we hit the jackpot: more butane cylinders than I could burn in a lifetime of cruising, and a wonderfully earnest clunky heavy Chinese knockoff of the old eggbeater drill.

Some years ago I went looking for a hand plane -- you know what I mean:

... and the best I could do in my local upper west side hardware store was the same kind of slightly approximate imitation of a generations-old First World product. The plane came from India.

I plan to keep the Chinese drill on the boat and the Indian plane at home, lest they fall to quarreling over Tibet.

Ishmael took his van into the garage in Wellfleet, where it lives during the winter, and I sailed the Scapegrace from Sesuit into Wellfeleet harbor, and we set off for Down East in the afternoon.

Day Twelve is not quite over, but I'll leave the rest of it for another entry.

Day Eleven: Jack ashore

After my morning coffee in my tranquil slip in Sesuit Harbor, I was able to raise Ishmael on my increasingly squirrelly cell phone. We arranged for him to come from Wellfleet and pick me up.

I was a wee bit worried about this. I know Ishmael from a rather egalitarian setting in New York, and I didn't know what his place in Wellfleet would be like, or how he would feel about putting my smelly greasy gas tanks in his trunk to go fill them up. Will it be a gleaming Lexus, I wondered?

He turned up in an ancient rattletrap van full of unidentifiable junk even greasier than my gas tanks, with holes in the floor and doors held on with string -- well, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But let's just say my fears regarding the immaculate Lexus were laid to rest.

I had never before set foot on Cape Cod, and I took in the landscape with great interest as we drove back to Wellfleet from Sesuit -- a longer drive than I had expected. I had my nose out the window like some goofy Irish setter, sniffing the air and eyeing the older buildings for subtle differences from the New England vernacular architecture I'm used to.

The landscape is not unlike what the north shore of Long Island must have been before it got so crapped-up, but it's just that little bit farther north, so the trees are slightly gnarlier and the air slightly brisker and there's more of a piney-woods scent in it.

Ishmael's place is the canonical beach house, though it's not actually on the beach. It even has that wonderful thing, an outdoor shower.

Ishmael had some work to do closing up the house, so I tried to lend a hand. I even spent an amazingly sweaty hour or so digging potatoes and onions out of the garden, which reminded me what backbreaking work agriculture is and has always been. Once the potatoes were dug I was very glad to have the outdoor shower.

We ate raw clams freshly-dug somewhere nearby.

Now being an old Southern boy, and only an adopted denizen of the Northeast, I am usually a bit squeamish about uncooked molluscs. But these were utterly delicious, and after bravely slugging down my first one, just to be polite, I had another and another and another... I probably put on more hot sauce than a Real Man would have done, but still: now I know what the fuss is about.

Slept that night at Ishmael's place, first night I've spent ashore since I set off.