Today, I had the honor of taking my favorite aunt and one of my uncles out on the Pretty Gee. YS is generally referred to as “Auntie Ford” within my family, as she has worked at the Dearborn-based company for many years. WK, is the husband of my YS’s and my father’s late elder sister, who passed away two years ago.
They are the first two of my family to get a chance to sail on the Pretty Gee. I also had Johnnie and another friend of his along as crew. On the right is a photo of the Pretty Gee that was taken by Walt, from Sunday’s sail on the bay—Brandon is at the bow, I’m sitting under the boom, Dave is standing on the port ama, and Johnnie is standing at the stern—Lauren can’t really be seen, as she’s asleep under the cockpit dodger.
This morning, my aunt and uncle showed up at the house, and I drove them down to Avon, where we did the grocery shopping for the day. We then headed over to Johnnie’s house, and picked up our crew for the day—Johnnie and his friend Nick. Next stop was the marina.
The plan was to get down to the marina and get the boat prepped and make the 10:00 bridge opening. This allows us not to rush anything. On Tuesday, I went down to the marina and got the Pretty Gee ready for today’s sail. This included getting fuel down to the boat, and loading drinks into the refrigerator.
We arrived at the marina about 8:50 and started to get the boat prepped for the day’s trip. Around, 9:30 we left for the New Bedford-Fairhaven swing bridge. The bridge opened a little after 10:00, and we headed out past the New Bedford Hurricane Barrier.
This was the first time for YS and WK on a sailboat. They didn’t realize how much work is involved in getting a sailboat rigged and ready for sail. Fortunately, sailing on Buzzards Bay is a bit less work than sailing on an inland lake—the wind is constant, and the distances we can travel on a single reach are fairly long.
Once we were past Butler Flats, we got the sails up, and headed off. We decided to head south first, and then turn east towards Nashuon, to start with, even though we didn’t have any plans of actually stopping there. Even though it wasn’t as windy as I’d like, only five-to-ten knots, the day was pretty amazing.
We got within a half-mile of Nashuon, and then turned to the north-northwest, and headed up the Bay towards Mattapoisett. Since this was Wednesday, the middle of the work week, there were far fewer boats out on the water. Monday and Tuesday had both been horrifically humid and hot days—the humidity was much lower today, and made the day a very pleasant day for a trip on the Bay. One of the boats we saw today was a small catboat, towing a dinghy, as seen on the left.
Not having any specific destination in mind, we ended just sailing about Buzzards Bay for about five hours. Finally, we decided to head back in. It was getting towards the late afternoon, and we wanted to make the 5:15 bridge opening.
As we headed up the main channel to the hurricane barrier, we had to dodge a lot of lobster pot buoys. Why the lobster pots were setup in the middle of a channel, I’m not quite sure, but there were almost two-dozen of them. We ended up going over one of them.
At first I wasn’t sure whether we had snagged the buoy line or not…but Nick finally spotted a line trailing from Pretty Gee’s rudder. A few minutes later, a buoy surfaced next to the rudder. This was very surprising to me, as we were still making almost five knots, even dragging the lobster pot and buoy. I tried to push the buoy down and past the rudder, which I had raised at this point, but it was too well snagged. I had Johnnie, who has much longer arms than me, cut the line going to the pot. This was a last resort in my book, but I felt it had to be done.
As we approached the hurricane barrier, the buoy finally popped free, and we brought it aboard. There were no markings of any type on the buoy—no way to know who had owned the lobster pot in question. Oh well, I can’t help them if they don’t mark the buoys. I’ll have to check where it got snagged on the rudder when I haul the boat this week to see if I can make it a bit more snag-proof.
We made the 5:15 bridge opening, and got the boat squared away and rinsed off. It was as I hopped off the boat and bent over to tie off one of the spring dock lines, that my phone decided to go swimming, as I’ve written about in another post. Ugh—not much I can do about it now. I hope to see if I can recover the phone from the bottom of the slip later this week and salvage the SIM card and Transflash card from it.
Then it was off to Margaret’s for dinner. Eating at Margaret’s is something that Johnnie and I have decided is going to be a tradition for a day of sailing on the Pretty Gee. But Margaret’s is not well suited to larger groups, so they asked us to go to their sister restaurant, Elizabeth’s, which is two doors down the street from Margaret’s.
I highly recommend either of the two restaurants, Margaret’s and Elizabeth’s, to any who are looking for a pretty good place to eat in Fairhaven. The food is excellent and reasonable in price, but the two menus do differ a bit. After dinner was a stop at the little ice cream shop, between Margaret’s and Elizabeth’s, that has also become a tradition. On the right is a photo of the two girls that were running the ice cream shop.
As part of Tillerman’s Cult of Sail’s Missionary group, I have been working on getting more young people involved in sailing. Thus far, every teen that has crewed on the Pretty Gee, has been bitten by the sailing bug. Nick, the most recent convert, was overheard saying, “First, I’ll get a car, and then a sailboat….maybe, I don’t need the car.” Sounds like another convert. My aunt has also decided that a trip out on the Bay is something she needs to do when she comes to visit in the summer.
Johnnie mentioned to me, while we were out, that it was a bit scary to realize that he knows the New Bedford-Fairhaven area far better from a marine perspective than he does from a land-based one. He knows where the radome is located; how the marina, the swing bridge, and the hurricane barrier are related to each other; the approach channel to the hurricane barrier, as well as the buoys and lights that mark it. He said he has no idea how the roads related to any of this yet. It is probably a good thing that he doesn’t drive yet.
Great story – thank you. Sounds like you’re having lots of fun sailing the bay. My experience is that kids don’t learn how the local roads relate to each other until they learn to drive – and not always then.