The 'Hard'-est Decision

We made it to Plymouth, Massachusetts through three of the five Great Lakes, four rivers, two canals, two other lakes, Long Island Sound, Hells Gate, and 36 locks to get to the ocean. We also had to start dealing with tides and currents, salt water, lobster pots, large ships and marine life during this trip. We have sailed over 1800 nautical miles and finally 'landed on' or in the same harbor as Plymouth Rock! INSANE!

It was our hardest harbor to get into due to the strong 15-20 knot wind, the current pushing us every which way and crazy power boaters swerving every way around us yelling "Hey Chicago!" as they left us dealing with their wake. It was a VERY tight channel we had to come through and our little atomic 4 motor could just barely keep up with all of the factors trying to push us out of the channel into very shallow waters. Thankfully she was able to keep up when we pushed her at the last couple of miles to keep us in-between the buoys and afloat!

After grabbing a mooring ball we took a break from Further and ventured into town to wander around Plymouth see the Rock where the pilgrims first landed, and the Mayflower II. It quickly was dinner time and time to plan for the next adventure (day). (As Gramps says, every day is an adventure out here! We never thought about it like that until he came out to be with us but he couldn't be more correct with this statement!)

I was unable to sleep that night due to our breeze bandit (this parachute like tube that redirects the wind into our v-berth and cabin) whipping in the wind. And all I could think about while laying awake, listening to the wind howling, was how bad tomorrow's sail is going to be in high/choppy seas. First light took a long time to show itself and as soon as it did I hopped on my phone to check the weather. Just as I thought, the winds were showing no signs of slowing down and the marine weather forecast had issued a small craft advisory for basically the entire New England coast from Casco Bay (just outside of Portland, Maine all the way down to the bottom half of the Cape. No buneo. The only area of water that was not included in this advisory was the area where we were to our destination for that evening (Salem or Gloucester). So, we could make the very uncomfortable trek to the next city but then we would be stuck until the seas calmed down.

As soon as Brady woke up I informed him of our predicament. After looking at the weather again and the five day forecast for marine conditions and weather things didn't look as though they would be improving anytime soon. Seas were expected to be three to five or six feet minimum until Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. Double no bueno. We knew we had to stop and have a BIG discussion to weigh out all out options. The weather may or may not have improved before Thursday/Friday. We may not be able to stay in one spot for that long with the busy last week of summer upon us and Labor Day creeping around the corner. We still had roughly about 140 nautical miles to go which would take us 5 days to get to Portland. Not possible to get Brady to his first day of school on Sept 6 if we had to wait till Friday for the weather to change so we could leave. Time finally caught up with us. Like I said before, we could have sailed very uncomfortably to Gloucester that day however we did not want to get stuck there. They don't have as good of services for sailboats as they do in Plymouth.

We unfortunately knew exactly what we had to do as soon as we started crunching the numbers. My eyes couldn't stop watering, now even after a couple of days, my eyes are still watering writing this. This would be the final sailing destination of our trip. We ran out of time. If we didn't have to be somewhere next week, we would have been able to wait out the weather and continue on, this is the luxury true cruisers have when you don't have deadline. So, with heavy hearts and very few words except for rechecking the weather and making sure there wasn't another way we could sail to Portland we walked to Brewer Marina to figure out how to get Further on the hard (take her out of the water) and ship her to Portland. While walking hand in hand my heart slowly melted through little cracks into my abdomen. It took everything Brady had to keep his voice from cracking while asking all of the questions we had about how to haul and ship Further. I wasn't able to take off my sunglasses while talking with the kind woman who walked us through every step like it was no problem. In fact, this is something they do all the time. They made it so easy for us. It was exactly what we needed at the time.

We took all of this information back to the boat to look things over one last time before putting this new plan in motion. Within hours we had everything set up, the haul out scheduled, the transport truck scheduled, indoor (non heated) storage in Portland set up and rented a car to take us the rest of the 146 miles of this trip. This was done before we finished our first cup of coffee. I still can't believe just how easy and smooth everything went. And on Tuesday the new plan was put into motion. It made us feel that this in fact was exactly how our story was supposed to go. Not the ending we would have initially chosen but fitting none the less. We not only were able to do everything we wanted during this trip but we did it successfully! We were still getting compliments from dock hands who liked our spring line docking techniques. We had handled extreme currents with our little motor. People all along the way would give us crazy looks when we told them what we were doing but we had confidence in ourselves and we never did anything that put us in grave danger or over our heads. Did we get into a lot of hairy situations, yes. Did we think we were crazy, yes. but we tackled each challenge one at a time and accomplished everything we set out to accomplish.

It was hard for the first 30 minutes to not feel like failures but then we thought about everything we did and yes there was still some mist in our eyes because this part of the adventure was over but the smiles didn't leave our faces for the pride we felt knowing we did it! We sailed to New England! We got to come into a cute little fishing town and experience the cute little New England harbors and just like the pilgrims, our sea journey ended at Plymouth (literally steps away from the rock)! And as Gramps says, everyday is a new adventure. Yes this is!

The best part about it is after we got everything lined up we ended up relaxing at a bar. Since we were the only people in there we somehow got onto the topic of our journey. At the end of the conversation she said "I've never met real sailors before". And she was so nice but didn't know the first thing about boats or sailing, which she admitted, but that didn't matter. I don't know if we will ever think of ourselves as sailors since there is always so much to learn but I guess we should give ourselves more credit and start thinking of ourselves in that way. So, now that this year's sailing adventure is over, it's time to start Brady's school and our living in Maine adventure! However, we cannot wait to start planning our next big trip, which will begin to happen as soon as we get our whiteboard!

Enjoying our last sunset on Further in the mooring field - Plymouth, Massachusetts

(Stay tuned for past posts of this adventure, more and more will be popping up soon! I promise I have not forgotten about them!)