Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts

Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Wed 12 Sep 2007 15:03
41:57.886N  70:38.761W
 
Here we are in Plymouth after a cloudy, foggy, little bit rainy, mostly motor over here from Provincetown.  Not the most hospitable place.  We radioed the harbormaster for a mooring (since the town moorings are hogging up most of the good anchoring space), but they wanted $1/foot for the night - on a Monday night after Labor Day? Seemed a bit steep, so we shoehorned ourselves in among the moorings and anchored.  After hearing of our decision, the harbormaster was quick to tell us that if we anchored, it was required that someone be on board at all times.  Ok, we didn't really want to see where the pilgrims landed in the Mayflower anyway. So there.
 
On Tuesday (9/11) the weather looked bad, so we decided to stay another night here in friendly town and use the extra rainy day on the boat to get some things done.  Things like prepare our applications for visas to Brazil (not an easy process) and plan our route for the next week or so, and bake more cookies since we couldn't go into town to buy them.  As we went about our business, the weather got worse and a few storms passed through.  The last, most ferocious storm (not too bad - 33 knots of wind, tops) spun us in a direction we didn't expect, just as the tide was heading out fairly rapidly.  Result: the water got quite shallow, dipped below Harmonie's water line by not a little, and we were lodged quite nicely on the sand bottom - and heeled a good 16 degrees to port [non-boater translation:  tilted 16 degrees to the left].
 
In an effort to ensure that all of our experiences, good and bad, are well documented, I took several pictures to show how nicely we were heeled, sitting on the bottom.  See the two pictures below.  As usual, Don was not worried and went about his business like the boat was not sitting at a significant angle at all.  I, on the other hand, sat and watched the tide table graph, depth meter and clock until we passed low tide and started to 'untilt'.  That whole process took about 2 hours.  Needless to say, Don was right.  The tide came in, we floated off the bottom and re-anchored in a slightly different spot among the town moorings to avoid another similar episode tomorrow morning at 6am when the tide goes out again.  Maybe all of this is why the town requires someone be on board at all times?
 
Anyway, what we learned from this is that there are many good things about being heeled over 16 degrees to port while anchored.  We wanted to share these revelations with you, so we have compiled a list of:
The top ten reasons why it is good to be firmly lodged on the bottom and heeled over 16 degrees to port while anchored in a sailboat:
#10:  It's something fun to write about in our blog.
 #9:   We can tell this story to other sailboaters we meet along the way.
 #8:  It gave all the local fisherman something to point to and talk about as they went by us on their way up the channel to the inner Plymouth harbor.
 #7:  Going from one end of the galley [kitchen] to the other was easy with socks on - you could just slide.
 #6:  Finding things in all the port lockers was easy because you could look right in.
 #5:  If Don had the paint handy, he could have gotten in the dinghy and touched up the bottom paint below the waterline on the exposed starboard side.
 #4:  The head [bathroom] is on the port side, so there was no need to latch the door - it stayed shut all by itself!
 #3:  The boat did not bounce up and down like it usually does at anchor.
 #2:  There was no water slapping noise on the outside of our cabin in the back because there was no water.
 Most importantly, this experience was good because:
 #1:  Being heeled over 16 degrees to port for an extended period of time was really good practice for when we will be heeled over 16 degrees to port for multiple days at a time when making major passages across oceans.
 
And there you have it.
We set our alarm for 4am tomorrow morning - just to check our position before the really low tide gets here again at 6...
 
Anne

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