Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Wed 12 Sep 2007 15:03
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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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