We spent Easter Sunday in Sandwich, which was totally awesome. We would happily stay here forever, except that they charge us $65 per night to tie up to their dock. Steph made pancakes! And they were awesome! We ate them on a beautiful day overlooking the Cape Cod Canal and pondering how the hell we would possibly get around to Portsmouth RI in just one day.

Monday morning we got our asses in gear and steamed through the Cape Cod Canal. It was nerve-wracking, but not so harrowing as we had been led to believe (thanks, Dad, for putting the fear of God in us). In order to transit the Cape Cod Canal, you need to follow a few rules:

• Keep your speed below ten knots. No problem. We could barely make ten knots if you dropped us off a cliff.
• Keep your speed above six knots. No problem, again. Turn on engine, which is a great idea anyway since it is not permitted to transit the canal except under auxiliary power
• Complete the transit in less than 2 1/2 hours. Well I should hope so. It’s only six nautical miles, so we would be screwed if it took longer than that, anyway.

The place where we made a potentially big mistake was in deciding tha we should sail fifty miles after getting though the canal. We had to go all the way out Buzzards Bay, then around what appeared to be a treacherously rocky point, then eleven miles up a river. And all, it seemed, with the tide against us. How is that even possible?

We timed the Cape Cod Canal transit pretty well. Going from East to West, as we were, it was necessary to go through on a falling tide. So we caught the tail end of the falling tide, not realizing that the current turns about an hour before the tide turns (???!!!!). So we began to fight an opposing current toward the end of our trip through, but it wasn’t too bad and soon we were out into Buzzards Bay.

In Buzzards Bay, we had some of the best sailing we could ever have hoped for. The wind was almost directly ahead of us, but it was so awesome that we had to take a chance on not making our evening destination and sail. Anyway all the motoring was not why we bought a sailboat in the first place, so we heaved up the sails and had a go.

It was awesome. Despite the fact that we still have an accidental twist in the genoa track, we made five knots with a weak wind and over six with a slightly stronger wind. The pictures above are from the weak wind. I was too nervous to take photos when the wind came up even a little. We gradually made our way south through Buzzards Bay.

Eventually we had to turn the motor back on because we still aren’t confident in our anchoring abilities. So the choice was either “sail through the night” or “motor to Pirate Cove.” We motored to Pirate Cove. Actually, after we rounded Sakonnet Point and turned north, we sailed most of the way up the river (against an opposing tide, again) and arrived just before sunset. We tied up to the dock with almost no drama. I didn’t hit anything, and no one fell in the water, so it was a huge win.

Then we collapsed into bed. Since then, we’ve been tied up to the dock here at Pirate Cove, exploring the town by foot and by dinghy. The trip South was pretty exciting! I hope the rest of our adventures are as interesting as this one has been.

I’ve tried my best to keep up over the past couple of days, but the best I was able to do was twitter updates. If you want to read the adventures in real-time, follow me on twitter (@willronco) because I stuff my laptop in a pelican case for travel. Let’s catch up.

On Friday, Jeannine from Wilkins Signs in Chelmsford came by to apply the lettering John Young sent us. We contemplated trying to do this ourselves, but it seemed like too daunting a prospect. There isn’t too much on board that we really have to get right on the first try, but our transom lettering is definitely on that short list. After watching Jeannine, we were REALLY glad we did not try it ourselves.

It looks AWESOME, and even better in person. Thanks a million, John!

After that, we were itching to get going … so we went! It was late in the day, our chartplotter did not show quite the data we were expecting, and we had forgotten to install the battens in the mainsail. so our First Sail turned out to be a First Motor, and just as well for that. Boston Harbor is challenging to navigate with less chart detail than we had expected, and our 5-10 knot wind had suddenly grown to 20-25 knots. But we made it out of Boston Harbor, narrowly (well, it FELT narrow) avoided a 500 foot tanker in the Boston shipping lanes, and negotiated the entrance to Scituate Harbor with time to spare. The Scituate harbormaster was a really nice guy who directed us to an overnight mooring we could borrow, and Steph made us an amazing terriyaki chicken dinner before we both collapsed from exhaustion.

This trip has been funny like that; we haven’t really done much Hard Physical Work, but we are both completely exhausted at the end of the day. By the end of yesterday’s voyage, I was ready to hibernate. But instead we soldiered on, leaving much earlier this morning to arrive in Sandwich – at the northeast end of the Cape Cod Canal – in late afternoon. Today we were able to actually sail, which was an incredible experience. Megatron sails beautifully, even in the hands of two rank amateurs such as ourselves.

Because of the wind angle, we were soon faced with the choice of staying overnight in Provincetown or motoring on to Sandwich. Provincetown would have been a cool side adventure, but we are pretty keen to make it to Rhode Island, so we motored. And then, at the end of a long and overall very challenging day, we had to enter a tiny harbor across a five knot current and then dock side-to (“beam-to” is the correct phrase, I think?) in a pretty strong cross breeze. Steph, me, and Megatron all survived, but we will need lots of practice if we are ever going to try something like this in tight quarters. As the (again, very nice) harbormaster said, “You’ve got to learn sometime.”

So we are!

Then Steph and I dragged it out onto the dock and built it (it’s an Ikea-style dinghy, some assembly required).

And then we took it for a shakedown dinghy cruise around the marina:

Here’s what we now know about this dinghy: it is tippy! On our honeymoon we had a ten foot rigid bottomed inflatable dinghy, which was a super lot of fun. For our current adventures we got an eight foot long hard plastic dinghy, with a 2.5 horsepower yamaha motor. Here is why we chose those particular options:

• Plastic, instead of inflatable. We’re going to be using the dinghy to explore rocky coastlines in an area with a 14 foot tidal range. We have to be able to drag it over rocks, without worrying about popping it. Inflatable would have been more stable, and have a higher load capacity, but it was also more expensive and not as durable.
• A little engine, instead of a big one. “Big” in this case would have been about 8 horsepower, maybe ten at the outside, but that’s a lot more than two and a half! We chose a small engine because it was cheaper, and even more important lighter weight. We need to be able to get the dinghy and motor out of the water and onto the boat in a pinch, and a 34 pound motor makes that pretty easy. A 94 pound motor would have been pretty tough!

Now that the weather has started to clear, it looks very likely that tomorrow we will have a chance to install our new name! My hero friend John Young sent us amazing new laser-cut labels for our transom (vocabulary update: the “transom” is the very back of the boat). We got them via FedEx yesterday, in the middle of Noah’s Flood. The decals have to be put on in sunny, warm weather, so we’ve had to wait. I cannot describe how excited about our new name, MEGATRON, done in what is indisputably the world’s most awesomely-named font: “Smashing Sans”

Also, Steph says hi!

I eventually made up my mind to go out and retie some of our docklines. I thought I could keep us a little closer to the dock and thus reduce the amount of space in which we could agitate. It worked pretty well! My feet got appropriately soaked, and I otherwise stayed pretty dry. We’re generally doing a lot better with the squeaking, pitching, and rolling now. The solution seemed to be to get us closer to the dock. That was also a bit scary, because the dock is this hard immovable object, so my instinct is not to get as close to it as possible. But tied up closer and more securely has given us a more comfortable day, so WHEW!

Perhaps you are wondering: “How could they get wind over the transom? Isn’t that the back of the boat?” You are right to wonder that! Normally, if we were anchored or tied to a mooring, we would swing around to face into the wind. It’s only the fact that we are tied to a dock, with the back of the boat facing toward the only exposed area of the harbor, that makes us so exposed to the elements. Having committed this oversight once, we will probably never do it again. Lesson learned: check where the harbor entrance is, and don’t point the boat away from it!

NE winds 20 to 25 kt with gusts up to 40 kt. Waves 2 to 3 ft…except 4 to 7 ft at the Outer Harbor entrance. Patchy fog. Rain. Vsby 1 nm or less.

Now, we are safely landward of a huge rock breakwater, tied securely to a great big dock, and nothing short of a hurricane could hope to dislodge us. But it is still pretty exciting to have an actual storm on its way in. We prepared by sitting belowdeck all day long today, listening to the patter of torrential rain on the roof and googling the MPH equivalent of 40 knots of windspeed (it’s 46). I unnecessarily retied all of our docklines twice, in preparation. So now if there’s a quiz, I’ll do pretty well on the “hauling docklines” portion.

One of the great joys of being on board so early in the season is that the marina is almost completely deserted, so there are few people around to see our continual un-yachtsmanline efforts to do everyday things. Attaching the sails yesterday was the most obvious, but even tying up docklines is pretty challenging. The other boats all sit peacefully, lines slack, while we seem to strain against one squeaking line no matter how much I fidget. I assume Steph and I will figure it all out eventually.

Today was my first day back working, which went great on the EvDO-wifi router although I am pretty worried about the 5GB monthly cap. I doubt we will be able to handle such restricted usage for long, but there’s no other solution available for now, so we’re going to grin and bear it for at least a little while. Maybe we’ll find municipal wifi in Rhode Island. Or 4g. Or something!

We were without internet access for the first couple of days after launch, so I did my best to document our progress on twitter and flickr. I’ll give you the executive summary now: it is awesome. So awesome I can hardly believe it. It’s even better than I anticipated, and I anticipated a lot of awesome.

After purchasing a CO detector, we spent our first night aboard on Friday. My dad and stepmom visited, and they brought us champagne, and we toasted to an exciting new chapter. Awesome! The furnace kept us toasty warm inside the boat while the outside temperature dipped as low as eighteen degrees with a 25 knot wind.

Yesterday we did lots more shopping; spare parts, hoses, ropes, clips, wrenches, shackles, clamps, and some normal things, like shampoo, soap, food. We’ve tried EVERY DAY to buy a dinghy, so far without luck. We will find one, I’m sure of it. And it will be great. Spacious, lightweight, big capacity, fast, fun, folds up to fit in a pocket, the whole deal. It will be our main method of exploring new harbors, so it needs to be great. Yesterday night my mom, stepdad, and three of our dear friends visited for dinner. That means we had SEVEN people eating dinner comfortably (well, *I* thought it was comfortable) in our living room. Rad.

Last night it was hardly cold at all, only 25 or so, with hardly any wind. We were toasty warm, and woke up to another idyllic morning. My sister visited for breakfast and a nap after an overnight flight, and Steph made scones in our little propane oven. They were indescribably good, even moreso done in our floating kitchen (I mean, “galley”. It’s called a galley now.)

Then Steph and I bent on the sails (that’s a nautical term. It means “attached the sails to the boat”). After two hours wrestling one onto the boom, we realized it was the genoa and had to start from scratch. Even we know that the genoa goes on the front; once we realized which sail was which (they’re devilishly hard to recognize in their little bags, especially when the bags’ labels are reversed) it took only an hour to attach both. Protip: the genoa is heavy! It was no match for our combined strength and cunning, though, and after a brief but exciting time with the sail up and drawing, we furled it in textbook style.

So in short, everything that could possibly be going well is going well. We finished today’s big projects:

• Figure out how to attach the sails to the boat
• Set up the internet (for reference, it’s a Verizon 3g data card hooked up to a Cradlepoint MBR-1000 with a DC adapter cord. The router draws 1.5 amps, and to ease the pain of a 5GB monthly cap, we will probably piggyback a Pepwave Surf Mini onto the Cradlepoint so that we can use WiFi where it is available, only falling back to the 3g where there is no WiFi available.)

And most importantly, we’re having a BLAST. Even Euonym likes it!

Steph and I jumped aboard for the ride over to “B Dock”, which will be our home for the next few days.  Soon the surveyor and the previous owner arrived, and we were able to complete the survey begun last month by running the engine in the water, checking the water pumps, and noting that there were no visible leaks.  Awesome!

After they left, we set about unpacking the car.  Steph and I were shocked to realize that everything that was in the car fit inside the boat pretty comfortably.  We may yet realize that there is nowhere to store all of it, but so far we have at least been able to cram all of our boxes belowdecks.  We also tested our new heater, and found it to work well although it emits a foul odor (“Ah, that new heater smell,” noted Peter, the surveyor).

The smell of the heater and nervousness about carbon monoxide poisoning combined to send us back to my mom and stepdad’s house in Lexington for the night.  There, instead of worrying about dying in our sleep, we instead worried about our unattended boat sinking at the dock.  I twittered our biggest current dilemma (“How on earth can we christen this boat?  If we smash a bottle of champagne over the bow, we will get broken glass everywhere and probably break a host of environmental regulations.  If we pour a glass of champagne over the bow, we will feel like hopeless sissies.”) in the hope of new input, and we fell asleep.

We left Boulder early Monday morning after a nice but emotionally difficult weekend in Boulder where we had to say goodbye to our friends and family. We expect to be back for a long visit soon after Thanksgiving, so it is not as though we are parting with any kind of finality, but the mere fact that we plan to base our lives from another side of the country makes us feel as though we are leaving the community, even though we will certainly return.

The first day’s driving was pleasant. 675 miles is a long way, but with it we cleared the eastern plains of Colorado, all of Nebraska, and made it to Des Moines, IA in time for dinner with our good friends Karen and Ben. Karen is a college professor at Iowa State, and a nursery school classmate of mine. She and Ben live in the coolest loft apartment I have ever seen in real life, and they had us stay over with them, which was totally awesome. Des Moines is having a flood right now, so when we walked across the river bridge we could see the submerged waterfront amphitheater, submerged waterfront bike trail, submerged lightposts, and quite a lot of submerged grass. It was an awesome treat to visit with Karen and Ben, but we had to press on early yesterday morning to continue the journey.

Continuing east, we crossed into Illinois and then Ohio.

Since Euonym was taking the day’s journey fairly well, we briefly considered pressing on through the night, but a short break for dinner outside Cleveland made us realize that we were too tired to make it, anyway. We pressed on to Erie, where we collapsed into an extremely convenient roadside hotel, of which I will shortly become the foursquare mayor.

In other news, after much back and forth with the boat yard, we seem to be about 75 percent likely to meet our target launch date of tomorrow morning. Here’s hoping!

See you later, desks, beds, and coffee table!

So far it’s quite a lot like a normal move in terms of all the “should we keep this” and “how should we wrap this up so it doesn’t break?” kinds of decisions, only with the additional distinction between “should we bring this with us now” and “should we keep this for The Future House.” Practically all of our dress clothes, for instance, are going in to long term storage. Along with Euonym, if she’s not careful:

It’s very exciting, but it’s also stressful and sad. We are doing things this week that we wanted to be sure to do “one last time before we leave.” Last night we went out to Steph’s favorite bar downtown, and tonight after the show (we’re both in the chorus of Aida) we will have a chance to watch a movie with friends from the theatre. It’s a pretty challenging time; both of us are psyched about the adventure that lies ahead, but part of having that chance means that we need to leave our friends and family. We are trying to be very clear with our invitations (“ANY TIME YOU’RE FREE, WE WOULD LOVE TO HOST YOU”) but it’s a long trip from Colorado to the ocean so we know it won’t be an everyday thing to see our friends from home. We’re very excited to see more of our friends and family who live on the east coast, and very much looking forward to reconnecting with them, and it is still hard to leave Boulder.

Anyway, one glance out the window easily shows us that it’s time to break out the bermuda shorts and floppy sun hats. Obviously, nature is trying to give us a sign. Thank goodness the heater is all installed.

Other than the destination, though, so far it’s a lot like all of our other moves: storage, packing, goodwill, phone calls to the new destination to make sure the various legalities are lined up, etc. There are some differences:

• Documentation. Marine documentation is handled by the coast guard. On the plus side, documenting your vessel with the Coast Guard is seen as A Good Thing by our bank, and it allows us not to have to register with the state DMV in every state we visit. On the minus side, we paid someone a bunch of money to make sure we did it right, because there is a significant fine for doing it wrong. Now that it’s done right, we have to get our boats name and hailing port (Megatron, Boulder CO) painted on the boat, and an engraved plaque with our documentation number mounted somewhere. This has to happen before we move the boat at all, or we risk a $10,000 fine. Whew!
• Living Comfort. We take certain things for granted in an apartment, like heat, fresh water, and electricity. No more. We purchased a big device that is basically a marine furnace to keep us warm, since pleasure boats aren’t generally built with them preinstalled. Fresh water lives in a 100 gallon tank, which seems like a lot until you shower twice in one day. We’ll be able to refill at a local dock, hopefully not too often. Electricity lives in one huge battery that has to be recharged whenever its level of charge drops below 70% or so.

There are lots more things, which I hope to get to eventually. Tonight, I’m shipping fourteen eBay packages. I sold most of my triathlon equipment on eBay, and we are using the proceeds to buy a dinghy:

I have no idea who that lady is, but I think she’s in our future dinghy.