2014.IX.5 (Voyage #37) -- West Falmouth

Solo #7
Friday, September 5
LW 0501; HW 1028
20.5 nm
6hr 30min
Ave Speed 3.5 kts (Max Speed 7.3 kts)
Partly Cloudy

Headed out on a Friday morning for a sail over to West Falmouth on the Cape.  Originally I planned to head to Quisset, near Woods Hole, where my friend Ric said he was headed with his wife.  I thought it might be fun to surprise them there.  But I got a bit of a late start and was never able to raise his boat, the 'Mommigrand,' on the VHF.

Today I decided to raise the mainsail while I was still on the mooring, and then sail down the river into the bay.  Once again I wrapped the halyard around the winch, but this time I inverted the wraps, with the halyard tailing from the bottom rather than the top.  No problem.  Three stripes, baby....

Casting off around 11:15, I cleared the river without incident, and sailed passed a flock of birds feasting noisily on the surface of the water just off Great Hill.  A few minutes later, I came up on a single bird sitting in the water, flapping its wings strenuously, and crying audibly.  I sailed up close, expecting it to fly away, but it was only as I passed within a few feet of the bird that I noticed it had its legs tangled in fishing line and was unable to get airborne.  I thought of stopping the boat and trying to extricate the poor thing from what seemed to be a fatal predicament.  But a stiff SW breeze quickly pushed me onward into the whitecaps of the bay.  I felt guilty, not having made an effort to rescue the doomed creature.  But then I thought it looked a lot like one of the birds that has been shitting all over my boat, and that quieted my conscience a bit.

By 1:00pm I was crossing the channel approach to the Cape Cod Canal.  The waves were big, but not like that day of the Mattapoisett ass-kicking.  Under mainsail alone, I was making 4.5 knots with the boat heeled 25-degrees.  Yeeeeee-ha!

An hour and a half later, Wild Harbor was off my port beam.  Wind and seas had diminished somewhat, given the proximity to shore.  Since I was not only making less than three knots, I pulled out half-jib and bumped up the speed to 5.3 knots.

At 3:00pm I had reached the Red #2 NavAid off West Falmouth.  The waves were bigger here, running three to four feet at mid-afternoon.  I realized that I probably was not going to make it to Quisset in time to hang out with my friends, and considering that I was uninvited anyways, it was probably better to turn for home.  A half hour later I was back in mid-channel, and completely drenched through all my clothes from the waves and the spray.   yee-ha.  (lower case).  By 3:45, I had round Green #1 NavAid near the entrance to Sippican Harbor, and turned starboard for the run home. The GPS was reading a steady 7+ knots.

Rounding Great Hill, I looked for the bird that had been entangled in the fishing line, but failed to find it.  Maybe it went up and away; maybe it went down and away.  It was not hard to imagine how quickly it would have tired in those conditions, and how its desperate thrashing about might have attracted the attention of a hungry sea creature, as predator turned to prey.

By 5:30, I was back on the mooring.  As I relaxed post-sail with a bit of my 'Captain's Reserve,' a cormorant lighted upon the spreader bars on the mast and promptly shat down all over me.  SPLAT!

Trust me, cormorant feces smells nasty.  Curiously, it has a lot of tiny pebbles in it, and they can hurt a bit when dropping from that height.  Oh well, Instant Karma's gonna get you, I thought.  I should have stopped and tried to rescue that tangled bird.