New Bedford

N 41 37.458 W 70.54.749

This morning I created a very blog worthy disaster. I was preparing to go ashore in the dinghy. I was taking trash and a couple of gallon jugs of waste motor oil, with me. I put all this stuff in the dinghy but the cap to one of the jugs was not screwed on tight. My attention was diverted for a while. When I looked back there was a puddle of black oil all over the seat and the inside of the dinghy. What a mess! More than two quarts had leaked and mixed with the gallon of loose seawater in the bottom of the dinghy.

I changed into my most grungy set of shorts and climbed into the dinghy to clean it out. It was awful. As I climbed in it rocked the dinghy and now twice as much of the inside was dirty as before. I had to stand in the oil, and sit in the oil and put my hands into the oil to clean it up. After that, anything I touched became oily. I picked up the trash bag, it was oily. Libby took it on deck, and now Tarwathie's deck and the side of her hull were oily.

You can picture the scene. The more we tried to control the situation the worse things got and the farther the oil spread. But we kept our heads. Step one was to get the suction pump and to pump the oil and oily water into jugs. When that was done we wrapped the oily jugs in plastic shopping bags. Step two was to wipe down the dinghy with oil-absorbent rags. I don't know who invented those rags or when they were invented but they are miraculous. With only two rags and ten minutes, almost all of the oil was off the dinghy, off Tarwathie, off me and off Libby. Step three was to wash all the above with dishwashing soap. Step four was to wash myself with pumice soap. It all worked pretty well. There are some stains on the seat of the dinghy, but otherwise the mess was cleaned up.

It could have been a catastrophe, but we limited it to only disaster proportions. If I had been alone and not had Libby to help it really would have become a catastrophe. Sorry, no pictures. If we had picked up the camera it too would have been oily.

We rented a mooring here. Only $20/night, much more reasonable than some recent stops. I went ashore, disposed of the trash and old oil and bicycled into the city in search of a West Marine store. It is very hot today, about 95F (35C), and it was hard to find things. (Ah yes, I just remembered about street layouts in Massachusetts) Eventually I found the place, and I bought charts and a new cruising guide for New England. Now we're prepared to go all the way up to the Canadian border.

I also bought some groceries and located a laundromat. We'll stay here tomorrow and do more errands.

The harbor is full of commercial fishing boats. We'll be entertained watching them come in and out. The harbor is also protected by a massive hurricane barrier. We entered through the gates this morning and we are moored right behind the barrier now. The barrier seems to be about 15 feet high. It makes me think of Katrina from last year, with 25 foot storm surges. It is very scary to visualize the sea coming in over the top of the barrier.

We are also close the the Vinyard Ferries terminal. My friend Pete Lemme was heading for Martha's Vinyard soon and I suspect that he may be boarding the ferry here.

Yesterday and today we had our first experiences sailing in thick fog. Both times we were in high traffic areas. We kept a sharp lookout, we tooted on the fog horn, and we watched on radar. In both cases, we were out of the fog within an hour, and we didn't have any near collisions. I think it scared Libby more than it did me. One bad thing is that no other vessels sounded their fog horns. That's not good. Anyhow, fog is part of life here in New England.

By the way, our cruising guide (by Duncan, Duncan, Fenn and Fenn) said that there is never fog in Buzzard's Bay. We had fog our first morning here. I bought a new cruising guide today.

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