The morning light flooding through the ports was grey and dense. It was earlier than usual when I woke up with a feeling that something about the day was going to go differently than expected.
I set the kettle on the stove to boil and turned on the VHF radio at low volume and waited for the NWS weather station to cycle through offshore and coastal reports to the inshore forecast for Massachusetts Bay. I was spooning coffee grounds into the filter cup when my husband emerged in time to hear the offshore forecast broadcast warnings about Hurricane Henri.
“It’s not our forecast, it’s offshore and that always calls for more wind and seas,” I said. “I’m going to plot our course to Rockport.”
We planned to stay the day in Manchester-by-the-Sea to have lunch with the friend who secured us a guest mooring in the crowded, landlocked harbor. While Tom prepared breakfast I climbed into the cockpit with my coffee and the essential tools for coastal navigating.
1-Chartplotter
2-Logbook
3-Pen
4-Cruising guide
5-Paper chart
6-Tide and current info
7-Weather forecast
At the time we used the old Raymarine Dragonfly chartplotter that came with the boat. It worked, except for getting occasionally squirrelly on zooming in and out. Beside me on the cockpit seat a tattered Block Island to Rhode Island BBA chartbook, Eldridge Tide and Pilot, and Maptech Embassy Cruising Guide: New England Coast completed my tools for laying out a course using the chart plotter to set up waypoints.
Ocean Versus Coastal
I spent years crossing oceans, and ocean navigation and coastal navigation are like cousins from different backgrounds. Planning an ocean passage meant choosing a destination port, plotting exit and entry routes, getting forecasts to make sure we left on a day with at least 24 hours of good weather; in between and for hundreds or thousands of miles, I only needed a few intermediate waypoints and the courage to face whatever weather came our way.
With my cell phone I called up the local NWS text marine forecast. It predicted SE winds of 5 to 10 for the morning but warned that Hurricane Henri would begin affecting our weather over the weekend. A finely tuned warning system of my own began to vibrate. We couldn’t afford to get stuck; our courtesy mooring was good for only one night. The ebbing tide would get us out of the channel and help us exit Boston Harbor. With a growing sense of urgency, I told Tom we needed to go — now. He didn’t protest, and after texting goodbye to our friend, by 0750 we were out of Manchester and four rainy but calm hours later, had tied up to a town float in Rockport.
Catching an ebb at Manchester was merely pleasant. Determining the strength and direction of tidal currents can in fact be crucial to successful coastal cruising. From New York Harbor to the seaward end of the Cape Cod Canal, strong currents shift as the tide turns, bringing huge amounts of water into and out of bays and channels. My instinct on ocean passages was to leave port early to get far out to sea by nightfall. That same instinct time and again proved counterproductive along the coast, where poor timing can lead to large amounts of frustrating motoring because wind often didn’t come up until mid-morning and currents in bays could be either helpful or lead to long delays for our underpowered boat. Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book has tide tables for major ports, but its true virtue is the current charts that show in map form the direction and strength of tidal currents throughout a tide cycle.
Our Trip
The stretch between the eastern exit from Long Island Sound and the northeast corner of Buzzard’s Bay is 65 nautical miles, passing from one tidal basin through a patch of open coast and into a second tidal basin. If you time the tides correctly at the start, you can pass on one favorable current in either direction, but not if you want to stop in the middle at Narragansett Bay and sail up to harbors in Rhode Island. Newport is a popular stop but we were headed to Wickford on the western shore of the bay.
From a mooring in Stonington, Conn., I first did a rough measurement of the distance to Wickford, and came up with 37 nautical miles. Next, I plotted waypoints for three Stonington breakwaters, then Napatree Point shoal that comes from Watch Hill Point. From here it was a stretch of open water until the Point Judith bell buoy, with several waypoints to carry us wide around the lumpy bottom off Point Judith that was bound to create uncomfortable seas and currents. Then we hit a north-northeast turn and straight shot up Rhode Island Sound to West Passage, experiencing four miles of sheltered sailing in Narragansett Bay. That should get us inside Dutch Island, 5 miles short of Wickford and a good anchorage.
I set the route on the Dragonfly and looked at notes I’d made from the weather forecast. Winds were predicted to start northeast 5 to 10 in the morning and go east and get stronger in the afternoon. The first 20 miles would be smooth-reach sailing in the lee of the Rhode Island coast and we left at 0600 with an hour of ebb tide to get us through The Race. I hoped that by the time we turned north, the wind would be easterly and allow us to sail comfortably, but strengthening wind and contrary current pushed us south as we approached Point Judith.
Ora Kali strove valiantly to beat against them but it took hours to get out of the lower bay, and many extra miles because our tacks were widened by the current and we had to dodge trawlers. After almost 12 hours we made it in time for a peaceful happy hour. Looking back on the passage, we could have left six hours later at the end of the ebb and carried a flood up Narragansett Bay, but we would have encountered the strong winds sooner and might have made port after dark because there was no alternative anchorage sooner.
With Experience Comes Knowledge
Early in our cruising career I was sloppy; well, arrogant actually. It was our first season with Kraken, a Galeforce 34. After a winter on the hard in Annapolis we decided to take a shakedown cruise to New York, a chance to show her off to family as well as gain experience sailing her.
The initial part of the voyage was through the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay and the C&D Canal, exiting into Delaware Bay from whence we would reach open ocean and the coast of New Jersey. We had a cruising guide to the Chesapeake but I failed to get one for New Jersey, assuming that if we exited the C&D Canal at the top of high tide we could carry a favorable ebb current for six hours before the tide turned, getting us well down the 50-mile-long Delaware to be flushed into the Atlantic Ocean. We had no intention of stopping until we reached New York Harbor.
An hour into the Delaware leg our forward progress slowed until we were barely making headway under sails and engine, and we realized the current must already be flooding up the bay. That observation was confirmed when at the very edge of the shipping channel we hit a fishing float, the prop stopped turning and we drifted rapidly backwards. It all ended okay; we were able to turn around and fly north under sail and tack into a sheltered anchorage behind an island. The next morning a tug pulled us into Delaware City where we found that a cut trap rope was wrapped solidly around our prop shaft.
The lesson learned from that episode was, always have all possible materials at hand when planning a coastal hop. Had I taken time to purchase a cruising guide I would have discovered that because Delaware Bay is a semi-enclosed body of water, the movement of water in and out doesn’t coincide with the time of tide changes. In a low-powered vessel like our sailboat with no wind, the current will change before you reach the ocean no matter what you do. But with the help of Eldridge, or NOAA tide tables, I could have gained us a couple more hours. With a cruising guide I also would have felt comfortable pulling off to the side to temporarily wait for a change.
As a navigator I find these challenges invigorating. It’s enough to get me up at dawn, make my coffee and climb into the cockpit whatever the weather. What challenges am I going to tackle today? n