After we left Scituate, we had a pretty boring motor all the way to Newport. Which, all things considered, is ok, I would rather a boring motor than bashing into the cross chop coming out of the canal for 2 hours. The most notable event was that when we were about 10 miles from Newport, at about 1930 or so in the evening, 4 benevolent dolphins came up to play in our bow wake. Before they would breech, they would be illuminated by the luminescent plankton, which made them look pretty amazing. They hung out with us for half an hour or so, and Alex, Nathan and I took turns watching them. The other thing of note, was that the radar still wouldn’t work but we calibrated the autopilot after much deliberation and now have a functional extra person. We named the autopilot Heffe’ as he is pretty much in charge of the boat, plus he works hard.
After fighting the current for some time to get into Newport, we dropped the hook near Fort Adams. In the morning we realized that what we thought were no wake buoys were actually submerged cable buoys. Great. But we managed to not pull the cable up and the new windlass passed its first anchor operational test. We dropped Alex off at the fuel dock and traded him for some diesel then turned to and made way for Block Island. On the way we taught Heffe’ how to sail and not just motor. Block Island looked like a sweet little anchorage. We tried to find a place to prepare for today’s blow. We had full batteries so we tried out the inverter/rice cooker operation and it went really well. Plus it was supposed to be windy enough that Jocelyn would recharge the 50 amps that dinner cost. Cocktail hour followed by building a tent and a pseudo-hobo fire to keep warm allowed us to sleep.
The wind picked up around 2 am which led to a sleepless night for me. I eventually fell back asleep after I felt we were secure, but around 8 am a banging halyard woke me up, it was hard to get up and fix it considering how cold it was. When I got up though, I found that we were dragging anchor in the increased wind. Up it went, and we motored around awhile to reset the hook, just a little further in than we had been. Way to start the morning. Also, Jocelyn sounding like she was beating her self stupider so Nathan went out to fix her. Turns out he forgot to wire the ground and they had a little fight. I think she and Nathan are secretly dating. After awhile he fixed the grounding issue and she has been really happy. We have no idea how other stuff was working though. But after that, she happily charged up the batteries from the rice cooker operation.
The day has been really windy and otherwise uneventful. We met another cruiser. We dropped a second anchor and set two anchor alarms, hopefully that will help me sleep. No dragging after we put 75 feet of ¼ inch chain on the ground as well as another 25 feet of 3/8ths. Hopefully we don’t go anywhere else. We are hoping to leave for maybe Cape May Friday. Nothing else of interest, except just now, for some strange reason the Nathan alarm (AKA man over board) sounded, but he was in the cabin. Turns out after furious troubleshooting to make it stop that it was actually the carbon monoxide monitor going off from the alcohol heater. It has the exact same tone as the Nathan alarm, weird. Battery removed and we are sleepy.