Beantown!
Well. The weather was fixing to get pretty rowdy this week so we decided to clear out of Manchester by the Sea on Sunday morning to avoid a rougher-than-necessary ride to Boston.
But before that happened, our buddy Matthew took the train up from Dedham and came to visit us on Saturday. He was our first overnight guest! We hung around Manchester, walked to Singing Beach, ate some ice cream, made pizza dough, made pizza, danced on the roof when the wedding band at the yacht club played. Good stuff!
The harbor at Manchester by the Sea is so crowded, some boats put laundry baskets over their propellors so they don’t damage their neighbors if they get too close at slack tide. Also, wow is it lovely here.
And before Matthew got to Manchester, Ellen and I spent a night moored at Misery Island and then a night anchored outside the Manchester by the Sea harbor. On Misery we circumnavigated the island, investigated the ruins on the island left behind after a resort there failed 100 years ago. After the resort, the property was home to about 45 summer residences that were destroyed in a brush fire. Now it is conservation land owned by a trust and open to the public. I tried going for a run on the trails Friday morning but called it quits after about a mile and a half because I didn’t want to break my ankle and get eaten by the herd of deer on the island before anyone noticed I hadn’t returned to the boat.
In addition to being a picture of lovely Ellen, this one is a treat because it lets you read the word crenellations in a sentence today.
We are really lichen this adventure so far.
Looks like a New England cousin of Stonehenge, but it’s actually the base of the old water tower on the island.
Sunday morning we dropped the mooring and headed to Boston. It was a short run of about 21 miles. What we learned is that Cyclops has a lot of bottles that clink and rattle in a bouncy sea state. It was a bouncy sea state. Just ask Friday…she barfed and then dozed unhappily the rest of the trip. Once we got inside the harbor islands things settled a bit and we could concentrate on all the commercial vessels, law enforcement vessels, pleasure vessels, and exciting views.
Waste treatment plant looks like giant eggs and acorns.
It was entertaining to watch Matthew try to identify the buildings in his city. He’s lived and worked in Boston since the 1980s but was all turned around approaching by water.
The Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge reminds us of the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine. That illustrates what country mice we are.
We are at the Constitution Marina, you can see the masts of the USS Constitution behind the building in the background. This place is slathered with history. This morning Ellen and I went on our run along the waterfront past the Constitution to the Naval Yard, then we finished up at the Bunker Hill Monument. And on the way home we played chess at a park near the site of the first English settlement here in 1629. The tables had boards built in, and there were tupperware boxes with chessmen. Fantastic!
This Boston is a hopping, colorful town.
The biggest fright of the day is that when we called the Constitution Marina to ask for our slip assignment, they gave us the chilling news that they wanted us to back into our slip. BACK INTO OUR SLIP! That’s something I’ve been saying we should learn to do since 2022, but I’ve been putting it off. Because it is really really hard. The boat walks to starboard in reverse. That feature, coupled with the bow thruster, makes docking forward pretty easy. But in reverse? Yikes.
Well, I had a crackerjack crew aboard and went at it slowly and carefully. Slow like a pro, as the kids say. The fairway leading to the slip was narrow, the boats had their anchors and bowsprits pointing at us, ready to gouge the hull. Cyclops does not like a crosswind, (who does?) and I didn’t know how to keep the stern parallel to the narrow slip as I approached. Then I learned I can get the girl to pivot with the bow thruster. It’s counter-intuitive to push the bow to starboard in an effort to pivot the stern to port, but after three tries I figured it out and got the job done without incident. In fact, the dock master told us we looked pretty salty.
There are locks and drawbridges galore around here. Drawbridges to get the trains to North Station, locks to get boats in and out of the Mystic River. And pedestrian paths along the water – everyone in Charlestown is young and out jogging. We don’t know when they go to work! The place is also crawling with preschools and preschoolers. So much energy! We know what everyone is doing when they are not out jogging.
Boats. Water. Machinery. Yowza, this place is great.
This is for the stick and ball people. The Bruins are a local sport team. TD Garden used to be called Boston Garden and it is where sporting competitions are frequently held. More importantly, it’s where we saw the Grateful Dead at the end of last century.
Because we are tourists and life-long learners, we walked a bit of the Freedom Trail. The Copp’s Hill Burying Ground has been a final resting place for nearly 400 years. And is beautiful. And is chock-full of stories.
When I was in law school I realized that the library wasn’t full of dull legal text (ok, of course it was) but that every one of the hundreds of cases in those thousands of books told the story of some kind of human interaction. A cemetery is the same thing – every grave marks an entire universe of a person’s life.
There’s a Star Market not far from the marina, so we picked up some provisions. This display selling pinecones also made us feel like country mice. Who buys pine cones? People who don’t live near pine trees, I suppose. (To be fair, these are vanilla or possibly cinnamon scented pine cones, not the run of the mill pine scented pine cones with which we are most familiar.)
