A Tale of Two Chemists: A changed place

A changed place

Monday, September14, 2020

Yesterday we thought that there were a lot of moorings free in the inner harbor at Cuttyhunk and tonight there is even more space available. I think of the 65 town moorings there are less than 15 that are occupied. When we came here in August there were no moorings available by sunset. Today there was plenty of space at the dinghy dock. Typically you have to push boats around to be able to get to the dock. There were hardly any people to been seen walking around on shore. What a difference from our visit only a little over a month ago.

We set off to walk to the shellfish farm on the south-west end of the island. Our path took us past a pickup truck parked outside the house with the big “Trump 2020” sign. I noticed that the truck had no license plate on the back. When we got to the front, I turned and spotted the plate on the front. Facing forward again, I spotted the same numbers on the rear plate of the next pickup along. I pointed this out to Mike who said “that’s interesting”. I replied “interesting and illegal”.

This evening sitting in the cockpit we heard sounds akin to thunder. We figured out that it was waves crashing on the beach opposite the channel into the harbor. From time to time we could see spray over the tops of the dunes in that direction. This is presumably the start of the swells from Hurricane Paulette. The NOAA forecast looks quite dire for wave heights for the next couple of days. We are planning to make the hop back to Narragansett Bay tomorrow, hopefully without seeing the higher end of the predicted “4 to 7 foot seas”.

On the National Weather Service site, they explain about wave heights. The prediction is for the average of the highest third of the waves. The disclaimer goes on to say that individual waves could be more than twice the height of the predicted range. That’s a bit sobering, but in fairness the period of the waves is also important, so we would expect “4-7 foot waves” with a period of 13 seconds to be much easier than the ~5 foot waves with a period of 4 seconds that we encountered on Friday. We typically get our marine forecasts from three sources - NOAA, Buoy-Weather and Passage-Weather. They each give you a different perspective, such as wave period in Buoy-weather, but it’s not always easy to form a single consistent picture.

Gloria

41 25.532 N, 70 55.476 W