Back on the road…with a bigger boat!

We’re speeding along Massachusetts coast, wind in our hair.  It's a perfect day for a maiden voyage: blue sky, calm waters. 

“We’re doing it!” Ben shouts over the motor. “We’re really doing it!”

I look around; nothing's on fire, nothing's hanging overboard, the VHF radio is on, and the Garmin screen is aglow with florescent fish marks.  Maybe we do know what we’re doing now.

We’ve bought three boats in the last eight months. Before you start hating on us for being bougie, the first two were very small, sensible, inexpensive starter boats. Why two boats?  It's complicated (this post from last winter has all the gory details).

But Ben was not content for long with small, sensible boating sprees, and he does not have a sensible girlfriend to talk him out of his insanity. He wanted to pursue his favorite seafood wherever it might roam, and that’s hard to do in a 14-foot V-hull, especially with only 6 hp motor. The fact that we almost sunk our last boat (twice) did not deter him; everything we did wrong was a learning experience. We were ready for a real boat, or so he thought.

Ben was not content for long with small, sensible boating sprees,  and he does not have a sensible girlfriend to talk him out of his insanity.

Almost as soon as we returned from Florida, he began researching boats. After looking at a few, we narrowed in on exactly the boat we wanted: an 18-foot walk-around with a small cuddy cabin. There were a handful of them on Facebook marketplace, but Ben had a good feeling about one in Pennsylvania, a 1998 Bayliner Trophy, which had belonged to seller's late father, and lovingly maintained in his memory. Parting with his dad's boat was emotional for him, but we promised to take good care of it and send him pictures of our adventures.

We anchored off Cathedral Rock, where particularly long slabs of granite jut into the sea. It’s a well known diving spot; lobsters and other ocean candy love to hide out on the slimy shelves of submerged rock. It wasn’t as calm as the harbor, but we could see the bottom between the gentle swells.

Mansions gazed oceanward from the bluffs above, not longer home to sea captains' wives, but Boston lawyers and investment bankers. Cormorants congregated on the rocks, drying their outstretched wings. 

As we were suiting up, a commercial lobster boat came by to check its traps. We watched warily as it chugged from buoy to buoy, coming close enough that we could see the lobstermen pluck lobster from the pots of writhing claws and hold a metal stick against the carapace to check if they were of legal size.

Thankfully they ignored us. Lobstermen are notorious for harassing divers, who allegedly poach from their pots. I’m sure it happens, but I doubt it’s enough to significantly impact their harvest. I think divers are an easy target for built up frustration about declining stocks and increased regulations. Some divers are also not conscientious about putting out dive flags so that boats can easily avoid them; nevertheless, there have been cases where divers have been intentionally run over by angry lobstermen.

The lobstermen certainly had nothing to fear from us. By then I’d developed a terrible sinus headache, so stayed in the boat, while Ben submerged to investigate.  He was back up in less than 30 seconds. He said he could see the bottom clearly, but when he looked side to side, there was nothing but a wall of cloudy water, from which anything (like a Great White shark) might emerge unexpectedly.

My ibuprofen eventually kicked in and were able to enjoy the rest of the afternoon exploring the coves and points around Rockport. We didn’t catch any fish, but it was enough just to hang out on our own boat in the glorious weather.
We drove back to the harbor feeling quite accomplished. I hopped out and held the dock line while Ben retrieved the trailer. He backed down the ramp into the water, stopping when the muffler was just a few inches above the waterline. The problem was, one side of the trailer was also above water. He tried to reposition the trailer a few more times  before it dawned on us what had happened.

“You could kill your engine,” a bystander warned. "I know!" I snapped.

The tide had gone out, and the boat ramp was graded unevenly so that it was impossible to submerge the trailer deep enough to safely drive the boat onto it. 

Desperate, Ben backed the truck axle deep into the water, muffler bubbling loudly.

“You could kill your engine,” a bystander warned.

"I know!" I snapped, pulling frantically on the winch strap until it just reached the hook on the bow.  

The electric winch slowly pulled the boat, moaning and groaning, onto the trailer, and Ben drove the truck up and out of the water. The truck was still running, the boat was intact. We'd gotten lucky, this time, but maybe we still had a thing or two to learn.