This is going on our 3rd day in Newport; the plan was to leave this morning. The weather has been wet, foggy, and cool… welcome to New England. Tomorrow the weather should clear and we will head over to Buzzards Bay, stopping either at Cuttyhunk, Hadley Harbor, or Onset. Then we will time ourselves for the current going through the Cape Cod Canal for Friday morning and head toward Maine.
We had a great time in Block Island, we walked but I would suggest renting bicycles and seeing the whole island. If food is your passion the choices are many; we ate at Yellow Kittens for an inexpensive Mexican dinner. Walking to the eastern side of the island, called Old Harbor, we found several huge Victorian era hotels loaded with tourists as well as tons of shops, bars and more restaurants. Coming back to the boat we had a little incident with a smaller power boat, whose anchor was dragging and almost hit us. With a few choice words from me they decided to move. Our friends anchored next to us on White Bird got a big kick out of my animation to the poor powerboater. Monday morning we left in light fog for Newport, looking forward to a nice sail, wrong. The sailing started off great, but as we turned further to the east toward Narragansett Bay, the winds were directly behind us and we were not making much speed. Then the fog set in, so we started the engine as a safety factor as high-speed ferries run to Block all the time and in that soup we relied on our radar and AIS to keep us out of harm’s way. Coming into Newport the visibility was down to about a hundred feet, we were concentrating on dodging lobster floats and oncoming traffic. Staying to the far right of the channel out of the fog appears this huge rock, although maintaining the course I was on we would not hit Castle Hill, it still scared the you-know-what out of me. We picked up a mooring close to Goat Island, and then later went into the very nice Newport Maritime Center. We took showers, did laundry and read old Yachting magazines.
Yesterday we went into Newport and walked the main drag called Thames Street. Our friends were doing the Cliff Walk on the other side of town, so we decided to walk the shoreline. Even in the fog this was a very impressive walk but several miles of mostly paved walkways along the cliffs with amazing mansions on one side and Eastern Bay/Atlantic Ocean on the other. We met up with Cathy, Peter, Susan, and Chuck for a late lunch and later ice cream. Despite the rain and fog we had a pretty nice day. Today, Wednesday we are under a flash flood warning with hard rain all day so we are hunkered down on the boat being lazy.