Massachusetts is charming

It turns out we are staying in a really quaint town…it seems to have several names though. The signs all say South Dartmouth, but folks just say welcome to Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and all the boats (and the yachties) say Padanaram. As soon as you go ½ a mile east you are in the city of New Bedford. Yes, I exaggerated, there are only about one hundred boats in this harbor and many of them are sweet squat cats. It turns out this harbor is the home of Beetle Cats and Cape Cod Catboats; giving the harbor a particularly old-fashioned salty look.

On Wednesday evening we were extremely charmed to see dozens of sailboats going out for an evening race…they cut such a beautiful line gliding out of the harbor under sail. As they were making their way out of the harbor, a graceful tallship out on the bay caught our eye. The tallship Shenandoah then glided on into our harbor and dropped anchor very close to us. And as Shenandoah was making her way in, we heard music coming from the shoreline. After a while we decided to check it out and it ended up being a concert in the park with a classic car show. What a treat; and it seemed the entire population of Dartmouth must have come out for it.

We didn’t think we’d be running into menus we couldn’t understand until we left the US, but here in MA we ran into several things and tried them out at the concert…Reinhart had Linguica (a type of hot dog/sausage) and I had a Quahog (a huge clam/stuffing thing). Our Linguica, Quahog, and two drinks cost us all of $5.25…the docking may be expensive but the fairground food is cheap. When we got back to the boat we realized another tallship had joined the first and we dinghied by to say hi.

Thursday evening’s weather promised to be rough, so Reinhart and I grabbed a yacht club mooring (New Bedford yacht club in the village of Padanaram within the town of Dartmouth). Once we picked up our mooring ($45, are you kidding me!!!) we hopped on the bikes and took a trip to New Bedford. On the way there, we rode through the old industrial side of town which was interesting and a little sad…a lot of manufacturing plants were still in operation, but there were also a lot of buildings standing empty and old stately homes which had fallen into disrepair. Then we came to the harbor front; I have never seen so many working fishing vessels before…not even in Homer Alaska! Once we had gotten into downtown New Bedford, it was really captivating…New Bedford was once the center of Whaling in the US and was an extremely wealthy seaport in the mid 1800s. Downtown was surrounded by astonishing Victorian homes to rival those in San Francisco. Downtown was very retored/revived with cobblestone streets and parks dedicated to whaling and Herman Melville. We spent the afternoon at the museums within the New Bedford Whaling National Park. Oh, and we spent some more money at West Marine on fishing stuff (to replace the lure Reinhart’s 50 lb tuna swan off with)…no more marine stores for us.

Now we are getting ready to do some laundry and later on this afternoon we’ll go for a hike on a local trail. Saturday we’ll leave southern Buzzards Bay and sail north for about 4 hours to anchor overnight near the Cape Cod Canal for our Sunday departure. It turns out Paul O’Connor will be visiting his brother on the coast near Kennebunkport, ME next week, so we’ve decided to drop in on them. We’ll leave for the favorable current in the Cape Cod Canal on Sunday morning and arrive in Cape Porpoise, ME on Monday morning. We don’t know how long we’ll stay in CP before making our way north on the coast; but we do know there are several folks we’d like to meet while we are in the Maine area and we really need to make some phone calls soon!