Boston, but not in Massachusetts

Tuesday, Sept 13

For breakfast this morning I made cornbread.  Aside from the corny, yummy goodness, this provided cabin heat, which was welcome this morning.  The hot days of summer are over, and Autumn has fallen with a crash.  After breakfast we masked, sanded and got a coat of varnish on the port caprail.  And after lunch, we threaded the needle out of Vega Bay and drove the entire distance to Boston Harbor, over at the top of Budd Inlet (wind was non-existent).

This is a shallow bay (both in terms of the water depth, and the amount it intrudes into the coastline), and is not easy to anchor in.  We took a tour of the mooring field, looking for a spot that had perhaps been overlooked in the placing of mooring balls, but there just wasn't one.  So we ended up anchoring at the outside of the mooring field, well exposed to the pretty substantial current. 

Usually I am pretty good at picking a spot to drop the anchor, but here I failed; the current flowing thru the bay threw me off.  We ended up too close to a moored boat and had to move.  The second time I did better.  But still, we were unsure how things would sort out after the tide change.  So we set an alarm for 15 minutes before the change (01:00) and went to bed. 

Then in the middle of the night (it was a warm nite), we sat in the cockpit and watched the dance as moored boats and empty mooring balls rearranged themselves in response to the changing water flow.  Being on deck on a boat at nite in a quiet anchorage is like no other experience.  There were no waves, so I was able to take some very long exposures with my digital camera - up to 15 seconds.  These approximate the view that you actually see, but they don't convey the sound of gently lapping waves, a soft breeze, and the intense quiet.

As it turned out we were OK, and we gladly snuggled into our berths for the remainder of the nite.