"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley." The saying is adapted from a line in "To a Mouse," by Robert Burns. The modern translation in American English would be "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And the meaning is no matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it.
How true, how true! In some cases the "awry" can mean real tragedy, like the Titanic for instance, or the space shuttle Columbia a few years ago. Keeping that perspective makes our failed cruise to Provincetown this summer seem rather inconsequential.
We left for our two-week cruise on Saturday, July 2nd with bright skies and a fair breeze for the weekend in Watch Hill, RI. We were there with a half dozen other Catalina boats and had a beautiful sunset cocktail party on board one of them. It was much like any other cocktail party filled with laughter as we really enjoyed each other's company. Even the kids on board had a great time up on the bow while the "adults" were in the cockpit and below.
Our first brush with fate was on Friday night the day before we left when we tried to hook up our GPS to our new laptop computer for navigation. Since new laptops do not come with serial ports anymore we had to buy an adapter. But the adapter did not work. We made an extra trip home to get the old computer, which was having power problems and had to baby it the entire trip to keep it functioning.
Our second problem came on Sunday when we got in our dinghy and motored up the Pawcatuck River to Westerly, RL for lunch and a little grocery shopping. When we returned to the dinghy the stringers in the air floor had ruptured at the bow end forming it into a large pillow and losing all rigidity in the floor. It was a slow, sloppy ride back down the river to Carter-Creagh. We kept the inflatable with us for the remainder of the trip as it was usable in an emergency but otherwise didn't use it. It was the second inflatable to give out on us in the last year.
On Monday we had wind on the nose as we headed east across Block Island Sound on our way to Jamestown, RI. Therefore we simply enjoyed the motor sail. After we rounded Pt. Judith and headed north up Narragansett Bay we had enough of a wind angle to set sail. We enjoyed about an hour's worth of tacking up the bay until the wind diminished to the point that we gave up and motored the rest of the way. That was the beginning of the deterioration of the weather. By Tuesday afternoon it was increasingly overcast. And by Tuesday night the NNE wind had built to 20 to 25 knots. Being on a mooring at Conanicut Marina in that wind was brutal as we had three-foot seas and no sleep all night. The weather reports were for continued high NE winds for the foreseeable future.
By then we were a dozen boats all hoping to make the trip to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. But with tropical storm Cindy having already passed through the area and the threat of hurricane Dennis looming within less than a week, we delayed the trip and headed across the East passage of Narragansett Bay to Newport and found moorings, anchorage and dock slips at various places around Newport Harbor. We ended up spending 4 days in Newport. Don't get us wrong, if we had to be holed up anywhere for 4 days Newport is not a bad place to be. We had several parties at various places around town. We had dinner out one night when we all got thoroughly soaked in a torrential rainstorm. We even went out to Brenton State Park and watched the most magnificent international kite-flying contest. They did better with the high winds than the boats that did venture out. By then we had all agreed that it would be fruitless and no fun to venture any further east, let alone try to make it to Provincetown.
On Sunday we finally left Newport. Some of us were headed for Block Island but many were already calling it a cruise and were starting the trek homeward. The first part of the trip down to Pt. Judith was magnificent. The wind was gusty out of the SW and we were able to sail most of the way there. We had to reef both main and jib to keep from being knocked over in the 20 to 25-knot gusts. We sped up to more than 7 knots in the gusts but otherwise slowed down to about 4 knots when the wind backed off in between.
The wind shifted more southerly as we approached Pt. Judith forcing us to furl our Genoa and turn on the engine to fight our way into the wind. As we neared Pt. Judith the sea swells built to around 6 to 8 feet and we pounded our way south the next ten miles to Block Island. In between the largest waves we were able to speed up to almost 5 knots under cruising engine speed but were slowed down to about 2 knots as we slammed into wave after wave. After a seeming endless two hours of this the seas calmed a bit as we neared Block Island and we finally turned into the entrance channel of the Great Salt Pond. We were extremely lucky to find the next to last available town mooring. We tied up to it, settled in and just relaxed for a little while.
A half dozen boats from our original cruise also made it to Block and had a grand time. Activities included walks to "town," visiting the Manissees Hotel farm with its camels, emus and various other sundry animals, beaching it, bike riding around the island, etc. We did have a wonderful barbecue dinner on a secluded beach one evening. And we did have a fine dinner the last night at the Manissees Hotel.
From there most of us headed home as the mid-summer doldrums and fog began moving in on us. We motor-sailed across almost the calmest water we have ever seen on our westward trip across Block Island Sound to Greenport. We arrived home on Wednesday, 4 days ahead of schedule due to our failed trip. We did use the extra time at home to buy a new interface for our GPS to talk to our new laptop computer and a new inflatable dinghy.
Our "best-laid plans," which we had started setting up the previous November, were shattered. But the moral of the story, at least for us Catalina cruisers was that even though our ultimate plans to sail to Provincetown were destroyed by unforeseen weather conditions, we were able to have a really good time together by improvising and doing considerably better than just making "the best of it." That's a good part of what our Catalina "family" is really all about.