We left the mooring at 8:30am and made our way out of Plymouth Harbor. We were ready to make some miles and were hoping to make it into Scituate Harbor by sunset but the universe had other plans for us. We ran aground around 9am in Plymouth Bay at low tide. As much as this sucked, we were very fortunate. The boat laid down at 45 degrees to our starboard side. We called the Plymouth Harbormaster and TowBoat US who gave us sound advice and care on what to do next. The tide went out for another hour or so as we slowly leaned further over and eventually left only two feet of water under the only side of the boat that was still floating. We threw an anchor as far out on our portside as we could so that we wouldn’t start to drift into a nearby rock pile when the tide came back. High tide was predicted for mid afternoon so we waited to get afloat until 2p when the boat righted itself. The dogs enjoyed taking the dinghy over to the rock pile for a quick intermission, they do amazingly well in situations like this but they certainly weren’t comfortable. Once we left Plymouth Bay we sailed a few miles north where we anchored off Duxbury Beach for the night. We learned that even though we might take one route into a harbor, it may not be safe to take the same route out depending on the tides. We are very keen to charts, tides and weather reports but made the mistake of not double checking our course before heading out.