Today is Amy’s birthday! She brought us with her to my parents house for the day!We definitely indulged in some Dunkin’ coffee and breakfast sandwiches, which is not conducive to our mission, but my new found appreciation for such a luxury thing is a major sign of growth. (coming from a girl that ordered a large iced coffee sometimes twice every single day.) We napped for 3 hours in my cloud of a bed. Then my mom and I cooked shepherds pie for Amy’s birthday dinner, and we had cake and ice cream to celebrate. My dad brought us back to Scituate Harbor around 9pm. Days like these make the troublesome ones worth it. 

I woke up at 5am and watched the sunrise. Once Shaun woke up, we gathered our laundry, water jugs, chargeable electronics and gas can. My little sister Amy came to hang out with us for the day and to help run a few errands before we check out the carnival and party on the boat. We plugged our bluetooth speakers, vacuum battery and cell phone batteries into an outdoor socket at the bath house where we left them to charge for a few hours. Once Amy arrived, we found a laundromat on the other side of the harbor by the carnival and were able to do a couple loads there! The Scitiuate Harbormaster let us use their hose to refill our 3 water jugs, totaling 15 gallons. Amy took us to refill our gas can and the small propane tank that we use for cooking. After we finished all of this business we went to Five Guys in Hingham for lunch. Things like sitting down for a restaurant meal suddenly feel different. I notice a new feeling of gratitude toward each individual person that has aided in serving me and have a new patience and understanding for what it means to be taken care of in that way. In a place that I normally wouldn’t, I took the extra time to thoroughly wipe down our table and push in the chairs. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always had good manners but this felt more intentional than ever. This adventure has afforded me the time to be more focused on my intentions. We all had a blast, and drank way too much once we got back to the boat. As is customary, we set Amy up inside the cabin and Shaun and I slept on the bow.

It rained all morning, the dogs slept in until about 10:30a when the sky cleared up! We spent the day ashore, found public showers at the Scituate Marina and even gave the dogs baths. Our dinghy laid on a rocky shore when the tide went out, so we chilled on the beach until about 4:30p when tide came back in. We did some cleaning/organizing/maintenance to the boat before eating dinner and watching a movie on my phone. The carnival at the harbor included a late night fireworks show, the booms resonated through the surrounding foggy skies and echoed 3+ times through the harbor, I’ve never experienced anything like it!

We pulled our anchor around 10am as the winds picked up, it was nice day of sailing once we got steadier winds around noon time. We pulled into Scituate Harbor around 2:30p. Our boom fell out of its holding as I dropped the main sail, a little sketchy as the winds picked up and motorboaters sent an unnecessary wake at us. The boom was fine, we had to re-rig the main sail and set the boom back in position. We slipped onto a mooring for the night to take shelter from incoming storms. There is carnival across the harbor all weekend, we might check it out!

We stayed anchored off Duxbury beach for the day and took care of some boat maintenance/clean up. Temps were in the 80s, we swam on multiple occasions. The beach was a nice break for the dogs, they spent most of our time in Plymouth on leash so they were ecstatic about having some beach freedom again. 

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. 

We spent another day in downtown Plymouth. We feel very lucky to be safely on a mooring. My parents met us for lunch and brought food and drinks with them! We had a picnic in a park by the gristmill. It was really nice to see them and the dogs were happy, too! We definitely have missed my parents’ habit of ordering amazing food on the regular! We did laundry at a nearby laundromat and then sat down for a drink at Dirty Water brewery where the dogs were welcome! We headed back to boat around 6p and had a few drinks together on the deck. Before we knew it a few drinks became an almost entire bottle of vodka and we passed out around 1am.