This winter was a cold one so I was excited to head south from Portland Maine to our usual summer spot in Provincetown Massachusetts.  Some last minute weather forecast checking had us leaving about noon on Wednesday April 30th.  And since we were heading south we were looking for a nice breeze out of the north.  That’s exactly what we had.

With the wind from the north the seas flatted out, essentially no wave action to speak of and we had a good following breeze making the sail easy.  BUT with the breeze from the north and it still being April in the Gulf of Maine it was a bit cold.  We broke out all the blankets and wrapped up tight.

The bright side of it being so early was that other than a few fishing boats as we left Portland and a few fishing boats as we made our final approach to Provincetown, we didn’t see a single boat at all.  It was so empty that I was worried that our AIS receiver had stopped working  But no, just not a single boat.

The only issue was that in our exuberance to hang our new sails, I had neglected to service our roller furling components (specifically the part at the top of the forestay) so our furler ended up jammed and we couldn’t take out our genoa.  To compensate I turned on the engine and ran it at a very low RPM to keep us over 4 knots. It didn’t take much and we only used about 5 gallons of diesel on a 30+ hour trip.

We arrived in Provincetown without issue and quickly found our mooring.  This will be our home for the summer.  Liam has a job lined up on a local yacht that does day charters and I’ll be working from the boat and from random cafes.  And Ryan, well he successfully launched himself into an independent adult life.  He’s got an apartment in Portland Maine and a good job there.

While it’s still cold in Provincetown at the moment I’m excited to be here and have already made some massive orders from Amazon and Defender Marine.  First boat project will be finally getting our new 3,000 watt inverter mounted and wired in.  The new 900 watts of solar is bringing us to 100% by 10:00am every day.  And that’s not even going though a properly sized charge controller.

So with that as my May project, I have high hopes.