Getting the Boat to Newburyport for the Winter

We like keeping our boat at Hawthorne Cove Marina in Salem Harbor during the summer. Its a nicely sheltered harbor, the town of Salem is a fun place to hang out, and its centrally located on the north shore, meaning that its easy to get to a variety of nearby cruising destinations. But we have had some problems with the yard while our boat is stored there during the winter, so this year we are trying something different. Lee found a boat yard he thought he would like across the Merrimack River from Newburyport, in Salisbury, Massachusetts.

Our initial plan is to take the boat up on a Monday and Tuesday. We’ll sail to Rockport, spend the night, and then make it the rest of the way. But weather, as usual, puts a crimp in this plan. I’m running the Smuttynose Half Marathon on Sunday. There’s bad weather coming on Tuesday, and Hurricane Mathew is meandering up the coast after that. If we don’t get the boat up to Newburyport now we might not have a chance until we come back from Italy, and then it will be COLD. Gotta get it done. 

Lee says lets go to the boat Sunday afternoon, spend the night and go to Newburyport really early on Monday. I’m reluctant. I’d rather spend the afternoon after a race soaking in epsom salts, propping up my legs and snacking, but I know he’s right. And I ran Smuttynose as a training run so I’m not really that depleted.  I didn’t want to race full out as I’m training for the Dopey Challenge, and riding my bike a lot as training for Italy. So I say okay.

After the race, a really nice mostly flat half along the coast, I meet Lee at the marina in Salisbury in order to drop off my car so we’ll have some way to get home after leaving the boat. Then its home for a little food, a shower and to pack my bag. By 4 pm we are in Salem hanging out on the boat. We go into town for dinner at the yummy pizza place, Bambolina’s. We take the dogs in for a walk when we get back. This will be their last chance to go potty until we get to Newburyport.

Lee is up by 3 AM, starting the engine and getting ready to go. I try to fall back asleep but the engine is right next to my bed, and I’m anxious too. I don’t like the thought of Lee up in the cockpit all by himself in the dark, making his way out of Salem Harbor. We are very familiar with it by now but still…

I put on some layers, make myself a cup of coffee, and clamber out into the predawn air, leaving the sleeping dogs behind in the cabin. We are out of the harbor, into the sound, approaching Mass Bay. We can see the lights of Gloucester glowing on the horizon. There are fisherman here and there. We have the radio and AIS on. Its peaceful, in spite of the rumble of the motor.

Slowly the sun comes up. We round the point toward Rockport. We are making good time. We pass the twin lighthouses, Halibut State Park. 

We see a whale! And a seal or two as well. I go down into the cabin, fix the dogs their breakfast but tell them they can’t come up into the cockpit until it is fully light. They don’t seem to care too much. We eat some cereal and hunker down.

By 10 AM we are at the mouth of the Merrimack. We have never been here before but we have heard a lot about it. During rough weather, or at maximum tide strength this can be a very dangerous passage. Lee has researched our timing and 11 AM is mid tide so we should be good. 

And in fact we have no trouble making our way through the mouth of the river. Its calm, and although there is definitely a current its nothing our motor can’t handle. Before noon we are safely on our mooring at Rings Island Marina in Salisbury, MA, right across the river from Newburyport. 

We’ll stay on this mooring for the next couple of weeks, until we have time to get the sails down and winterize the boat. Then the marina will haul us out of the water. We are hoping that this marina will be more accommodating to us than Brewer has been so far. Eventually we hope to find a marina to stay in farther north so that we can explore Maine before our sailing days are over, but that’s still a few years down the line. We’ll go back to our mooring in Salem in the spring, ready to explore points south for another summer.

A visit From Catherine

An old friend, one of my very oldest, came to visit a few weeks ago. She had been to a birding conference in Maine and stopped by on her way home. Her name is Catherine, everyone calls her Catherine, and I try, but inevitably I lapse into Cathy, which was how she was known in 8^th grade when I met her so many years ago.

We have stayed in touch erratically over the years, sometimes more consistently than at other times.  In junior high her family was my salvation, a refuge from the fights with my father and the tense atmosphere at home. She has 3 sisters, fairly close in age. Her father was an engineer at Monsanto, her mother stayed home. They were all very bright, much smarter than me. I liked that at her house it was okay to play music loudly, make messes in the kitchen, stay up all night talking and working jigsaw puzzles. I liked that it was okay to love reading, be unpopular, dream. Her family helped me through a rough time in life and I will be forever grateful.

I could be myself around her, and I still can.  We might not see each other for years on end, but it doesn’t take long to remember how we get along.

She arrived on a Thursday evening. I made us dinner, and burnt the chicken on the grille but she was kind about it. She is an avid birder and could listen to the birds singing in our backyard and identify them by sound.

In the morning we took the dogs and went for a walk on the Windham Rail Trail. Some ladies from the Newcomer’s Club met us there. We had a nice group tromping along the trail for a couple of miles. The dogs just love the trail. I can let them off leash and they are very good, never ranging very far, coming whenever I call. A few treats in my pocket don’t hurt either.

After our walk we decide to head to Newburyport, a historic town along the coast at the mouth of the Merrimack River. I had read that you could buy a book of walking tours of the historic homes in the local bookstores, so that’s what we did. The book I purchased is called “Walk Newburyport”, by the Newburyport Preservation Trust.  It contains three walking tours easily accessible from the downtown area. We did the first tour, called A Sampling of Styles, first. It wound around an area in central Newburyport and gave us a chance to see houses in a variety of styles, from Federalist, to Greek Revival, to Victorian. As we admired one house the owners came home and chatted with us for a bit. They had bought the house back in the late ‘70’s when it was a falling down wreck and nobody was very interested in owning these old houses. Now the houses are beautiful, the neighborhood is considered trendy, and it would be difficult to find one for sale at an affordable price. Times change!

As we wandered around from house to house, the book gave us details about their architecture, and a bit of their history too. I know nothing about architectural details but Catherine did and she helped me to see what the book was talking about as it commented on the Dutch gambrel roofs or Doric pilasters or the delicate entablature of a Georgian style house.

The people of Newburyport seem to be delighted with their little town. Even a UPS driver stopped and told us about the minister buried in the basement of a nearby church! We tried to stop by and pay our respects but the church was locked.

After we finished this tour we were ready to try another. This time we walked a little west of downtown to look at the houses on the Earliest Homes of Newburyport, the third tour in the book. All the houses on this tour were built in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. They are a simple style called First Period, built for practical reasons, not esthetics.

This neighborhood was quiet and sunny, farther down the river from downtown. On our way back we walked along the river. Catherine had a poem stuck in her head and she recited it for me. It was a poem by W A Auden, called Yeats is Dead.

“Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.”

After resting our tired feet for a little while on a bench in the town green along the river, we headed to Not Your Average Joe’s for an early dinner.

I can’t tell you exactly what we talked about. We filled in some of the missing edges in the details of our lives. She still works part-time. Her husband passed away several years ago and she misses him, but stays busy with music, art, classes and birding. And then there’s me, the accomplished ditherer, running, planting, taking classes, reading, binge watching whatever TV show currently has my attention.

It was a good visit. I like having visitors here in New Hampshire in the summer and fall. Its so beautiful, a little treasure, not as well known as the other New England states perhaps, but exquisite in its own right. I’m strangely proud of New Hampshire, glad to be able to call it home, at least for now.

Boston House-Hunting

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

I can’t believe we’re going to get to live in New England! My favorite book as a child, Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield, is the story of a little girl that gets sent from some unnamed big city (probably Boston) to a rural area in Vermont to live with her cousins, and in a loving environment learns self-reliance and confidence. She overcomes her fear of dogs (dogs terrified me as a child), gets her mathematical confusions corrected, takes care of a younger child, learns about humor and making maple sugar. She experiences snow, country roads, train rides and driving horses. I was enchanted and ready to move there immediately!

I’ve never lived on the east coast, except for a year in DC when I was in 5th grade. I’m excited to be near New York City, and only a short train ride away from downtown Boston, yet in an area of charming New England towns, filled with history.

But finding a house we like is going to be a challenge. We’d love to live in one of these little towns that are within a reasonable commuting distance to Lee’s job. Yesterday I went out with our realtor and looked at houses in Andover, North Andover, North Reading, Boxford, Newbury and Newburyport. All of the towns are just as cute as can be, but the housing is all over the place. If we had more money to spend we could definitely find a dream-house, but we don’t. If we were willing to do major renovations to an older house we might end up with something amazing, but that’s something of a shaky proposition. So far the house in our price range that meets all of our wants and needs is elusive.

I did get a much better picture of this area yesterday. Today we’re going to look at some additional towns as well – Haverhill, Chelmsford, and a couple of towns in New Hampshire – Salem and Windham. There are some nice lakes up there that would meet Lee’s desire to live on water. We’re going to look at some building lots, and there’s a house in Newburyport that from the outside looks amazing and is in a great location.

I asked our realtor a lot of questions yesterday about winter (November through April), amount of snow (about a foot of snow on the ground through much of this time), snow removal (efficient and fast but you’re sick of shoveling by March), commuter trains (hub and spoke system goes to most northern suburban towns). Mentally I’m making notes to check out the Newcomer’s Club and the League of Women Voters in these towns.

Monday Morning, September 7th, 2009

We looked at the house in Newburyport on Saturday. It’s a great little house, in a wonderful location, but it’s not perfect. It’s not a true open design (there’s a wall between the kitchen and the living room). The kitchen isn’t perfect, although it will do. It doesn’t have a gas line to the house, so it’s a real fireplace and an electric stove, but we’re investigating if a gas line could be run to the house. It doesn’t have air conditioning (!) but it doesn’t sound like that’s really an issue up here except for maybe 3 weeks out of the year. It has a really nice yard; it has a beautiful deck, a great master bedroom, huge walk-in closets, plenty of storage, and nice bedrooms upstairs. I think we would be all over it, except for the price. It is at the absolute top of our price range and we have no idea if they would come down much, if at all.

Then yesterday, while our realtor was taking the day off, Lee and I drove around on our own for hours. We drove past a lot of houses up in Salem, New Hampshire and found three we want to go inside on Tuesday. One is really beautiful and right next to a lake, but doesn’t have its own lake access. It’s way out in the country too. The other two are right on lakes. One looks too good to be true for the price, but doesn’t have a garage. The other one has a one car garage and would probably need work, but definitely has potential. All the prices are much more reasonable, but we are back to country living and I’m just not sure what I think about that any more. They are all easy commutes for Lee, but Salem isn’t nearly as charming from what I can see as Andover or Newburyport.

Monday Evening, September 7th, 2009

Sunday we found a house in Andover that we want to see. It’s in a very pretty part of town and looks beautiful from the outside. The pictures on the internet look great, but you can never really tell from that. It has a pool, which seems kind of stupid here. AND the name of the street it is on is Penni Lane! That’s going to be an issue; we were humming or whistling Penny Lane for hours yesterday!

We also drove over to Newburyport again and stared at the house we like there. We drove through downtown Newburyport and over to Plum Island to eat lobster rolls at Bob’s Lobster House. The weather was absolutely perfect – blue skies, temps in the high sixties. Then we drove through the tourist part of Newburyport, right by the ocean. It would be an amazing place to live, and now it’s clearer to me why the price of that house is so high. If Lee could stand the commute (probably 35 minutes each way) it’s by far my favorite town.

Then last night we drove over to my Cousin Mark’s house in Newtonville, near Boston College. Mark and Amy, his wife, are both doctors. Mark is around six years younger than me. They have three children. One is a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis; one is going to be a junior in high school and the youngest is a freshman. They are really nice, down-to-earth people, and it will be fun to live close to them. We went for a walk in their neighborhood after dinner. We could hear the Boston College soccer team playing a game as we walked through the woods near their house.

The Boston Marathon passes close to where they live so we walked over to the Johnny Kelley statue. Johnny Kelley is famous. He ran the Boston Marathon a record 61 times, won twice, placed second 7 times and in the top ten 18 times. It is actually two statues, one showing Johnny as a young man and one as an older man, both as runners, raising their arms in victory. The statues are at the bottom of Heartbreak Hill. Heartbreak Hill comes at miles 20 and 21 in the marathon, a point where many runners hit the “wall”, meaning that glycogen stored in their muscles has become depleted. When I think about how tired I was at 15 miles and try to imagine getting to 18 miles and reaching a hill like that it’s not a pleasant thought! I ran yesterday for the first time since coming here and I felt fine, no aches and pains, which is encouraging. When I start training again for my next race I’m going to build in more recovery time after long runs. Galloway says as you get older you need to do that, and now I’m convinced. I’d like to try training for some shorter events though – 5 and 10Ks – before I attempt another long event. And I’m not so sure about training here in the winter anyway.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and we’re meeting our realtor again at 10 am. We’re going to tour the house in Andover we found yesterday and go back to the house in Newburyport again. Then we’re going to tour the three houses in Salem and Windham and then we’ll make our decision and make an offer. I have a feeling we’ll make an offer on the house in Newburyport and use one of the other houses as a backup.

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Isn’t it funny how things work out? The house on Penni Lane was a complete bust inside. The lakefront properties in Salem and Windham were total rehabs and when it came down to it they were just more work than we wanted to take on. We made an offer on the house in Salem last night. Inside it was absolutely perfect. The kitchen is a dream; the open floor plan is just what we wanted. The master bedroom, bath and closet are wonderful. It has two additional bedrooms and an office, a formal dining room, large doors and windows leading to a deck in the backyard. It has a gas fireplace, and a fire pit out back. It’s shielded from the road by woods, and the backyard borders conservation land. It was built in 2005, so it’s almost new. Yes its out in the country, but it isn’t very far to the cute towns nearby. And it’s close to the train or bus to Boston proper. The Newburyport house is the backup if for some reason this one doesn’t work out.

It was a very hard decision to make yesterday. Emotionally we were so drawn to the town of Newburyport, but the price and the commute were daunting. And although the house in Salem is out in the country it’s very close to the practical necessities of life – groceries, gas, malls, etc. And New Hampshire has no sales tax and is just a less expensive place to live. I’m really okay with the decision today. But we’ve got to wait and see what happens with the offer before we get too excited.

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Well I’m on the plane back to Austin, and we have a house! They accepted our offer yesterday. They ended up going down $15,000 from their asking price which is fine with us. We have a contingency to make sure that the area designated as “wetlands” in the front portion of the property won’t prevent us from paving or even moving the driveway in a year or so, but other than that we are moving to New Hampshire and the closing date is October 30th.

Yesterday I took Lee to work and then did a lot of investigative driving. I drove all around the little lake where the house is located. I was looking for good places to jog. On our side of the lake there are cute little lakeside cabins next to houses like ours and a few McMansions. The roads on this side of the lake have little traffic so it will be great for walking and running. I can probably figure out a 4-5 mile run on our side.

To go all the way around the lake is around 7 miles, but there’s no way to avoid running on busier roads with poor shoulders at some points so I doubt that I will do that very often. I’d like to find an area with hiking or biking trails for longer runs. There must be someplace like that not too far away, but I don’t know where that is, yet.

The lake (I think its name is Arlington) has private beach clubs. If we join one of them we can use it for swimming and small craft boating. I saw some people using kayaks on it yesterday. Lee could get a small sailboat – a Hobie-cat or a sunfish, but nothing with a keel, because it’s pretty shallow. He was talking about a small ski boat, but we’d have to find out the rules for motor boats. I kind of hope motor boats are not allowed; I like the quiet!

There is a place in Salem called the Town Forest, and I drove to it as well. It has trails that can be used for hiking, biking or cross-country skiing, but not running (too rugged). It’s very close and will be a nice place to go sometimes.

Then I investigated both the bus terminal and the closest train station, for trips into Boston. The bus terminal is very close, maybe 5 minutes from the house. And non-rush hour the bus is only around 35 minutes to Boston. Its more expensive than the train, but not by much. There are two train stations I can try. I drove to the one in Haverhill, around 15 minutes away. Even though the train is cheaper, it takes longer and you have to pay $4 to park, so the difference ends up being not that great. I’ll have to check out the station in Lowell and see if it is more convenient. I’ll probably try all these different modes of transportation. I don’t think I’ll drive into the city very often, unless I have visitors like my mom that can’t do much walking.

There’s a Newcomer’s Club in Andover, maybe 20 minutes from the house. That will be a good way to make friends in the area. I’ll also look for a book or gardening club at the local library in Salem or Andover. I have lots of friends on the East Coast but I need to meet new people in the immediate area too. After all I need ladies for lunch dates, shopping, walking! I have so many different kinds of interests…it just depends what’s available and excites me once I’m settled. I have moved enough by now that I know there’s no telling what that might be!

I intended to take lots of pictures this week, but really fell down on the job. We were just working too hard on the task of finding a house for me to be very creative. It’s too bad; the surrounding area is beautiful, the little towns are charming, the moon was full and lit the night with an unearthly glow, the leaves are just beginning to turn. Ah well. I’ll be back here in mid-October and it will be a more relaxed visit, with more time for photography.