Day Four

Day 4

The plan today was to rent a little sailboat, pack a lunch and head off into Nantucket Harbor to explore.  Sadly, the organization that rents sailboats shuts down on Labor Day so we needed a plan B.  We decided to walk around town gaping stupidly at shop windows, an activity we named the “moron walk.”  I encouraged Ann to go in one of the cute stores on Main Street to buy a baby outfit for her niece, Paige.  Ann shot out of the store like a bullet, announcing that baby outfits in Nantucket cost $229 and a cute sweaters for her would cost $879.  Ann said she was tempted to ask the saleswoman, “Do you know the baby is probably going to poop in this outfit?”  I suspect that wealthy Nantucket babies are housetrained at an early age.

On the moron walk we had the good fortune to find the fly fishing store that I had been looking for.  The woman proprietor was a wealth of information and, after I bought $50 worth of flies, gave me a map with the good fishing beaches.

Went to the Ferry terminal to see about our chances of getting off the island.  They told me to call in the following morning at 630.  A slight undercurrent of anxiety returned to the honeymoon—blog readers will recall the lack of reservations which, as my friend Bradway points out, are required both ways.

We finished the moron walk with lunch at a little sandwich shop on the pier.  $28 for two sandwiches, but they were quite good.  While eating on the pier, groups of people, generally older, were wandering around, having been dumped there by the Nantucket tour bus.  I have witnessed this in peak season, where hordes of tourists pour off the ferry and scurry around town like cockroaches buying t-shirts and tchotchkes and then scurry back on the ferry.

We decided to look down on these people.  However, as we thought about it, we realized that the only real difference between the gawking tourists from the ferry and the wealthy investment bankers who own houses here is the nature of the tchotchkes that capture their fancy.  For the former, a Nantucket refrigerator magnet is just the thing.  For the latter, a $3.5 million summer house and a $50,000 oil painting of a whaling ship.  This insight allowed us to also look down on the wealthy investment bankers.

After lunch we decided to go fishing—or rather I decided to go fishing and Ann and Daisy decided to come with me to the beach and read a book and dig around and eat dead things in the seaweed, respectively.  Ann was given responsibility for navigational advice on the way to the beach.  Which brings up a bone that I have to pick with the minister at our wedding.  I was promised a “help meet”, a la the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve and all that stuff.  If automobile navigation is part of the help meet’s job description, we have a problem.  There also appears to be an issue with the vow of obedience but I will take that up with the minister directly. 

We eventually get to the fishing beach at Eel Point and I spent a couple of hours happily flogging the water with my fly rod with nary a nibble.  I found out later that the fishing is best when the tides are running fastest, which I believe is just before and just after low tide.  I was fishing in a slack high tide.  Ann was nice enough to support my theory that the problem was not my lack of skill, but the conditions.  The weather was good so I went skinny dipping on the way back to the car—Ann laughed and Daisy looked like she smelled something bad in the seaweed.

After fishing we came back to the cottage and got ready for a sailing adventure.  Since we could not rent a sailboat ourselves, I had made reservations on the evening cruise of a 35 foot sailboat (the “Endeavor”) that takes tourists out in Nantucket Sound on 1.5 hour sails.  The captain (Jim) had built the wooden boat himself 30 years ago.  Not sure what that style of sailboat is called—the boat had a gaff-rigged mainsail and two overlapping jibs. 

A pair of 60 year old twins (Joy and Pat—it was their birthday) were also on the Endeavor with us and made good company.  The trip started inauspiciously in pea soup fog but the weather lifted the minute we got out of the marina and we had a beautiful sail and a gorgeous sunset.  I helped Leslie, the mate, get the sails up.

Captain Jim regaled us with stories of the Essex (the inspiration for Melville’s Moby Dick), cannibalism at sea, the wives who sailed with their whaling captain husbands and all kinds of other facts, some of which might actually have been true.  An interesting fact that he shared with us was that Nantucket sailors often had second families in Hawaii and to this day, many of the leading families on Mauii have the same names as old Nantucket families and the towns share many of the same street names.

As we came back into the marina I asked Jim about a disreputable looking boat in a slip near our cottage.  He said that slips in the marina were rented out for $800 for the entire period from October 1 through May 1.  Apparently this attracts a dozen or so dysfunctional sailing bachelors every year who take advantage of the bargain to live on their boats in Nantucket all winter.  The epitome of this group is a guy who bought a very large fishing boat for $1 in a government auction of drug assets.  The engine was blown but he traded the 1,500 gallons of diesel fuel aboard for a tow to Nantucket Harbor where he moored the boat and has since lived with his 5 dogs.  Apparently he puts the dogs in a dinghy every day and brings them ashore for a walk, but this sounded problematic to us.  Notwithstanding all this, when Joy and Pat heard that most of these guys were single they resolve to make a little tour of the marina before going to dinner that evening.

After sailing we went to a nice dinner at a good restaurant called the Boarding House.  Arm wrestled Ann.  The woman is freakishly strong but no match for Johnny Moo.  Ate too much.  Went to bed thinking about the ferry.