Last cruise of the season

Fall 2024

By Brian R. McMahon

I’ll be unloading En Garde! and making a forlorn trip to Manchester Marine for an early haul out soon

Looking for an easy overnight cruise, I suggested that Jill and Larry join me in a trip to Gloucester Inner Harbor. Rich and Melanie Afrikian accompanied us on Lune for the three-hour run from Jubilee YC in Beverly. The wind that day varied widely, from 5-10 in the early afternoon to 10-15 kts with gusts to 20 kts by the end of the afternoon.

After snugging down on the mooring, we surveyed our surroundings.

We were just off the Harbormaster and Coast Guard Station docks, so it was a quick launch ride ashore. In the past, Gloucester seemed reluctant to welcome visiting yachties and only offered an overnight mooring rental, with no launch service. Over the past few years, the reliable Gloucesterman service was added and more recently, a shoreside lounge, head, and showers have been offered. There have always been fine restaurants in the city, and now we are able to quickly access them. With these improvements, America’s Oldest Seaport is on par with Scituate and other destination ports for boaters.

Having enjoyed dinner at nearby Decklyn’s with my car club, we chose to have dinner there (scallops and lobstah were top choices), and our Lune-atic friends came along, too.

Gloucester has always been an active seaport with trawlers departing and returning at all hours of day and night. A blinding white light at 2:00 a.m. was just a commercial fishing vessel scoping out the channel back to its berth.

As William Faulkner wrote:

And that’s certainly true in Gloucester. There’s a hearty contingent of schooners taking passengers out of “a three-hour tour” around Cape Ann, and they remind visitors of the sailing ships that have supplied local towns with fresh seafood for centuries.

Since Sunday morning was sunny with calm wind, we decided to go ashore and take a tour of the waterfront. Adjacent to the Harbormaster dock we saw Isabella:

And there was some activity on the lobster boat docks, along with a string of dories reflecting the past.

There were even sights ashore that appealed to our inner Gear Head. For example, when clams go bad https://www.mashed.com/268832/signs-that-your-clams-have-gone-bad/ who ya gonna call?

The local seafood industry is proud to offer a variety of ways to enjoy coastal cuisine, including a mobile catering service:

Gloucester even has a grand hotel and restaurant, the Beauport. The name originated with the first European to visit Cape Ann, French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who charted the harbor area in 1606 and named it Beau Port, or “handsome port” because of its potential as both a refuge and commercial center.

The current hotel is like a seaside Copley Plaza, and even features an amusing automotive decoration:

When a light breeze began to stir the water, we realized that it was time to return to En Garde! for the return trip to Beverly. We all looked forward to visiting Gloucester again next season.

Brian and Martha McMahon live in Burlington, Mass., 20 miles northwest of Boston. He fell in love with the ocean in 1972 while serving in the U.S. Navy on USS Fox, a destroyer based in San Diego, Calif. Back on the U.S. East Coast, Brian and Martha rented sailboats on Boston’s North Shore before purchasing their first sloop, Cyrano, a Bristol 19 Corinthian in 1976. Brian is a Life Member of Jubilee YC and a 47-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.

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