Dare we say “we summered in Nantucket, darling”.   Haha, well sort of.

We spent the last few months cruising around New England and remembering why we love East Coast sailing so much – lacking the dramatic natural beauty of sailing on the west coast of North America, it makes up for it with innumerable places to explore, charming scenery and, importantly, safe ways to go ashore and leave your dinghy.  If you are a long time reader you may remember how we went ashore in most places on the west coast – put down the wheels on the dinghy, wait for a break in the waves, run it into the beach and hop out and pull it up as fast as you can.  Walking around dry after that was a fantasy.

So, bays with docks where you just tie up and step off seem like the utmost in civility to us. Oh, it’s the little things, isn’t it?

We were hoping to get all the way to Maine but we ran out of time and will save it for another visit.   I believe Mother Nature took pity on us after our hellishly hot, wet summer in Panama last year and gave us phenomenally mild sunny days and cool evenings with very little rain for the entire time we spent up north.

Summer months are busy in this neck of the woods, especially weekends. Its nice to see the prevalence of sailing over motor boating in these waters, even if catamarans still seem like a UFO to locals (unidentified floating object).

They are traditional sailors.

Harbors tend to get crowded with weekend and holiday cruisers. However, very few of them anchor, preferring slips or moorings.   We felt our cruising time had trained us well and we happily saved the money and dropped the hook in some familiar harbors like Nantucket, several stops on Long Island and Block Island.

We also finally made it to other places we had long wanted to visit, such as Martha’s Vineyard, Cuttyhunk and parts of The Cape.

We dodged lobster pots and ate clam chowder, met up with old friends and truly had a summer to remember.  Click on each place above highlighted in red for more photos or videos.