Fenway Park, built in 1912, is the oldest park in Major League Baseball and catching a game there is on most “Top Ten Things to do in Boston” lists. We spent an exciting evening visiting the park and watching the Red Sox play at this historic venue. Highlights from our Fenway Park trip follow. Click…
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Charlestown Navy Yard
The Charlestown Navy Yard, established in 1801, was one of the oldest shipbuilding yards in the country. More than 200 warships were built in the yard and thousands more were maintained and repaired there. When the Navy Yard closed in 1974, a portion became part of the Boston National Historic Park. The rest was commercially…
Palm Beach to Boston
From Palm Beach we made a six-night offshore run to reach Boston, stopping for three nights at Cape Lookout to wait for a weather system to pass through the Boston area and one night at Plymouth so that we could enter Boston Harbor in the morning rather than at night. We got a good push…
Plymouth
After leaving Cape Lookout, North Carolina, we ran for three nights to Massachusetts and stopped overnight at Plymouth so that we could enter Boston Harbor the following morning. As with Cape Lookout, we chose Plymouth mainly because it was a convenient and easy place to anchor without taking us too far off our route. But…
Cape Lookout
Our first stop after leaving the Palm Beach area was at Cape Lookout in North Carolina, just south of Cape Hatteras. We’d stopped there en route to Boston mainly to wait out a storm that would be passing through the Boston area, but it turned out to be an excellent anchorage. We toured the Cape…
Time to Leave
When we arrived in Palm Beach mid-March, we booked a slip at Soveral Harbour Marina for two weeks, expecting to have a brief stay there, get some yard work done and continue north. Soveral Harbour, and Palm Beach in general, worked out so well as a home base that we kept extending our stay. We…
Nordhavn 47/52 Rudder Upper Bearing
Boats are full of compromises, and advances in one dimension can bring problems in another. Nailing the full equation of longevity, strength, and serviceability often is truly challenging. A perfect example of this challenge is the Nordhavn 47 and 52 rudder upper bearings. The early members of the Nordhavn 47/52 line used fixed race ball…
Cracker Boy Boat Works
When we hauled out in Whangarie, New Zealand near the end of 2013, we didn’t expect to go more than 2.5 years before the next haulout. We finally lifted Dirona again at Cracker Boy Boat Works in West Palm Beach. In the nine days that followed, we cleaned and painted the bottom; re-applied Propspeed to…
Navy UDT-SEAL Museum
The modern-day US Navy SEALs originated in World War II as Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) that provided hydrographic reconnaissance and underwater demolition of obstacles prior to any amphibious landing. The Navy UDT-SEAL Museum stands on the site where those first divers trained, at Fort Pierce, Florida, an hour’s drive north of Soverel Harbour Marina. Click…
Kennedy Space Center
The Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral are synonymous with America’s manned spaceflight program. It was here in 1961 that NASA launched the first American into space, Alan Shepard, as part of project Mercury. Later would follow the Gemini and Apollo programs that ultimately put a man on the moon and, more recently, the Space…
